It doesn’t really even give that much support, does it? It just gives survivability, and not even that much survivability.
If it actually scaled with something (coughhealingpower) that might be nice but I’m not gonna get my hopes up.
The tree overall? Mark of Evasion, Ritual of Life, Transfusion, and Deathly Invigoration all directly give support to allies. Ritual Mastery and Fetid Consumption also give some support, however it is either indirect (wells come up faster, wells have team utility/support), or based on a bug (FC still removes conditions from allies as well, IIRC).
Necros overall have the strongest team healing of any class, and some of the best raw healing power scaling, the issue is just that it tends to not be as useful as other support (PvE/WvW), or is based on mechanics that don’t do well (self-centered AoE, plus little else to offer).
If there were was a great grandmaster support trait, plus another 50 trait points worth of good support in other trees, we’d see necro supports. But as it is we’ve only really got 20 traits worth of good support, without the kind of backing that a guardian support would have (super tanky + tons of support).
Hey I’m a new player in GW2 and the necromancer class made me realy curious. I would like to play necromancer and it’s my first time playing so i would like to know if u guys have any tips or ways this class should be played and built.
Just play around right now. There is a fairly large patch coming on the 15th, so I suggest you wait until then before you make any big decisions, as basically every main build type we have is getting some changes.
Transfusion is an amazing trait for supporting, Ritual of Life is strong, Fetid Consumption, Mark of Evasion, there are a number of good traits in the tree. The issue isn’t the traits alone, its that the full playstyle that the traits would support doesn’t exist. In the case of life siphoning this is because blood magic is the only tree that gives synergy (whereas any other build would have synergy from at least every major trait), or because support isn’t worth it.
Its a 10% nerf to base, but with the ratio now working. Basically just means that soldier has lower siphon sustain, but cleric’s gets a buff.
Not worth it in a normal power build. You lose a lot of either damage or defense, which isn’t made up for. You’ll either die too quickly to use your new sustain, or not have enough damage to make it matter.
I’m not actually sure what dire condi necros are in WvW right now. I know in sPvP the new meta will likely be 20/30/0/0/20 (unless Dhuumfire turns out not to be that bad), but in WvW its probably 30/20/X/X/X, because Dark Pathing into a zerg might not be helpful.
But I’m not sure if they go 20 into SR because they might not need the fear duration due to food. Dunno if the new DM traits will make it better though, same with new runes potentially changing stuff.
In WvW, dire Necros (tanky condition build), is still very good. Yes people talk about mass cleansing. You know why everyone needs to run mass cleansing? Because if they don’t, Necros happen. Essentially you still end up needing some condition builds running around spamming out conditions because without them you end up just hoping no one starts cheating. Just like in sports, you always try to keep someone “honest” by making sure your offense is always just enough mixed that people can’t always cheat on defense by only worrying about one thing.
Also, with the new trait setup, the new Spite healing could potentially make condi Necros very scary in WvW, because 5% of your condi damage heals you. Plague form becomes even more of a massive tank tool, Epidemic potentially becomes a large spike heal, terror also heals for quite a lot, and with runes of Lyssa’s 6 effect being nerfed to only 5 conditions flipped, it means a Necro’s signet of spite cannot be fully removed, and corrupt boon fully counters lyssa again. So if you are paying attention, you can hit a target, wait for them to cleanse, burst SoS/fear/other condis if they don’t have Lyssa, or if they do wait, CB, then burst and epidemic. Your conditions will “stick” much harder.
Condi Necro will also still be fine in sPvP. And while it will take testing, the new 30 in death magic along with the new minors might make you fairly tanky just by building lots of LF and using spectrals to keep yourself alive forever, while potentially dealing still highish damage through 30 SR with 50% added crit chance.
Its your own fault for not paying attention. The reality is that yes, when you are playing an online constantly changing game with specific rules that you have accepted in order to even log in, it is your job to keep track of the rules. ANet made the information pretty readily available,you just decided not to take advantage of that.
Notice how its all on you? Before paying 100g, next time look in to what you’re doing.
Because the legendary weapons were not made to be class specific. Frostfang 100% fits necros (cold/chill is totally in tune with us from a lore perspective), but yes the rest don’t really fit well.
Also, your scepter idea involves doing something completely unrelated to skins, you’re asking for a new skill set, which isn’t going to happen on scepter at this point.
Priority is based on distance, and it prioritizes players over summoned creatures. I don’t know the exact prioirities (since most have tiers within).
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter too much, unless you plan to RP or do something specific. Just whatever looks the best to you. Unless its asura, in which case you are wrong.
That is pretty significant. I think the real deciding factor will be whether there are situations were it can be used, since a constant 800+ healing per second is pretty big. It certainly solidifies our spot as by far the best pure healing profession in the game.
But it really comes down to when could you get good affect out of it. I expect to see it in organized zergs (assuming it heals multiple people, that is a lot of healing to blast through your frontline), dungeons, and maybe the hard PvE boss content. But its all up to getting it to hit.
Step 1) Stand across pit from enemy
Step 2) Place reaper’s mark at feet
Step 3) Pull enemy
Step 4) ???
Step 5) Profit
He asked for viable sPvP builds, not “I want to win every single organized 5 man tournament that comes out”. I specifically said I pulled them out of my kitten . But you don’t need to be able to beat every single OP build to be viable, you just need to be able to achieve success in your play. If you aren’t in the top 90% of PvP (and 90% of us aren’t), the amount of viable builds opens up significantly.
It doesn’t have high scaling because its a very low CD AoE heal. You can theoretically heal a team for 5k every 7 seconds with that, which is pretty significant.
We will have to see everything in total to know for sure, however some BS guesses that I’m going to pull out of my kitten
Cleric’s MM with 5% more LF per minion death, more toughness while in DS, vampiric master getting scaling, and likely buffs to healing power rune sets (based off Monk’s amazing 6 slot bonus), slight nerfs to offense but decent buffs to sustain will synergize with already high sustain
Bunker with the new 30 trait, maybe a X/X/30/X/30 spectral bunker would pull in with a really difficult to kill necro that just sits in DS for ages. Note that the new trait + dark armor will pull in 500-600 toughness (most likely) while life transfering, while healing your HP bar, while sitting in DS even longer
Support X/X/X/20/30 with new monk runes + new trait, transfusion, well of blood + traited WoB on revive, you already heal more than anyone else, and now you can heal 10% more than that. could potentially even combine this with the above one
Besides that, Blackmoa mentioned an Axe/Focus build with the new curses trait to just do a stupid amount of debuffing. And all of the old viable builds will still exist, but at most with some changes (20/30/0/0/20 standard condi build, instead of 30/20/0/0/20)
Yes
I know we missed a few questions, but we actually have a time line now (boo). I’ll save them for next week. Let us know how the audio quality is when it comes out.
Also, what subject would you guys like for next week, since it will be pre-patch?
Q: Will stock runes on dungeon or temple armor get better? (It is not like anyone who knows can say so why not set expectations by starting a plausible rumor.)
Making kitten up? I can definitely do that.
The AI is not always broken, its a cycle. At launch it wasn’t too bad (just SUPER aggressive), then bad but workable, then okay, bad but workable again, fixed, and now we’re at the current state. I’d expect a fix eventually, and most likely they’ll break again in the future. But minions have no need for nerfs with working AI, they were just fine with working AI.
Yep, that is exactly what I was looking for, thanks.
At 2pm PST But of Corpse will be coming back again with our new co-host Blackmoa to talk about the upcoming changes . We will focus on runes, sigils, new traits, and trait balancing; basically everything that directly impacts Necromancer gameplay.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask them here and we will address them when we go live in roughly four and a half hours from when this is posted. Thank you for your support, and we’ll see you live!
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
If you want to use conditions, I suggest going 20 into curses, and picking up terror. The added minion damage isn’t necessary, because you’re going to want to just drag fights out forever and slowly bleed them out. I’d also suggest using Geomancy or Earth sigils (depending on which you prefer), one on each set, and then have like an extra dagger with corruption that you can use to stack up, and then swap it out when you are maxed out (unless that has changed).
I have always personally disliked condi MM, however it is possible to do.
Flesh Golem has over 30k HP traited, its already really high. If you’re using only flesh golem without any traits or other minions to cover for him… what do you expect? If you’re not, you’re doing it wrong if he’s dying that fast.
The bug is just something that happens. It’ll be fixed eventually, it’ll probably break again in a few months after that.
Full MM builds never run crit chance, ever. The only time you see crit chance is PvE MMs (because soldiers is overkill), and back at launch some people ran zerker MMs in PvP to melt tanks. But the PvP build isn’t a thing anymore, and in PvE you shouldn’t be running a full minion build anyway, its a DPS build with minions tacked on.
So, why would I ever want jagged horrors to spawn on crit when I will crit less often than the on-death will proc?
No to the on-crit. There isn’t anything about the sigil that makes it have synergy with crit, so making it on crit is just kind of an arbitrary limiting proc. Have it on incoming damage, on dealing damage, something like that.
What are flesh reavers?
We’ll see. I mean I’m bad at the game, don’t play it nearly as much as other people, and boring, but we’ve still managed a decent show.
?
I’m assuming he’s saying that since you can activate it while stunned, you can fear the person attacking you for the duration of the stun. So while your stun isn’t broken, they are effectively unable to follow up.
They are supposed to be single target, there is no need for them to attack anyone except your own target.
Its not necessarily all the skill itself, and just projectiles in general in this game.
Mixing them up works just fine, re-LoL, which has some abilities that are up very rarely, and others that are simply a few second CD form swaps.
I think the real issue is that people want to have an elite that feels very strong (like our current transforms which are very strong), but doesn’t lock them out of their other skills.
Thieves require you to be fast with your reactions. You just need to CC them while they are un-stealthed. The one issue is pistol (main hand) thieves who just run in circles going in and out of stealth and applying bleeds, and honestly there isn’t much you can do to them if they play it right. But besides that, an MM build has up to 15 seconds of continuous CC in a chain, if you catch the thief in any part of it you should kill him. Plus they are almost all melee, and minions de-aggroing actually brings them back to protect you from them when they pop out of stealth again. You should also have a number of abilities that work through stealth (DS 4/5, Axe 2/3, WH 5, Staff 2-5, Dagger 2/5, and if you are a bit lucky putrid explosion and charge). So just CC him when you see him, apply as much damage and pain as you can until he gets away, and right as you think he’ll stealth away start using your skills that go through stealth. Flesh Wurm also used to attack through stealth, dunno if he still does but thats 1k damage per hit.
Warriors are pretty hard if they play it well. Basically, just don’t die while zerk stance is up. If you get past that, you should be able to perma cripple (golem/bone fiend/axe/wh), get some chill, CC with immob/fear, etc. At that point its just kiting around and playing MM like normal. Also poison uptime is a big thing, when you get them CC’d blow up your minions so they get Death Nova on them. It won’t be easy, I’d say they have the advantage when playing well, but you can win.
Sure, the angle itself isn’t the issue, there are a bunch of really weird weapons out there that had varying success (although lets be honest, ANet probably wants to keep things fairly simple on the weapon front).
I would enjoy seeing them add non-Western weapon types/skins though. As it is now there is a pretty big bias towards European-based designs, and even though they don’t need to necessarily add new weapon types, they could add skins into the existing weapon sets.
Why does no one do DS stomps. I just came back been playing for a week or so and haven’t seen anyone do them but me. Im back for now till wildstar comes out, just noticed no one uses this great tool for stomps.
It was never a common thing, as it takes a bit of practice to do properly and consistently, plus it just isn’t that useful without Foot in the Grave, which is also not the most common trait. So only a portion of the community takes the trait required, and only a portion of them will know about it, and only a portion of those who know will be kitten d to practice and use it.
To the above, I think traits to augment minions would work if they either buff them at some sacrifice (makes all your minions have additional strength, at the cost of doing something negative to the Necromancer), or are just small changes to their actives (Charge now cripples whoever it hits, Blood Fiend explodes and heals in an AoE, etc.), that make sense with how they already work, and add new functionality that requires some kind of skill to use.
Examples of minion stuff:
Blood Fiend: Blood Fiend now stores life energy with each attack (a max number of charges, and a visual indication of what is happening), when sacrificed this stored energy bursts forth, healing allies in an area around the minion.
Bone Minions: Putrid Explosion now rends the enemies it hits, ripping one boon.
Bone Fiend: Rigor Mortis now causes the minion to fire rapidly into the air barraging the area around its target; immobilizing its target and crippling those around it.
Shadow Fiend: Honestly no idea. Never use him really.
Flesh Wurm: The area around you explodes as you leave, chilling enemies in the blast.
Flesh Golem: Flesh Golem charges with more strength, weakening enemies hit.
They could do the same thing for conditions, with a trait that makes the actives more suitable for a condi build (put it in Curses at the master level).
I think the key to good changes come down to adding functionality into the active skills that supports the intended playstyle, or weakening one party (the minions or the necro) in a noticeable way while buffing the other.
But honestly, I’ve been posting ideas for minion changes since the day I hit these forums, and thousands of posts later, we’re stuck with on-and-off AI that is fixed and broken in cycles, and a set of minions/traits that are largely unchanged in meaningful ways since the game was launched (at most QoL changes have been made, which while good, don’t actually expand anything).
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
We have the best elites in the game, as far as a full set goes. Some professions have one elite that is amazing, but they also tend to have kitten elites to go with it (Mesmers), but we have three really solid elites.
It’d be nice to have more, but we’re definitely in a great spot as is.
Staffs get a scythe visual when used. Why doesn’t this count?
Because you don’t swing it like a scythe so you can’t RP as well, I guess?
pole arms is another word for a spear.
It’s really sad, but our underwater spear is as close as we will ever get to a scythe weapon that we use like a scythe.
Scythes as a weapon are considered polearms. Halberds, spears, naginata, etc.; anything that is a weapon at the end of a long pole is considered a polearm. Spears are just the most basic form.
On a side note, true scythes are unlikely to be put in the game, because they would only make sense for magic-based professions, as the kind of scythes you are thinking of are not weapons, but farming tools (and pretty bad weapons). The cases of scythes being adapted to warfare is a modified scythe where the blade was reattached to be straight out from the pole, instead of at a right angle.
TL;DR, scythes will probably only be a subgroup of staff in this game.
Berzerker. Soldier/Cleric is massive overkill in PvE, you’ll find yourself with near 100% HP almost all the time if you’re dodging right.
Engineers are the worst matchup vs MMs simply due to the amount of AoE spam they can put out.
How important is FitG to your build? Also, I have to agree that ritual of protection is really weak here. For sure I’d drop 10 points from DM and put them somewhere else.
Also, if you’re preparing for the patch, this build will be just fine, I think. Same question with FitG, but just replace the well trait with the new GM and you potentially have a solid setup. Also not sure how great SoS is for this. WoC (if you drop FitG for crit chance), SA, WoD, I feel like there are plenty of choices (for different reasons) that would fill out the build better, depending on what you’re aiming for.
It was nerfed because it was good enough that it was pretty much single handedly making Necros viable in high tier PvP. Once it was nerfed Necro play dropped off massively.
I agree they took it from always used to never used, but they did have a reason to nerf it.
20/0/30/20/0, clerics, A/F D/WH, 2x leeching sigils, 4x vamp runes, 2x melandru runes, minion build, I very rarely lose 1v1s, and I’ve beaten players who are vastly better than me (and yes, that includes condi necros).
If you aren’t good with minions, don’t expect high level success. But a good MM is one of the single best 1v1/2v2/3v3 builds out there. Just don’t teamfight, and have a team strategy that allows you to not teamfight, and you’ll be fine.
Which kind of adds to my point. I’m not necessarily against the idea of corpses as a mechanic, I just don’t really see the point to it. If, like you said, corpses are everywhere, then when does the corpse mechanic actually matter? It wouldn’t really change anything from how they work now.
I’m all for corpses if they have something tied to them, like Jagged Horror currently. Or, potentially, summoning minions with special features based on the corpse they were summoned from. I just personally find it bland to only use them as a resource, and not have any other impact. Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with it, since as you said in most cases it’d work just fine, I just don’t see the point.
Only if you are an MM, otherwise like said above you really deal pretty low damage.
Guardians feel similar to Necros, but with flipped mechanics. Instead of huge HP/no mitigation you get low hp/huge mitigation. Instead of conditions being a big focus, boons are. You can probably imagine the rest.
Mesmers are a very different playstyle, I feel. So if you want more Necromancer-like play, pick guardian, if you want something totally different, go mesmer.
Either like spoj said, a full DPS build, or at most 20/0/20/0/30 (gives you the most minion tanking possible, but with the least impact on DPS). Full damage. You should never be running more than 20 trait points in your minions in PvE, or you’re simply handicapping yourself for no reason.
Full berzerker is obviously the choice. Especially with minions, you should almost never get aggro yourself, so you have almost no need for defenses anyway (assuming you can manage to dodge roll the few AoEs that will come at you).
Well, if you aren’t changing your build from sPvP to WvW to PvE you’re going to have problems. Minions in PvE are best used to distract/tank for you while you use the other 50 trait points for personal damage. In PvP/WvW, people aren’t dumb enough to sit around attacking each minion to death one by one, so its much smarter to go for a fuller minion build.
sPvP I run 20/0/30/20/0, cleric’s amulet, A/F and D/WH, sigil of leeching on each set, bloodlust on dagger, hobbling on axe, 4x vamp 2x melandru, CC/bone minions/bone fiend/flesh wurm/flesh golem, 10 trait in Spite is the focus one, 10 trait in BM is transfusion, the rest are the obvious pickups
In PvE I run 20/0/20/0/30, a DS LB damage build with 20 in DM to make minions hit hard, utilities are CC (or blood fiend is damage isn’t an issue), shadow fiend, flesh golem, bone fiend, and then the last one can swap a bit (signet can add some power for damage, well can add damage, a few others add utility, flesh wurm/bone minions add more minion tanking). The rest of my traits and my entire build is just like you’d expect from a full damage build, I try to get pretty close to max crit chance/damage, high power, and just blast away with a full glass build.
The sPvP build is a very tanky build I came up with. The point is to have a crapton of healing, too much tankiness to get bursted easily, and abusing the high base damages of minions/siphoning to do damage. Its a bruiser in the purest sense of the idea. It works the best of any build I’ve used personally (although there are other equally valid playstyles, like 30 BM).
PvE however, there’s no point to be that tanky, at all. PvE is a DPS race, through and through, so you should be going full DPS. The minions exist to make going full DPS really simple and easy, plus give team support via meat shields. So going 20 deep in BM doesn’t add a meaningful amount of defense (you should easily live without it), using the 20 point trait on minions only adds 30% damage (which isn’t a lot since they’ll die and don’t do a lot within the context of PvE anyway). So, just go for a full DPS build, with the minions there as extra ways to make it easy for you.