Guild Wars 2

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRAoY3djMap7daKb07JApCNP947u3G6Ru16MA-j0BBUDgUBBiSAOJtIas1NFRjVNjIqWnEDA-w

Traded out a few things, although a note is that either transfusion/MoE can be traded back for dagger mastery if you really want that trait. Other than that, there weren’t many changes to be made to the build itself to use healing power more, its just a matter of if its a good build or not (which you’ll need to decide for yourself).

GW universe Necromancers don’t raise “zombies” or “skeletons” they make golems out of assorted parts in the area.

Anchoku.8142:

Bhawb, could you do a podcast to run over some of the basic patch history? It seems like those dev folks keep tweaking things all over the place and it is difficult to keep up with. Every quarter something major changes the balance. There may be others like me who find it difficult to keep up and some new players arriving without the long, sordid, history to reminisce over.

I could definitely try this, but it’d probably take a while to put together, great idea though.

TotM is roughly a nerf of 40-70 DPS (total, considering 6 minions up), and VM will be at worst a nerf of 2 HP/s and 2 DPS (per minion); final numbers will actually be slightly lower due to actual minion damage uptime vs theoretical, and whatever scaling gets added on to VM (realize that depending on the scaling put into the game, VM might end up with a healing buff with healing power investment).

I did a very short update podcast, which will be up on youtube most likely tomorrow morning. Its just 12 minutes or so of me saying what’s been going on and some plans for the podcast going forward.

The real podcasts should resume next week.

1. PVT or HPT is the way to go, Soldiers is generally the easiest to run, but I personally love Clerics (slight loss in damage and up-front tankiness, but you gain sustainability).

2. For PvP (WvW or sPvP) yes, dungeons you should never go full minions like that. Also make sure you are picking up Death Nova, and are not taking Bloodthirst.

3. Yes, almost always. If you are using Blood Fiend, you need to use Soldiers, 30 in BM, and some extra condition cleansing somewhere as well, CC opens up a lot of extra variety (and with Clerics you easily heal for 10k with a few conditions on you with CC).

4. They scale off your condition damage/duration, and the duration is very important to note, because having at least 20-30% condition duration is important for your CC chaining and Flesh Golem being able to perma-cripple.

5. It is great, as long as you are not running Blood Fiend. It makes for a much more sustainable necro if you can stay alive for a while, and with the traits you should be taking (transfusion or MoB, plus high regen uptime in general, and CC or WoB) you get a lot of extra healing.

Also because Moa is a terrible elite and is generally just taken in sPvP for trolling.

No.

We do not need to give Anet even more work just to make minor arguably useless changes to current skills.

ronpierce.2760:

snip

This is more realistic as to what actual scaling would give us. I just assume that everyone who asks for scaling really just wants minions to get nerfed into the ground because they have no idea what they are talking about.

It depends on how much you want to not care. If you are going to just use a god-awful build, then you want to avoid any group-based content where the other players aren’t obviously just there to have fun (or its people you know and they don’t mind carrying you). However if you’re talking about running a perfectly viable build, but maybe not worrying about rushing to get the best ascended armor possible right away, then it doesn’t really matter that much.

Minions scaling will not fix MM builds, it will completely change the entire mechanic of how they are and break everything that works right now. Putrid Explosion will become insane, the rest of minions will be crap, and you’ll end up with glass MMs that have a single weak burst and nothing else, and bunker MMs that are as strong as wet paper.

Flesh Golem deals an average of 770 damage per 1.2s – 642 DPS
Blood Fiend hits for 240ish every 3.5s – 69 DPS
Bone Minions hit for 159 each per 3s – 53 each – 106 DPS
Flesh Wurm hits for 833 every 3s – 278 DPS

Bone Fiend hits twice for 140 each every 3s – 47 DPS each, 94 DPS, plus one hit per 10s that has boosted damage of roughly 350 each, or 233 DPS (for that one hit). In total, this means over time you get a total DPS of 120 (ish).

Overall, you’re looking at a full set of minions dealing, very roughly, 1300 DPS. People seem to think minions do some ridiculous massive DPS, but they don’t, on their own they deal a max of 2k DPS, with some very liberal rounding, VM, and TotM included; but without activations.

1) Addressed above, general minion DPS is far closer to 1200-1400, plus it can be boosted by 30% for TotM and 26 DPS per minion for VM. The only minion with a chain is Flesh Golem, Bone Fiend just gets a buff once every 10s (but averages out to about once every 5 attacks in practice).

2) He wasn’t talking about “cheating” it so the Golem deals all of its hits to the target, just making sure it hits.

4) Minions should not have scaling. It kills the build, not to mention ANet has already said it isn’t happening. The entire minion playstyle as it is now requires a tanky main player, or you aren’t optimizing at all. They’d need to heavily change how it all works to make scaling in any way make sense, otherwise you’d end up with glass builds that don’t have damage, and bunker builds that can’t bunker.

6) Death Nova is amazing, adding in free jagged horror procs to it just makes it better. They can expand minion playstyles, but it will be done through new minions, and a rework of Necromatic Corruption.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Even so, when ANet touts us as the “attrition class”, then nerfs our most viable “attrition” in most cases, we kind of have to wonder what they actually want.

That said, I still don’t see why they don’t bring our other siphons scaling up. Make all the siphon traits the 3% scaling and then it might actually be viable.

It could be argued that MMs are too good at attrition right now, and I know that the people responsible for balance at Anet feel that way (they’ve made such remarks a few times, even though I guarantee none of them could play the build good enough to beat an all-signet necro).

And agreed, its always been strange to me that minions had way better attrition scaling than everything else.

Minions do crit, they just have their own separate chances/damage for it. But if they are only changing player crit damage, you are correct it won’t affect them.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Bhawb, I respect you, but please don’t act like you know what the scaling will be. Most likely, it will be the same terrible “scaling” as the rest of the siphon traits. Unless you have hard numbers from the Devs, I’m going to have a hard time believing what you’re saying here.

It already has scaling. It just doesn’t work. It has had scaling since they reworked Blood Magic (and has been bugged since then). If I know ANet at all, they are just going to fix that bug along with the nerf and call it a day, like they’ve done before (cough DS cough).

Its current ratio is 0.03 , with a per-hit of 98 with 1223 Healing power. If they take the route of fixing the bug, you’re looking at a nerf of 10% to the base, but with a 3% scaling with healing power added on. A lot depends on what they take as the “base” to nerf it from (seeing as it currently is 72, but should be 64 base). But still, at worst you’re looking at a nerf of 8 HP per hit, which can be made up by 267 healing power on the current ratio.

So sure, I can’t say for a fact what it will be. But at worst you are looking at a 10% nerf, which overall nerfs the trait by 2 HP/s per minion. Over the course of a fight, that’s going to end up nerfing you by 10 HP/s, which is only 600 HP per minute lost. When you complain about bad scaling, you’re looking at even larger amounts of HP/s changes, yet those are already considered unimportant. It just isn’t as big of a nerf as people want to think.

The reality is that the vast majority of MMs will never notice the difference even if they just give it a flat 10% nerf with no scaling added in, same with the nerf to TotM. So this incessant complaining on the forums doesn’t accomplish anything, especially when its done by people who obviously haven’t done any research into the actual changes that it means. They see “nerf” and instantly put on the black makeup and start writing poetry about how bleak life is.

If you don’t know anything about minions, please don’t act like you do.

Vampiric Mastery is taking a very small nerf (10%) and at the same time getting healing scaling, which it doesn’t have atm. This means a total nerf of 2 HP/s and 2 damage/s (per minion) if you aren’t using a single shred of healing power past the 200 that you get, and will actually buff it if you have anymore.

So no, VM is not only not “really” getting nerfed, its actually getting buffed for a lot of builds.

Also, ToTM is only losing 5% damage, which again is a very minor nerf, maybe 3% nerf to your overall damage as an MM w/ the trait.

Anyway, to OP: I don’t believe Flesh Golem has a counterpart. I don’t believe it did in GW1 either, and they have the same basic design (yes the new one isn’t half as good, but it is the same overall look, just worse). Whereas the rest of the minions have had in-game counterparts.

This is your second post about MMs that clearly shows you don’t understand the build. Please, just don’t.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

I checked this thread hoping to also be inspired to roll a Necro, as I really love the concept of the class and have little to no idea about them.

…Didn’t quite work out as I’d hoped. =[

Make a thread in any other forum and I guarantee there will be plenty of QQ.

I was going to say inb4 massive QQ but I obviously wasn’t fast enough.

The reality is that a lot of people enjoy playing the Necro. If you’ve had fun on Ranger, Necro can feel similar. I suggest you just play the class a bit (especially in sPvP as you can get a feel for level 80), and just see if you like it. If yes, play it, if no, don’t.

People wouldn’t come on here to kitten if they didn’t play the class, and they wouldn’t play the class if they didn’t enjoy it.

Luke.4562:

Anyway how do you see Vampiric Master scaling with Healing Power? We can’t see the percentage of scaling, so we can’t make a precise assumption, but what gear setup would this change push us to? What options does it allow to us?
Is that just an indirect nerf to force us into taking other stats in pvp?

We know exactly how it will scale, because it should have been scaling this entire time, but was bugged. IIRC it will go up to a max of 100ish (I believe it was low 100s with 20 in BM and clerics amulet/jewel in sPvP), whereas now it is stuck at 72.

So specifically, it will sit around 65 base, and with healing power can max out around 90-100. If you run soldier’s gear, this will probably lead to a nerf of about 2 HP/s per minion, aka not much. If you run Clerics or any other kind of decent healing power, this will actually be a buff.

I’m happy with the upcoming change, actually. At the very least its a step in the right direction.

The ICD on armor is fine, the skill is amazing as is.

SWalk obviously needs help though.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

post that podcast on Youtube so I can listen to it.

All podcasts are posted on youtube, as well as the main website ; youtube being audio + background image, and the website also has audio only.

Afya.5842:

That sounds interesting but hope it won’t turn into flame war. lol although it would be interesting also.

We’ve always at least tried to be very respectful with people on the show (I reserve the right to call you trash on the forums though, a la Doublelift); and have had on quite a few people who disagreed with us. You’ll find that when you are talking with someone “privately” and on voice, they suddenly seem more like a real person.

Anchoku.8142:

Has anyone actually noticed a difference in vampiric build performance since the patch to buff those traits? The scaling for healing is there and it is real, it just is difficult to notice; especially when receiving spike damage that utterly dwarfs it.

Ironically, the change to scaling never occurred to Vampiric Master, which has been stuck at a flat 72 per proc since the change (without scaling). It makes the nerf to it a bit more humorous, considering it should have been significantly stronger the whole time.

But yes, even with VM not working, I’ve noticed the buffs a little.

Balefire.7592:

Interview other class personalities and get their opinions on where the Necromancer sits. For example, you could interview Wooden Potatoes and see where he thinks Necros sit from an Ele POV. Or Teldoo and an Engi POV.
As the Profession forum has showed, few people who don’t play this class actually have any idea what they’re talking about regarding the Necro. I’m interested in seeing how far this extends.

This was actually originally planned, back when we were intent on getting one podcast for each profession running. We were going to give each of the 8 teams a bit of time to get used to podcasting, and then we’d start mixing the podcasts every so often.

But BoC was the only one that has been up permanently (with short breaks) so it didn’t work out as well :P

I’ll try to get some people on though, it would be interesting.

Patch notes:
“We finally realized, like every other company on the face of the earth, that trying to achieve perfect balance is entirely impossible. Instead, we will only attempt to balance in more extreme cases, where something is too overpowering, or something is useless.

Instead we will increase variety not through the slow, grinding process of making incremental changes, and instead by greatly expanding the skillsets of each class. We will slowly make most weapons available to each class, along with the introduction of a few choice new weapons. Also, we will introduce new healing skills, elite skills, and both add new skills to old types of utility skills, and add completely new types of utility skills.

In line with these changes, the trait trees will be expanded and slightly reworked. New traits will be introduced to support the new skills and weapons available. Also, more total traits will be in the trees, to allow more choice.

These changes will allow us to expand on the type of playstyles available. It will also free us from being held back by subpar skills and traits, by no longer limiting ourselves to such few options. Along with this, new additions can be more niche in their use, allowing us to create much more fun interactions between game mechanics.

Balance notes:
None."

I’ll try to get Ascii on for the WvW ones, since I don’t think Tenderly or I know much of anything about organized WvW anymore.

Lily.1935:

A comparison of the necromancer profession to GW1 and even other games. Where the profession gets it right and where the profession fails when standing up to necromancers from other games. Or similar classes.

This will definitely be done, its something I’ve had on my mind for a while.

So, honestly I have no idea what to talk about at this point. I could drone on about minions for ages (which will happen eventually), and we will talk about balance patches as they come. However, for anyone who listens to the show, what would you like to hear about? Anything will include a forum discussion prior to being talked about, and then we’ll go over what has been said and our own opinions.

Go ahead and submit your ideas, I’ll just cherrypick whichever ones I like and use them when I need ideas.

Wells themselves have always been strong in PvP, they just go in and out of popularity because the spec that you need to run them with (powermancer) has a lot of issues.

Either get rid of it, or have it increase the usefulness of staff skills, not just power damage.

I’m fine with Death into Life, tbh. The only issue is that we need a wee bit more HP scaling before people like it. But with a bit more siphoning work the trait will be good.

I’m assuming Spiteful = Spiteful removal. In which case I think its a bad trait overall, same as Parasitic Bond. They aren’t weak, they just proc badly. I think all on-enemy death procs need to be expanded to work on minion death, ally death, and enemy down, and then rebalance them. Obviously death should be the biggest triggers but I think partial benefit from other procs would make these traits usable. Whereas now in sPvP they are basically useless.

Spite needs more condition-based things. No on-crit traits, but traits that deal with conditions overall. As it is now, only Dhuumfire directly applies a condition, and Chill of Death indirectly does via the skill its attached to. We need more condition procs, especially offensive conditions.

While some might dislike the tree overall, there are a few traits here that are still absolutely amazing. Almost all power builds go 30 into Spite for a reason. But strong traits =/= good tree.

#BringBackOrders

They wouldn’t likely add a whole skill type to this, considering it is already done to a degree with current skills. You’re basically just asking for a PBAoE effect that has a duration attached to it and stays on you – more Locust swarm type mechanics but with different effects.

So, mini-plagues that traded increased stats for being able to use skills.

Or extra Locust Swarm type effects.

Sandra Martino.3870:

Why would they Samhayn? They can still leap/teleport/stealth/charge away when they realise they are in danger. We would still have no ways to finish the job which i think would be fair in light of the devs vision.

Because we are the only ones that think we can’t stick to targets. A lot of other players I’ve talked to mention how they feel its almost impossible to disengage from a Necro in the middle of a fight.

Thieves with SB and stealth, and Mesmers with portals are the only ones that get a guaranteed disengage. Everyone else has to work for it, and it can be made very difficult.

MethaneGas.8357:

This here is about Necros, not politics, not law-school, and not some “oppression” by the all-mighty totalitarian ruler.

I’m pretty sure ANet is literally Hitler.

Yes. Crits are calculated at time of the damage application, so anything that you have going (locust swarm, wells, etc) will work, so long as the damage is applied after you enter DS.

Same thing with entering Lich Form.

I don’t think buffing base death shroud is the way to go. Buffing base attributes of classes introduces power creep, something that we really need to be careful of, when the game is very susceptible to such things, and ANet is very much against them. Traits are also convenient in that they can be “turned off” by getting rid of them, whereas innate mechanic changes need to be strictly beneficial or neutral to every build, with no downside that cannot be turned off, otherwise you indirectly hurt other builds.

It isn’t so much an issue that there needs to be one trait and only one trait, but that there needs to be multiple ways of being able to still function as an attrition class with the existence of CC. This can be done via re-introducing a Shade-like mechanic as a trait, it can also be done via a number of other skills, mechanics, and traits that have varying degrees of accessibility and desirability for each build type.

For example, lets look at the main build that actually functions well for attrition: MMs. How do they deal with CC? By being too beefy to burst through CC, having a lot of counter-CC, and by having a utility set that cannot be shut down through standard CC means; you can’t CC all the ranged minions, Necromancer, and melee minions at once, unless the MM screwed up bigtime.

How can that be translated? Have mechanics that aren’t affected by CC (like conditions, skills that persist like Locust Swarm/Wells), abilities that aren’t affected much (instant cast), or ways to heavily mitigate it (FitG/Shade/Dogged March).

However, it won’t be fixed by a single change or a change to our “base”, nor should it be.

We can already have Rainbows of Death [Shroud].

Marks can be “fixed” simply by having the mark appear on the ground the instant the mark begins casting, and then you have half a second to get out. Along with more differentiation between the casts. If this makes marks too weak, buff them.

Swagg.9236:

So let’s start here:
Which skills could be the best candidate for being remade/adjusted to being movement skills? After pinning down—let’s say—two skill slots across at least two different weapon sets as ideal candidates for movement skills, I could start crafting out ideas. Which weapon skills or weapons in general feel lack-luster or could maybe use some additional combat movement the most? “All” is not an acceptable answer.

See, this isn’t a fix at all. Necromancers shouldn’t have mobility except at the very most things like dark path/flesh wurm/spectral walk; namely things that don’t allow generally allow you to run from fights/outside of fights, but allow you to reposition in them.

I’d vastly prefer they stick with the non-mobile Necromancer and just make it work, instead of change what we are.

I’ve always hoped that the nerf was made with the plan to make other changes in the future. I still hope that the upcoming death magic changes will include a 15 point trait that has a similar mechanic to “old” DS.

It remains to be seen if that is well placed hope or a pipe dream, but oh well. I agree though that as is DS just doesn’t cut it. It is pretty sad when your main defensive mechanics actively invalidate each other.

Its because DS was very majorly reworked “recently”, and it has a lot of hold-overs from its old states. Also, imo, it was a very lazily done rework, in that they seem to have done shortcuts (like making it a “transform”) which lead to a lot of issues.

It shouldn’t be easily accessible, imo, and it makes most sense for the DS trait to go into our DS tree.

This post is 100% inspired by sPvP.

It makes most sense to just get rid of FitG and replace with Shade, but it probably won’t happen, even though its a perfect counterpoint to Perception.

Look at professional sports and you’ll see how “just a game” doesn’t always translate.

1) His proposed changes have nothing to do with preserving the identity of Necromancers, this is something he puts everywhere.

2) You can still have the play/counterplay mechanics of things being relatively hard to hit compared to their output. However certain things like Staff Marks right now don’t fit into the gameplay the game is supposedly about, whereas something like Epidemic does. Even if you make it a relatively low CD low effect skill with lots of reapplication to make conditions work as attrition, it still needs to be clearly shown in game, and have reasonable counterplay.

You can have attrition without relying on the spammy AoE application we have now.

LezardValeth.9453:

Yeah, some people can get so worked up. All I want to is spread an opinion, then people come and bully me.

Welcome to the internet.

Edit: And life.

Swagg.9236:

Power in GW2 implies that you must strike your opponent. Power implies that you must get in key strikes in order to bring down an opponent. Conditions completely undermine that principle and have run this game into the ground with a paradigm that ousts timing, positioning and prediction as viable ways to counter damage. While full zerker is heavily implied when one speaks of “power builds,” it’s not zerker that’s being discussed: it’s the fact that you have to strike your opponent to deal damage; not spam skills at the guy and then run around while pressing auto-attack as he bleeds out.

Condition builds must become more like Power builds in how players strike their targets for initial damage.

See, this is exactly what I mean. If you had a power build where the auto attack hit for very little damage, but it hit 10 times a second at range, there is nothing to do about it. It is no more active than “mindless” spam. You could also have a power based AoE attacks that left a huge circle on the ground and dealt similar small amounts of damage but very rapidly over a long period of time.

On the other hand, you could have a condition skill that was on a long CD, had a long buildup, and applied a large stack of conditions, but did so at melee range and was very telegraphed.

The fact is, nothing about conditions or power makes them innately more or less skillful than the other. I agree that, in general, the way the game is right now that popular condition builds tend to be ranged and more along the lines of spammy AoE, and power builds tend to be melee with telegraphing (although while this very discussion is happening I can almost guarantee that in the next week there will be a thread of line of posts arguing that too many direct damage skills aren’t telegraphed enough).

However neither of those are innate to the damage type. You could easily have power-based skills that mirrored the effects of conditions, and conditions that were the same as power-skills. The issue that really needs addressing is the “skill-less” spam, of any kind. Conditions are fine, when they require constant and skillful re-application. The problem is that too many skills are a 6s AoE application of 8s of conditions.

They can change this just fine without doing anything huge just by matching the strength of a skill to how easy it is to land it, and making clear telegraphs for everything that requires it. Another issue is that skills like Necromancer staff aren’t just “instant” after casting, but also difficult to tell apart, and have no ground indicator, so if you are within 1200 range of a Necromancer casting a mark, he could be aiming for you, or he could be aiming for someone 2400 units away from you.

There are ways to fix this without killing half of the game’s playstyles in the process.

It could serve to have a bit of a reduced CD, and/or a slight other buff, I totally agree. The issue is that any “standard” buffs to it just make it even more overbearing to melee builds, and just as useless to the rest.