Come on guys, he was making an incredibly blatant innuendo.
Power builds should not be innately better than conditions just because you think power takes more skill. Thanks for the effort to help the game, but I’d prefer the whole “condi takes no skill, power 4 pros” crap that prevails over the sPvP forums stay out of this subforum.
Its better than some healing skills.
We will (hopefully) be live today! Planning to go over the preview, and also possibly talk a bit about minions and how I wish they could fix them (greatly inspired by some of the posts ronpierce has made).
2pm PST (in roughly 40 minutes from now), on www.twitch.tv/soacgaming
You just need to keep being vocal, but intelligently vocal (something I suffer from not doing sometimes), and also realistic in your expectations.
^ This dude makes a very interesting point.
He makes a good point, but I would be highly surprised if they could get in trouble for it. Every single game that is based on online servers (and so you can’t run old versions of the game, like you could with an offline game) does the exact same thing. This isn’t restricted to gaming, either. A lot of online features that don’t/can’t use old versions do the same thing (iTunes anyone?).
Even if things are “technically” illegal, if they aren’t enforced its the same (coughweedcough). It only matters if you can actually use the rights that you technically have, and in this case I highly doubt the “rights” that we might have could actually be used.
Edit: I do agree that they need an open communication though with certain things. They are far too secretive about certain issues that are just obviously broken. The four months BS about Putrid Mark comes to mind.
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Yes, its a huge problem and one that needs fixing.
Was shade replaced with foot in the grave? I’m guessing necromancers were Gods on earth back in beta then.
It was replaced, although I don’t know how direct it was (Shade might have been removed prior to FitG being added back in as a bad Shade).
And during closed beta, yes we kinda were. But our class was very different, and everything that made Shade too strong has been removed or nerfed pretty heavily. At the very least, I’d like to see a non-permanent Shade introduced (although I still think permanent might be fine), if perma-Shade is too good.
I wonder if the change back the nerfs to staff 2 and szepter 2 for pvp, as they said they want the pvp/pve splitt gone.
Its always possible, it depends on if the dhuumfire change is as bad/good/different as people think. If it doesn’t actually end up changing our overall power, or if any other changes are made that are relevant, maybe.
I’m aware that you were only meaning slows, but that is still too strong for a base improvement.
A natural ability: no. That is a massive buff to the base strength of Necromancers.
As a trait? #BringBackShade
We’re not any more neglected than anyone else. You can’t look at power/popularity/“viability” as a sign of who is getting the most attention.
I am perfectly happy with where the Necro is currently, compared to the other classes. Yes I wish we were more balanced, yes there is still a ton of work that needs to be done, but the same is true of pretty much everyone.
Honestly, I think the biggest thing this game needs right now is not more balance. We need an expansion. It has been 17 months (ish) since the game was released. Since then, PvP has gotten a few maps, WvW basically hasn’t gotten diddly squat, and PvE has gotten a “lot” of content, but very little that is truly hardcore.
At this point in GW1, we had seen the release of both full expansions, plus EotN was on its way. This essentially tripled the amount of PvE available, doubled the number of skills, added TONS of PvP content, and was just overall a massive addition.
I would be perfectly happy if they barely touched balance (except to fix extreme cases), and instead put all that time into making new PvP modes/maps, making real hardcore content in PvE, gave me something actually fun to grind for (can’t be a necessary grind though), and started releasing a bunch of new skills. Even if they had this game perfectly balanced, I still would find it just as difficult to play as I do now, simply because there really isn’t anything to do that I didn’t do 15 months ago.
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If you tried to take ANet to court over your “rights”, you’d get absolutely shut down. Why? Because you don’t actually have any rights. You are given a few specific rights, generally allowing you access to the game and its various services as they are at the moment you sign the agreement. NCSOFT, however, has the right to change the service at any point, which means you must then agree again to the same thing again, and they also reserve the right to take away your few limited rights for nearly any reason they deem deserving.
For example:
“10. SERVICE AND AVAILABILITY
You acknowledge that NCSOFT may in its sole and absolute discretion provide subsequent versions, enhancements, modifications, upgrades or patches related to any part of the Service.
You acknowledge that Service may be interrupted for reasons within or beyond the control of NCSOFT, that NCSOFT cannot and does not guarantee You will be able to use the Game or any Account whenever You wish to do so, that NCSOFT will interrupt the Service on a regular basis for purposes of maintenance or updates and may do so without providing You with notice before such interruption, and that NCSOFT may provide subsequent versions, enhancements, modifications, upgrades or patches related to the Software that You must accept and/or install before You will be able to use the Game.”
Basically: they reserve the right to do whatever they want with the game, whenever they want, and if you don’t accept it, you can’t play. User agreements are about as close to signing away your soul as you can get.
Edit: Oh, I probably forgot that you actually more than likely gave away your right to even take this to court as part of the user agreement. Too lazy to look into it to see if that is true in this case, but most user agreements by now include a clause stating that you can’t sue them. By and large, every time you click “Agree” to something online, you can assume that you have given up all your rights, when it comes to whatever you are signing about, except the right to use (for as long as they allow) the product as-is.
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Why are we helping him kill us? This is madness! Staahhp!
Better competition makes the game more enjoyable.
First in last out, most likely.
The idea that Fetid Consumption isn’t taken is completely false. You can remove 6 or more conditions every 10 seconds with this trait alone, and that is very much worthy of a GM slot.
It is far more rare for an MM to go 30 spite (why the hell would I go 30 spite in a full MM build) than 30 BM. And 30 BM is roughly equally taken to 30 DM.
MMs shouldn’t be difficult for you to kill as an engi, if you are playing the right spec. If you have anything like bomb/grenade kit, just position yourself so you are near as many minions as possible, and run in a small circle (so they don’t hit you much) and drop AoE at your feet. Once the minions are dead, deal as much damage to the MM as possible, and repeat until they are dead.
You have no rights when it comes to this game except the right to play the game as it currently is and the right to come on these forums and voice your opinion. They have reserved the right to make any change to the game they want, regardless of how you feel. They have the right to completely and totally ignore everything you say, and in fact could choose to spite you and do the exact opposite of everything you say.
It may be good policy for them to try to make us happy, but when it comes down to it, you really don’t have any rights, you signed them away before starting up the game the first time.
Why every MM who copies the same exact standard build and can’t think for themselves for half a second uses soldier gear despite it being subpar in the majority of situations and builds that MMs are using.
A nerf that won’t affect its usefulness at all in PvE.
Well ok, but why minions in fractals. And why 20 traitpoints too buff them?
With 20 Bloodmagic u get a bit more dmg, and u can heal yourself a little bit.
Seems much better then wasting 20 points to buff 1 kind of bad utility skills. All other traits in Death Magic are weak.With bloodmagic u can switch traits too support your allies a little bit. And u can use all other utilitys. With 20 points in DM not.
Its for running with pugs, people who may or may not be so mentally handicapped that you wonder how they log in to the game every day.
Minions will tank most bosses for you. You won’t want them 100% of the time, but the majority of the time having minions makes things far easier on your group. It makes it a lot easier to take out bosses when your players only have to handle half of the boss’ DPS because it is more commonly hitting the minions instead of the players.
You don’t bring siphoning because it isn’t worth it. You don’t need the healing, not to mention you are in DS the vast majority of the time.
Untraited:
BloodF – 22k HP every 20s
SF – 17k HP every 30s
BoneF – 17k HP every 30s
FW – 17k HP every 40s
FG – 22k HP every 60s
20 in DM
BloodF – 33k HP every 16s
SF – 25.5k HP every 24s
BoneF – 25.5k HP every 24s
FW – 25.5k HP every 32s
FG – 33k HP every 48s
Notice that your minions go from 95k total HP per round, to 142.5k HP per round, and can be summoned 20% faster. That is far more helpful for your team than a 15k total healing from Transfusion every 40s, and far more helpful than 100HP/s from vampiric (most of which, again, won’t help you).
This isn’t a full support build. Its a DS/LB build that dropped 20 points and utility skills for a massive meatshield.
Like Falcon said, the minion siphoning is worthless. 50% HP is a fairly large boost to their ability to tank damage for you.
And they think the community is wrong. From what I’ve heard from one of my friends who does testing for the game, they don’t seem to care too much about what we think, and worse then that they seem to think that we are completely wrong on all accounts that don’t agree with their “vision”.
I’ve talked to them in person, as well. It’s not a matter of they think everything we say is wrong (note that they’ve taken a lot of ideas from the community), but this is THEIR game, and they have their own vision for it. For example, how often have you seen people in these forums go:
“omg necro iz so bad, we need BOONS, also, our auto attacks should be blast finishers, and minions should be zombies that convert anything they kill into OTHER ZOMBIES”
and other ridiculous crap that just obviously isn’t in line with the design. At the end of the day, they are the ones that have to make the decisions about what does and does not get added. They can’t always listen to the community, but that doesn’t mean they never have.
Dhuumfire (both versions), terror, torment, new weakening shroud, all siphons, reduced CD on wells, reduced CD on SA, spectrals working in DS, vital persistence, changing the DM minors, reducing our bleed stacking; these are all changes that have happened that the community talked about either directly or indirectly, and this is only Necromancers, and isn’t even a full list. Just because every change isn’t followed by “we made this change because we saw Nemesis’ thread” doesn’t mean it isn’t made because of the community.
Because its a well
I’m using 20/0/20/0/30 DS LB build, but with minions to tank and overall make fractals a lot easier. Not optimized at all for good group play, but makes grouping with pugs a lot easier.
As long as I’m still enjoying the game and my Necromancer, keep playing it. They won’t suddenly see that everyone stopped playing Necros and BOOM realize that we aren’t happy with balance.
They do realize we aren’t happy, and in general they understand what we aren’t happy about. That doesn’t mean they can fix it over coffee break tomorrow, or even that they agree with you, but they do know where the community stands on most large issues.
Like Dranor said, you always can know which one will blow up. The issue is that you can’t tell them to go die in the proper spot to trigger that tiny spectral line on the ground.
Necromatic Corruption is just not worth it in any way. I’ve played with it extensively to get it to work. The issue is that it directly conflicts with the only good way to play with minions right now. Even if they made minions viable in builds that focused on keeping them alive (whereas now they are expendable), it would still be subpar to just taking Fetid Consumption. And you couldn’t combine it with a lower trait like DA/MM without it being too strong for the cost.
It should be moved to another tree and be buffed to include minion self-sustain.
I have one demand for when they make pistol off-hand available: it must have a skill that “shoots” jagged horrors. I don’t particularly care how it works, or why, or anything besides the fact that I need to be able to shoot jagged horrors at my enemies.
I think it is very accurate that minions aren’t brought in non-minion builds to combo. I’d argue that that is completely stupid in the case of bone minions, seeing as they are two blasts every 20 seconds while also being pretty good direct damage, but regardless it is how things work right now. The issue is more that even if you bring bone minions, you can’t self combo, its to combo off allied fields.
There are two big issues with Necromancers and combos right now:
1) Lack of active finishers
2) Lack of good combination-making fields
The first is an issue in that we have exactly 1 good finisher for making combos with at all: Putrid Explosion. Every other good combo is still on minions, and are essentially just fire and forget. This is fine for minion builds, as they do get a lot of good combos going, but no one else gets decent access to this. Even Putrid Explosion is relatively difficult to combo except in specific situations (when a field is on your target, or ooc finishers on an allied field for buffing).
The second isn’t as big because we do have fields, but it is still an issue in that our fields don’t actually combo with anything non-minion. You put down a field, maybe blind someone once, or get chaos armor… and that’s it. Its not like engis who drop their Turret, blast for healing, pick it back up, or Thieves that jump through to get stealth. Ours just apply conditions. I’m not advocating we get all fields, but ones that are heavily offensive in nature, or ones that fit us (ice) should still be added.
But as it is now, non-MM necros really don’t get a lot of field play, and that is a lot of depth that other classes have, that we are severely lacking in.
Dark Armor makes no sense to have it paired into, and Minion Master isn’t weak as is.
I agree there are a lot of minion traits, but they can get rid of three of them (2 minors + corruption) and the loss wouldn’t be big at all. The only reason I don’t want them to get rid of Corruption is because I keep wanting them to buff it, move it (preferably to Blood Magic) and then introduce new minions to have a secondary minion playstyle (that focuses on minion upkeep).
As a long time MM player, even for MMs the traits aren’t that great.
That is the point? They are changing the 5/15 point traits, that is what everyone keeps talking about.
I think Necromantic Corruption could easily be made to replace Withering Precision as boon strip on crit. >.>
Necromantic Corruption would have to move to Curses then, and have some tweaks obviously, but that is a great idea.
Yes they will change Death Magic, if you aren’t an MM this will only buff you.
Spoj is right, the nerf to NtD and bringing it down to master really hurt flashing builds. Granted, I think it was a good change, but the other things need to be brought up.
There is no such thing as a reputable “source” for video games like this, unless the devs have specifically opened up about something, and even they can be wrong. 95% of all the collective knowledge that the Necromancer player base has is just based off experience, with the 5% being based off a source like a red post.
Also, you can just go test it. That is how I know as much as I do, I just tested things that came to me. Its how I figured out things like their HP values or DPS when the wiki was frankly terribly off (seriously who updates the wiki).
I completely agree. I’ve been asking for them to significantly change Necromantic Corruption and put it somewhere else for a while. Honestly though, I wish they’d expand at least the GM spot to have more slots. Necromancers make this painfully obvious, if minions are going to be made to support two different playstyles (one that is based on expendebility, which is the only viable one atm, and the other on minion upkeep) they are going to take up some GM slots, which leaves things like DM without anything, and that isn’t good.
They need 3 GM slots. For DM, rework the bad minion trait, then add in a non-minion heavily defensive trait.
Its just generally better practice for them to roll as much into one as possible (which is why they don’t have 4-5 separate patch times for every single team), although I guess that could confuse people.
Seriously, I don’t understand why people don’t know this yet:
They have different teams for different things. The living story team does absolutely nothing about balance. They don’t touch it. The PvP team that makes maps and new PvP stuff doesn’t touch balance either. The balance team balances, that’s it. They can’t do things nearly as quickly as people on this side want, because it just isn’t possible.
Do you have any source for this information?
I will try to test this with the dummies by removing my armor.
Yes. I have played this game since beta, and have exclusively used minions in sPvP, and fairly often in WvW/PvE. I am generally considered one of the most knowledgeable people when it comes to minions.
They don’t scale.
Death Nova, Fetid Consumption.
I guarantee a lot of Necros in PvP and PvE will still use it, although I feel it is far more worthy of a master slot and isn’t really up to GM par, for the reasons listed.
I’m saying at no point in PvE is there a need for that much survivability on a Necro. Open world PvE, dungeons, world bosses, solo or group, anything. Now, obviously it isn’t that big of a deal, its not like you’ll be unable to do something because your DPS is too low, but you are basically wasting stats.
Basically, if you want to use minions in PvE, you really just need 20 points in Death Magic, which maximizes their tanking potential, and then you do the entire rest of your build as something separate. You can either go for personal damage at that point (like 20/0/20/0/30 or something like that), or maybe support (0/10/30/30/0), but the only minion traits that you ever want to take are, at most, -CD, +HP, and in a support build Death Nova.
So basically, if you are running MM in PvE, its really that you are sacrificing your utility skills to get refreshable meat shields, traiting the bare minimum to support that (20 DM) and then the rest of your build is normal.
It is a bad band-aid fix, at best.
Power does not make minions hit harder. Minions do not scale anything except conditions inflicted with your stats.
The problem isn’t making those traits go away, it is putting in new traits that are worthwhile in their spot. They don’t want to take away two bad minors and replace them with two slightly-better-but-still-bad minors.
In PvE there is absolutely no reason to be running full Soldier. Zerker with just enough defense mixed in is more than enough.
Which brings me to my next point, never run full MM in PvE either, it isn’t worth it. Minions in PvE are useful solely for their quality as meat shields. Yes they will add some DPS on top, yes they will give a little bit of utility, but it is pretty much pointless to take them as anything more than meatshields. And to do that, you only need 20 into DM for +HP and -CD. After that you should be spending the other 50 trait points into personal offense or support for your team.
Tl;DR you shouldn’t be using a full set of either in PvE.
Anything that works consistently makes sense once you understand it. I used to understand the incredibly arbitrary and overly complex minion aggro because it was consistent, that doesn’t mean it also wasn’t stupid and needed changing.
It made no sense that the skill stored a blast finisher and then could blow up an extra one. It just did that. It is obviously a nerf, but it isn’t a nerf to something you could control well. I’d prefer they make clarity changes like this at the expense of a little bit of balance (which, technically should be made up for later) than keep in every little esoteric mechanic.