Guild Wars 2

If necros had access to vigor, blocks, and invulnerability it would be a L2P issue.

You lose very little damage when mixing in knights. Only 91 power an 18% crit damage. When standing at 2729 power and 99% crit damage already, this is a mere 3.3% from power and 7.2% from crit damage. This is, of course, assuming that the food used is curry butternut squash soup and Master Maintenance Oil.

What is won in exchange? Well, this depends on how you look at it. If you go with the build I posted and have 100 in death magic, then the 315 toughness gives you a 16.3% reduction in damage. If you go with a pure DPS 30/10/0/0/30 build, then this comes to a 22.6% reduction in damage. For now, I’ll run with the 16.3% in further examples.

16.3% of your health is about 3000 HP, and factoring in DS (as an additional 156% of your health), this is about 7,700 HP. So, an easy metric to see how often it is this armor saves you, look at your health whenever it is low. If it drops below 3K HP, or 7.7K HP if you wore down Deathshroud first, then the armor just saved you from dying. A second, harder metric is to look at your health and see what percentage of damage enemies are doing when they hit you, and divide that up into halves, quarters, thirds, etc. If 16% more damage than what you took would put you over half, third, or a quarter health lost, then the armor has bought you an additional hit, two hits, or three hits that weren’t there previously.

I drop below 7.7k HP quite frequently. Mostly because the dagger really makes you belly up for the damage it does. I even drop below 3k on occasion to, in which I usually just go into DS and then wait for an opportunity to use a healing skill. There is a further thing to add to this, too.That 16.3% increases the overall effectiveness of heals, so you can take that 3K HP, and add an extra 850 for every consume conditions, as well as 16.3% of every heal your teammates give you. In long battles that last over a minute, this threshold for “the armor just saved you” gets pushed to 6.4K HP, for using consume conditions 4 times or more.

I wouldn’t even know how to begin factoring in life force generation. So all in all, that extra 315 toughness contributes a lot, and at a minuscule decrease in damage that is less than what the RNG in the game varies anyway.

Broadicea.8294:

>powermancer
>knight’s
>lol

Actually, the trinkets, weapons, orbs, and build are all berserker. I chose Knight for the armor because necromancers don’t have all the vigor and blocks and controls that every other class has, so they need at least some defense. You won’t believe how often that 400 toughness has saved me.

For direct damage, phantasms, and ambush builds, go with pure berserker. Berserker gear does the most damage, and even though it has no defenses, the mesmer has a crap ton of defensive measures to take that compensate for this. Mesmers have blinds, blocks, reflects, stealth, interrupts, and easy permanent vigor.

An alternate option for DPS is to use berserker gear until you get to 50% crit rate, then use valkyrie gear. Precision takes a steep drop in usefulness once you have a 50% crit rate, so it is better to invest in something else. Valkyrie is a nice alternative, since it has the same power and crit damage, but vitality instead of precision.

For condition damage, I’d recommend a mixture of rabid and rampager gear. The best mesmer conditions come from procs, which require precision to really work. The only thing that is really lost by using this setup is the damage that shattering would normally give, but that isn’t so bad since it is done for the confusion anyway. Again, greatly diminished effects at 50% crit rate, so once you have 50% crit rate you can change around the rampager gear for rabid.

For damage/condition hybrids, I’d recommend rampagers to 50% crit rate, then carrion after that. The goal is to stack up as much offensive stats as possible, and the mixture of carrion and rabid gives a whole lot of everything. The other way to do this is to have rampager armor/weapons, but celestial stat trinkets.

For support… run anything? The only stat that is really a support stat is healing power, and mesmers don’t have that many heals to begin with. Other than spamming restorative mantras for heals, you can have any build be a “support” build.

I could never find a use for it myself. There are several problems with the field that makes it so I could never get any use out of it:

#1: The conditions it inflicts are slow and terminates as soon as you leave the field. Most people just casually walk out of CPC.
#2: The damaging condition it inflicts is poison. Poison doesn’t do much damage, and the necro already has many sources of poison.
#3: On condition builds, the weakness is redundant. I already have weakening shroud and enfeebling blood, and those cause weakness instantly in an AoE. This makes CPC inferior and redundant.
#4: The weakness might be useful on power builds, however the self-weakness cripples the utility. Power builds don’t have the condition transference to make use of self weakness, so it ends up being a limitation.

Because of this, CPC is on the bottom tier of the utilities. Nearly everything a necromancer can take has more use than CPC.

In sPVP I would use dagger/warhorn in PVT gear. Use superior statistical bulk to engage opponents at point blank range, locking them down and letting the minions pile all at once.

It depends on the content I guess.

In PVE and WvW I run an HGH build, so cleaning formula 409 gets rid of most of my condition problems.

In sPVP, the only cleanse I have is healing turret. It doesn’t do too bad, though, since the high amount of control my grenade + turret build means my opponents can rarely get a shot off, let alone stack a ton of conditions on me.

Liadri, for all the wrong reasons.

The hardest part is, whenever I give advice, people just accuse me of being elitist and refuse to listen.

The other day on the guardian forums I mentioned how it perplexed me that people would refuse to run wall of reflection, even in areas where that skill is incredibly useful. It does damage, protects the team, makes a light field to comb off of, and can be used in any build with no required traits to be effective. The responses I received were along the lines of:

“You don’t have a right to tell me how to play!”
“You have no respect for other playstyles!”
“I choose not to use it out of principle”
“If you don’t like how others play then you should form a static group on your own”
“If you didn’t check beforehand when forming a pug, you deserve what you get”.
“I’m not responsible for keeping you alive. Learn to dodge.”

And so on. Of course, this just infuriates me. It always has, from videogames to real life.

I often say that reasoning is dead. For reasons unknown (though I could probably write a book about my theories as to this), people have stopped bothering to be self critical, and they lack the ability to respond to criticism meaningfully. The moment you mention anything, these people put up a defensive wall and spew a torrent of generic entitlement garbage from their mouths. Their standard practice in life is to surround themselves with yes-men, and to despise anyone who doesn’t unconditionally support them. They consider all those who don’t agree with them as less than human, and the thought that there is intelligence behind any decision contrary to their own never once crosses their mind.

In this sense, society has become more bigoted than ever. This is an issue that is far larger than just videogames, since it poisons society from the cultural level to the political one. However, it continues to leak downward into everyday lives, to recreational entertainment. I assume that the mass amount of information available at our fingertips has always left us with an excuse to refuse to listen, and with a prepared response for everything already said, a refusal to reason.

So, the big question becomes this: How do you help a person who refuses to be helped and fights you all the way? The answer is simple: you don’t. Instead, you exclude these people from your group, and then you only play with people who do listen to what you say. If socially ostracizing the helpless doesn’t instruct them on the error of their ways, then at least you don’t have to put up with their nonsense anymore. When someone justifies bad decisions in life with some grand philosophical statement, I don’t want to associate with these people. I don’t want to play next to a player who plays kittenome kind of political statement. It is worse than a regular bad player, because then a regular bad player can get better.

AKA: you surround yourself with your own yes-men. Negotiation and reasoning in general requires two willing parties in order to function. Either both sides are working toward an agreement, or neither of them are. When someone calls you a doodoo head and leaves the negotiation, what are you to do? The answer: the same thing. The breakdown in reasoning is contagious, and reinforces itself over and over until the whole social contract breaks down. Doing otherwise is difficult.

And yet here I am, constantly reaching out to people who despise me for it. The last reasonable man.

The biggest problem right now is that all of the toughest enemies and bosses have their damage stacked into slow but highly damaging attacks. Against enemies who attack in chains, attack rapidly, or generally have a high sustained damage, the dodge roll isn’t that strong at all.

I alternate between conditionmancer and powermancer for dungeons. You’ll only want to go with conditionmancer if you have a static dungeon group and you are the only condition damage dealer. Anyway, the build is something like this:

30/30/10/0/0
Reaper’s Might, Dhuumfire, Filler
Terror, Lingering Curses, Filler
Staff Mastery

Call carrion or rabid gear (I personally prefer carrion)
Food: Rare Veggie Pizza
100% bleeding duration at least via runes, sigils, or giver’s weapons.
Scepter/Dagger, Staff.
Required Utilities: Epidemic, Spectral Wall

I don’t list much more on specifics, because contrary to popular belief, there is no best build or set way to make a type of build. Personally I like to use Training of the Master with Bone Minions and the Flesh Golem to have supplementary direct damage alongside of conditions. Some people like to do things differently than that. I also don’t keep all of the utilities static, often changing them around on an encounter by encounter basis.

I also have a power build that I run:

30/0/10/0/30

Reaper’s Might, Axe Training, Close to Death
Ritual of Protection
Unyielding Blast, Deathly Perception, Filler

Trinkets + weapons berserkerk, armor is knights.
Any offensive Food
Axe/Focus, Dagger/Warhorn
Only required utility: well of suffering.

And this can run pretty good in pugs. I usually run it with well of corruption and Signet of Spite, though sometimes I’ll go full wells and use well of blood along with well of power. The pug friendly nature comes from Ritual of Protection, which gives protection to everyone in range of the well for a short time. That way, when dealing with overzealous but incompetent people, the wells offer some form of damage mitigation while doing damage themselves.

I really do hate this farming attitude the servers have now.

Maybe I’m just oldschool in this sense, but I preferred farming when it had tons and tons of smaller mobs, and not too many people there. One of my favorite spots to fight in was the Grenth event, where after the champion you were rewarded with more squishy enemies than the game could process. In that 5 minute period I would walk away with so much loot that it filled my inventory, as well as a guaranteed rare. Doing this, you felt accomplished and powerful as a player, and could go do other things afterward since these farms didn’t take up all of your time.

These new farms are just painful. All the players do is gather around this tiny event, and there are so many of them that tab targeting doesn’t even work to find enemies. You spend all of your time being hit by attacks from unknown sources, as you try and pile onto the champions one by one at a chance to get their loot. Because even in a team of 5 people, your chances of getting loot from the champions are slim. Sound doesn’t even play anymore at that point, and most of the farm consists of attacking invisible enemies that you cannot target. In a rush to get the loot, players don’t even rez each other anymore. And should someone actually follow the objectives of the event, it ruins things for everyone and the entire mob because a gigantic festering pile of hate speech.

And they do this event to the exclusion of everything else. When the event isn’t up, all those players do is stand around at the waypoint, waiting for the event to be up. Because of this, I haven’t been able to finish a single temple event in orr, despite soloing them to a point where all this limitless zerg needs to do is run up and squash the overworld boss to get a reward, and they still don’t do it. No, all they do is loiter around, talking about staff guardians.

The worst part is, the entire farm is based around cutting other players off of content. I can understand “doing” something over and over again to get money, but their goal is to prevent everyone from succeeding, prevent everyone from getting the gates of arah boss and achievement, prevent players from using that waypoint. The grinding zerg is assaulting players who are playing the game as intended.

I gave up on it awhile ago. Fact is, there are other things I want to do in the game other than blow my coin on a fight that is hard for all of the wrong reasons.

Darkbattlemage.9612:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

That is a lot of “could have” “may be” and “well, they didn’t specifically say” to dance around the link that is obvious to the casual observer. You’re invoking the argument from ignorance as a way to justify shooting down a perfectly valid hypothesis.

And there lays the problem with time travel explanations. It’s always “Could have” “May be” and “Well it was never specifically said” that is why the hypothesis is just a hypothesis not fact as the original poster seemed to claim.

The original poster is enthusiastic, not pronouncing things as facts. Anyway, nice deflection. You’d almost forget there was a strong correlation between the lore of the steam creatures in the personal story and the lore of the steam creatures in the living story.

Oh, AP means “Achievement Points”. I thought it might have meant “armor points” or something.

Anyway, yeah it should be obvious to the casual observer that Achievement points isn’t, and never was, meant to be an evaluation of skill. Achievements are about time investment, and game dedication, and not efficacy. Most of the hardest content in the game isn’t about skill at all, but rather the game is like an elaborate puzzle in which figuring out the trick makes things easier.

It is kind of sad that so many people think this way, though. I have to constantly remind people that no, getting the achievements, or getting all S ranks on missions in a game, or getting 100% completion isn’t a sign of skill.

That is a lot of “could have” “may be” and “well, they didn’t specifically say” to dance around the link that is obvious to the casual observer. You’re invoking the argument from ignorance as a way to justify shooting down a perfectly valid hypothesis.

Unless they fixed the slippery slope problem, the point still stands.

That amount of life force generation on a 6 second cooldown would be overpowered. Necromancers can dish out plenty of damage without using LIfe Blast.

Engineers really don’t need torment. Besides, in most of my builds I use blowtorch to keep a burn on multiple enemies for 5/6ths time.

Even though he doesn’t do it well, con does bring up a good point.

I personally didn’t like the orb system because it is just more positive feedback. What is positive feedback, you ask? Wait.. you didn’t ask? Then shut up then, because I’m monologue-ing here.

Positive feedback is the tendency for a game to reward players who are winning in a competition with more and more advantages, making it easier for them to continue to win. WvW already has plenty of this stuff, from the placement of sieges, control of the map, and availability of supply. The orb system made this worse: whomever had the orbs had a statistical advantage that opponents couldn’t break through, and these orbs served only to make the winning side win more.

The connection between the thaumanova reactor and the infinity ball is a fairly linear one: steam creatures.

Last I checked, in general in warrior vs. guardian fights, the warrior has the advantage:

*Superior statistical bulk
*Higher sustained damage
*Greater availability in control.
*More viable ranged offensive options

In sPVP, I spend a lot of fights in the game just chasing around other players auto-attacking them on my guardian, mostly because as a guardian that is all I need to beat people. My higher sustained offense and stats is enough so, were we both to just sit still and attack each other, I win by default. The whole fight becomes a counter-fight at that moment, for so long as I can counteract their strategies, I’m going to win.

This is true for every class except warriors. Warriors are the only class where the guardian has to maintain some kind of strategy that is more complex than just auto attacking. Doing things like reserving protection and shields for your own burst, and applying blinds and retaliation when the warrior catches up to you, and using stun for movement and positioning instead of just for burst.

I generally shy away from minion master in WvW for several reasons.

#1: The large amount of AoE and large scale fights will end up killing minions quite quickly.

#2: A lot of combat is off of different heights, from on cliffs to walls. Here, minions can’t engage the enemy that effectively.

#3: Other players are almost always specced for high mobility and high stealth, making it easy for them to get away from minions in a wide open area.

In general, minions have the most trouble with mesmers and thieves, because their stealth constantly resets the minion’s aggro. There are some places where minions can be useful, but mostly it is just using flesh golem while solo roaming. I see other players with minions all the time, but for me minions never really preformed well.

The real question is, are a lot of the players worth talking to? I argue with people a lot on these forums, and I do this for a very simple reason: I think they are wrong and their way of thinking is destructive to the game.

And I have to do this on so many different issues. Now, I assume that Anet sees at least half of the problems I see, and half of the problems I don’t see. So, when players are demanding something unreasonable or not thought out, the devs communicating with that player will ultimately result in the bureaucratic equivalent of telling them to stop whining. And no player wants to hear that from mean ole’ Anet.

If we assume Anet doesn’t just dismiss everything other players say, then we have to consider that Anet can choose to listen to the wrong players for the wrong reason. It ticked many necromancer’s off when a thread giving a one-sided analysis on Necros became popular with the devs largely because it was made by a somewhat famous tPVP player.

We also have to consider that some players are wholly misrepresented on these forums. I didn’t hear hide nor hair from the perspective of a spirit ranger until very recently. The weeks up until that point had been full of nothing but players complaining the ranger was OP, and other players claiming they didn’t have much issue fighting the rangers. This means that spirit rangers aren’t really going to the forums all that much, so we don’t get their perspective on that issue.

Misrepresentation is a bigger problem than you would think. Certain kinds of forums attract a very specific kind of person; usually those who are belligerent enough to start arguments, exhibitionist, likes to write and express themselves, and so on. You’re never going to get an appropriate representation of people, let alone whether the representations you get are intelligent or accurate. I mean, what if the lone guy defending some build like Stun Warriors happens to not be very smart, and can’t see the fallacies and logical gymnastics other players are using to call him the devil?

Its really hard to use P/S without a kit. Mostly because you don’t have an offense. You have plenty of defense, but you can get more defense using kits.

It’s obvious that war were declared.

^^To be fair, chaos storm is not instant. The damage it does only “works” when you loiter in the field, meaning that a large portion of the effects can be avoided simply by moving out of the field.

This is a distinction that needs to be made, and I think it is something that needs to happen more often in skills. There are a lot of skills that, while they themselves don’t have a big animation, their effects are delayed, they are channeled, or their damage is strewn about several slower hits instead of one big hit. I’ll give an example of each one:

Delayed effect: Dragon’s Tooth and Shatterstone. Activating the skill is really short, but they loiter around for a second or two before hitting the ground. Thus, their high damage is justified by the fact that players can just walk out of them, and they provide a means of area control because of it.

Channeled Effects: Confusing Images, Blurred Frenzy. These skills can be interrupted mid use, and lock the player out of preforming different tasks. Here, the attack themselves is the tell, and while avoiding the first or second hit is impossible, 75% of the attack can be avoided by positioning, counter-stunning, blocking, or dodging. These are fine in the sense that they enforce proper timing in use, or else the opponent has a dozen ways to mitigate the attack.

Strewn damage: Well of Suffering, Lava Font. While the wells themselves do not have a long activation time at all, in order to suffer the damage from the wells, a player has to loiter in them for several seconds, with most smart players leaving after the first hit. This is similar to a channel, but unlike channels these delayed attacks do not limit the user, so after placing them down the player is free to fight as normal. This encourages play, again, because it rewards effective area control and player control.

It is fine for these skills to be instantaneous because you’ll rarely ever take full damage from them due to their effects. Something that is truly instantaneous, however, generally isn’t that fun.

For example: Blunderbuss from the engineer. Absolutely no tell at all when you’re going to get buckshot to the face. The only thing you can do is guess that, when an engineer approaches you or you approach the engineer at close range, that they will use Blunderbuss immediately.

I did theorize once in another thread that the current meta of procs and conditions that evolved to counter the evasion meta did so not because conditions were superior to anything, but because the lack of telegraphs and short start up times for ranged weapons meant that players could keep a steady offense against evasive builds. It just happened that most ranged weapons and procs are condition based.

Looks like I’m not the only one to come up with this theory.

Ivonbeton.6814:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Funny thing, earlier today I actually made myself a valkyrie set since I changed the build to get fury.

Anyway, there is something that I don’t think anyone else mentioned, but I only skimmed so forgive me if I missed it:

Dead enemies deal no damage.

That is the main appeal of going with full zerker or full offense for any and every build. Though you can get more survivability with other gear, the fact is that the longer an enemy is alive, the more damage they do. So if you can choose between taking twice as many hits or killing an enemy twice as fast, killing an enemy twice as fast will give you roughly the same amount of survivability.

There are couple of fringe benefits, too. Killing things faster means you get more money and materials at a faster rate. You can also do more, since less of your time is occupied by hitting against a wall of HP. In contrast, when building for defense you aren’t accomplishing anything spectacular while doing so.

Probably the biggest advantage to zerker is that defensive stats aren’t needed for most content. I’ve been running a zerker thief for awhile in dungeons, and I can take on multiple silver mobs and champions alike. The better I get, the less defensive stats I need, and the more I can contribute because of it.

For most content I guess you could call defensive stats indeed just lazy, but I’ve never felt like my damage gets so much worse when I take 3 zerker + 3 valk and divinity runes compared to going full zerker with e.g ruby orbs. At the same time I did feel like my survivability improved. Ofcourse I’m not advocating going full defensive, but I can’t see how taking a few pieces of defensive gear will hurt you.

I wouldn’t call it lazy. For anyone new to the game or new to content, I would recommend defensive stats, since they provide some leeway in combat. You can only run zerker well when you are both experienced in combat, and have experienced teammates as well. I first discovered this by accident, when I noticed that I could run game content equally well in Magic Find gear as I could Knights gear.

Anyway, what you are describing is a perfectly fine fine tactic where you hybridize equipment to go mostly offensive, but not pure offensive. I do something similar on my Necromancer, where the weapons and trinkets are zerker, but the armor is knight. You take a minuscule hit to damage to get a comparatively bigger boost to durability.

EDIT: Part Two!

Sir Vincent III.1286:

Dead players also deal no damage. :/
Also when you go down, someone in your party has to heal you and that someone will neither deal damage or use any support skills. In the end you just became a liability.
Read my post:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/thief/Why-full-berserker-and-full-offense/first#post2612791
I gave some reasons in there.

There is a counter-point to this. There are many enemy groups and bosses in the game that deal so much damage that even in PVT gear, you’ll end up going down in a few attacks anyway. There is little distinction between offensive gear and defensive gear survivability here, where death is decided almost wholly by positioning and tactics.

The only time that you’ll lose out on damage from being downed in more conventional content is when you are downed for more time than you are up, or roughly 50% of the time. It is only here that you match the offensive power of full defensive gear, but only if defensive gear doesn’t go down, either. This is only an issue in dungeons and specific events, where otherwise a player almost never dies no matter what they wear.

Funny thing, earlier today I actually made myself a valkyrie set since I changed the build to get fury.

Anyway, there is something that I don’t think anyone else mentioned, but I only skimmed so forgive me if I missed it:

Dead enemies deal no damage.

That is the main appeal of going with full zerker or full offense for any and every build. Though you can get more survivability with other gear, the fact is that the longer an enemy is alive, the more damage they do. So if you can choose between taking twice as many hits or killing an enemy twice as fast, killing an enemy twice as fast will give you roughly the same amount of survivability.

There are couple of fringe benefits, too. Killing things faster means you get more money and materials at a faster rate. You can also do more, since less of your time is occupied by hitting against a wall of HP. In contrast, when building for defense you aren’t accomplishing anything spectacular while doing so.

Probably the biggest advantage to zerker is that defensive stats aren’t needed for most content. I’ve been running a zerker thief for awhile in dungeons, and I can take on multiple silver mobs and champions alike. The better I get, the less defensive stats I need, and the more I can contribute because of it.

The OP does reflect my sentiments using a necro in sPVP. There’s a reason why I main the engineer in sPVP, and that is basically it.

People complain about necromancers being OP all of the time, but whenever I play them, I never see it. They talk about terror chains being uncounterable and unfair, but I rarely managed to pull it off. It seems like every player I fight that I try to chain stun just breaks out of the fear and then teleports away/dodges/gains stability, ruining the whole chain. That, or they counter-stun me and then I’m on the defensive because Necros don’t have the best stun breakers.

They paint the necro as incredibly tanky, but I get focused and killed the moment I’m not pole positioning with the staff at 1200 range. Unless I actually build myself to be really durable, most classes just dance around while stabbing me to death. Even when I go minion master with PVT, I still get smacked around. The only time I’m really durable is when I have a full Life Force pool, and that only happens after I’ve leeched a few 2 vs 1 kills to fill it up.

They talk about how well we can stack conditions… but that is actually something we do well. The thing is, though, is that necromancers don’t stack conditions the fastest. Rangers and Mesmers get that distinction, stacking 4 or 5 bleeds every second. Necros can burst conditions in an AoE, but they have to blow nearly all of their cooldowns to accomplish this. Epidemic is touted as being overpowered, but it is extremely hit or miss, since to work it needs a series of specific circumstances to ever work, and even then the long windup and bad line of sight errors make it so epidemic rarely works. You end up copying 2 bleeds and a cripple most of the time. Of course, I’ll sometimes fight a super aggro class that has so many cleanses stack onto themselves that I get neutralized. The most effective strategy I’ve thought of isn’t even used in tPVP.

For non conditions builds, I don’t have burst. I have high sustained damage, but I don’t have a method to lock down and do a ton of damage. Wells are slow and suffer from the flaw that players can choose to not stand in them. Other than wells… there isn’t much to increase DPS other than minions. Minion builds can never catch evasive enemies, die to the AoE heavy meta, and often leaves the necromancer helpless in order to supplement offense. You’ll get some utility, but nothing too special or even notable.

I think I know why people think Necromancers are overpowered. During some particularly bad nights, I watched a dozen or so tournament videos, and I noticed a couple of big flaws in people’s builds:

#1: Most of the “underpowered” classes are running old builds and refuse to update their build. The guys in random tPVP and hotjoin don’t have a problem using a lot of stun breaks or condition cleanses, but in these tournaments they have no stun breaker, no condition cleanse, and complain when a condition class beats them. They say that they can’t use cleanses or stun breaks because it makes them useless, but bellying up to the primary offense for the moment also makes them useless. Seriously, mesmers: use arcane thievery.

#2: People are more concerned with what is on paper than what happens. In the videos I’ve watched, I saw epidemic used maybe once. I saw one fear chain that consisted of using more than one fear. Now I know that the announcers can’t see everything , but generally they keep focus on where the action is. The necro builds being run all have the exact same thing: Epidemic, Spectral Walk, and Corrupt Boon. Literally, every build I saw used those utilities. Epidemic is rarely used, corrupt boon is also rarely used, and Spectral Walk is the necro’s only tricky movement skill. That is it. Any and all combos that complain about necromancers that doesn’t use these utilities is immediately suspect.

#3: Something else necros are good at that not a lot of people mention is the condition transfers. This is highly situational, since it only really affects other condition classes in a 1 vs 1 scenario. But outside of that scenario, a necro can accumulate a lot of conditions on themselves, then suddenly transfer them all over, throwing the opponents offense right back in their face. This doesn’t mean much against warriors, guardians, elementalists, mesmers, and thieves, but against engineers and rangers it is quite dangerous.

There’s always something to be said of novelty.

Frankly, I think profession and race changing just causes way too many problems and not enough return to be implemented. If you want to play as another race or class, just roll another race or class.

I didn’t know Salazan was a problem for necros. I beat the tar out of him on my power necro, first try.

30/0/10/0/30

Reaper’s Might, Axe Training, Close to Death
Ritual of Protection
Unyielding Blast, Vital Persistence, Deathly Perception

Gear: All berserker, except armor which was knights
Runes: ruby orbs
Sigils: Superior Sigil of Force x 2, Superior Sigil of Air x 2

Kind of a budget build, but I didn’t need anything else. To fight him I strafed back and forth inside of his fire rings while using Life Blast. When I ran out of DS, I followed up with the axe skills and just steadily DPSed him down. I didn’t even need to use any wells; all the HP from Death Shroud and regular HP gave me so much statistical bulk that Salazan never stood a chance.

I guess my best advice would be to go downstairs and fight alongside the zerg for a bit to recharge your life force before each fight. A full bar of lifeforce at the beginning of the fight can mean the difference between an easy fight and failure.

Mostly because I’m in terrible pain, and I would go insane without something to distract me.

Honestly… I don’t want ascended sets that much. I’ve written about it in the past, and did so in an extremely large thread that exists just to answer the question you are asking here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Feedback-Changes-additions-to-Ascended-Gear/first

I suppose what irks me the most about the Liadri fight is that Anet got “difficulty” wrong. I wrote about this in another thread, which I’ll repost some here:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My biggest gripe is the fake difficulty of it all.

#1: The camera. It is extremely limited, making it so you can’t see what is going on. Half the fight is zoomed on the back of my character’s head.
#2: The random object pull. This would be fine if we could see the whole field, and that stupid pulling orb wouldn’t get “obstructed” every time you attacked it. But, game glitches and camera angles, ho! It isn’t like the random pull is pure RNG here.
#3: One hit kill mechanics are never fun. They just discriminate against builds.
#4: The grates on the ground make it so you can’t see the AoE circles that well. In the second phase of the fight, I basically have to guess whenever I’m in an AoE or not.
#5: OH THE LAG! This comes from two sources.
a)Zone lag. Due to the large amount of people zerging this area at 3:00 AM, every action you take can have anywhere from a 0.5 to 1 second delay on it. Because of this, you’ll end up squatting stationary in on area trying to pick up an orb of light, resulting in death.
b)There are huge lag spikes that delay the game 5-10 seconds, and you get these every few minutes. If you get one in the fight, fight is over.
#6: Time limit. Due to the extremely limited space of the gauntlet, to make it so no on can abuse the “whole server shares 6 domes” system they made, they put a time limit in the fight, so you have to rush ahead to beat the bosses when the smart thing to do otherwise would’ve been to wait for a better opportunity. Again, this just discriminates against builds.
#7: It is punishing and expensive. The truffle soups are 30 silver each, and you have to pay to get more tickets, and then you have to pay the repair bill. On average, each “fight” costs about 10 silver. Worst part is when people don’t rez you, and you have to run throughout the entire map to get another shot, getting more people to queue up before you and wasting more time off of food bonuses.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

for reference by what I mean for “Fake Difficulty”.

Fact is, a lot of players would like harder content. Problem is, hard does not mean gimmicky, frustrating, poorly designed, or grindy. Liadri was a step backward from AR and specially MF.

I wouldn’t say that Anet is disappointed by players as much as I’d say that I am disappointed by other players. What is going in in Guild Wars 2 isn’t new, and I have stories from the past to tell on the issue. For a historical example:

My ex-wife City of Heroes once released something called the Mission Architect; a tool which let players design instanced story missions using various in-game tools. Given the story driven nature of the game, this would’ve let players expand on the NPCs in any way they wanted, make their own custom enemy groups, make their own custom friendly groups, write stories for their characters or other characters, and make content as difficult or as easy as possible. They wanted to reward players for their work, so anyone running these missions would still receive money and experience as if it were normal play.

So, with expansive content-designing tools and story telling devices, along with access to nearly every map and NPC and customized character creator, what is it that the players as a whole did with this tool? By and large, players made farms and exploits. Just thousands upon thousands of farms, each one exploiting some mechanic in the experience reward system to give an inordinate amount of experience. Of course, the exploits themselves would get fixed, so there was always a new “farm” to run, and the old farms would clutter the system, and the player given ratings were often based on farms, so the quality assurance of any mission you went in to was shot because of this. Eventually, people stopped going to the Mission Architect because it was cluttered with broken farms, with no way to discern story driven, humorous, dramatic, fun, all around entertaining missions from the garbage that littered the Mission Architect.

This stands out to me as a pinnacle example of the way MMORPG players are. It isn’t ‘getting tired of old content" because there was oodles of new player-made content to play, with more getting released every day. It wasn’t about “having nothing else to do” because there was always new content, and the themselves can make something interesting. It wasn’t about flaws mission design because you made your own missions, and people could fix the problems they had with the game. It wasn’t for lack of storytelling because there were always good writers around, with CoH actively drawing the comic book crowd. The developers gave the tools to the players to make their own storis, expecting the influx of peer-reviewed stories and missions to provide exponentially more content and longevity than the developers themselves could ever hope to make. What they received were countless farming exploits that ruined the Mission Architect for everyone else.

I often hear the term “escapism” attributed to MMOs, and I’d have to say that I agree now. There are many things that you can have in an MMO: awe inspiring landscapes, exploration, a sense of wonder, competition, challenge, enthralling stories of tragedy and humor, interactive and engaging gameplay, etc. The problem with this is the fact that you can get all of these things elsewhere, from TV to books to other non-MMO videogames. So, you have to truly ask what is it that draws people to an MMO, when everything the MMO advertises is available elsewhere? In the end, it amounts to players wanting a skinner box to call home, and players wanting a sense of superiority over others through statistical values (better gear, more money, higher levels) rather than actual skill (AKA something like Street Fighter).

oZii.2864:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I’m still considering the torment set myself. The confusion procs, all in all, are a bit unreliable. When comparing the two, it all boils down to one question:

Will the confusion inflict more damage than the torment?

I’m not so sure on that. The superior runes of torment put nearly any condi necro build I run 100% torment duration, so this gives an additional 3 to 5 seconds for Tainted Shackles. This comes to a total of 9-15 extra ticks of damage overall from tainted shackles, but that is just the fringe benefit.

The real benefit comes from the proc on heal. Though the cooldown was nerfed to be nigh unusable with other classes’ heals, it goes fairly well with Consume Conditions and Summon Blood Fiend. The proc on heal causes 2 stacks AoE torment for 20 seconds, which adds an additional 40 ticks of torment to the damage output.

The real key here being the AoE nature of it all. The additional duration from tainted shackles and the heal proc hit up to 5 enemies, so overall it ends up being upwards to 45-75 additional ticks with tainted shackles, and 200 additional ticks with the heal. Then throw on epidemic to double up the damage, and things can get pretty wicked. Things can also get pretty complicated, too, depending on the foe you fight. Since torment requires motion to do full damage, in PVE this ends up being around 75% of bleeding damage, but against kite-able enemies and in PVP it is 150% bleeding damage for that duration.

The real trick in the comparison is whether or not terror will be properly fixed to be an interrupt. If it is, then Perplexity gets another firm foot to stand on. If you do a lot of 1 vs. 1 fights, small skirmishes, or are concerned with bosses, then Perplexity is probably the way to go. However, I’m going to roll with tormenting and cause more mass havoc.

The radius on the 6 piece bonus on heal is very small my guess 240m like most aoe on heal stuff and weapon swap stuff like geomancy, hydromancy, etc. That is the main problem with the torment rune (or any on heal rune proc with a damage component) the radius is just small which is fine if your on a class that will be in melee range often.

You would have to be right next to your target probably have to fear to ensure you don’t get interrupted then heal and they could very well be out of range by time you get it off.

Not a problem in PVE, where the team frequently stacks up for encounters and all enemies pool into one spot right next to you. But yeah, there’s always the inherent risk of being interrupted when healing at close range like that. Though I’m not concerned with them getting out of range, since on my condi spec I’m constantly hitting other players with cripple, chill, and immobilize.

Necros are decent at quite a few things.

The big one being epidemic, which is the only force multiplier in the game other than quickness. And despite what others above me have said, it dosn’t rely on other professions at all. A good condi necro can stack 12 to 13 bleeds in an AoE rather quickly, and then follow that up with epidemic puts 4 enemies at bleed cap, then 2 enemies half way there. No other class has nearly this potential. This also comes with all of the other conditions that get stacked along the way, such as cripple, weakness, poison, burning, chill, torment, and blind. Throw in other players, and confusion and vulnerability are also multiplied. The biggest advantage here is that epidemic, being a force multiplier, benefits from other players laying down conditions instead of losing out. Necromancer is the only condi class that can claim this, and a good condition necro will disable an entire room of mobs mere moments after entering a room, while doing a ton of damage to boot.

For a good example of what Necros can do, just look at what they do in sPVP. Despite what others above have said, the AoE and disabling potential of Necromancers transfers well to sPVP. The biggest advantage that necros have over other condition classes is that the necromancer can burst long duration conditions. Engineers, rangers, and mesmers all have to slowly build up conditions, or their conditions are extremely short duration. But necromancers lay down long duration conditions, then seal the deal with their deadliest sPVP trait: terror. With terror, the necromancer has a high damaging stun that also prevents condition cleanses, and much to the dismay of low HP classes this can kill an unprepared build outright. They get enough conditions to overwhelm cleanses, which makes them effective in the sPVP scene.

The big confusion people have is that they assume support = buffs and heals. That is a rather shallow definition. While necromancers can give everyone regeneration with marks, protection with spectral wall and wells, and random boons with Well of Power, most of the necromancer support is offensive. Necromancers have the best access to weakness in the game, cutting the direct damage of enemies by 25%. Necromancers are good at stacking vulnerability, which increases the direct damage of all other players by up to 25%. They have good AoE cripple, Chill, and Immobilize, which prevents enemies from escaping as well as prevents enemies from catching up. Then there is boon corruption and blinds, which while some other classes have more access (other classes being thief), necromancer blinds and boon corruption is still extremely useful to the team. Necros also have condition transferrence and corruption, which is superior to cleansing.

One of the cool things necros also have is extremely high Effective HP or EHP. In larger fights the necro has a weakness to being focused, however in smaller fights, Death Shroud provides a large amount of survivability. There are many bosses in the game that have rapid but weaker attacks, and against these bosses the necromancer can face-tank these bosses in bersrker gear. In PVE, against groups of enemies Life Force can regenerate surprisingly quickly, letting the necromancer sit back and blast enemies with a might stacking, vulnerability inflicting, piercing attack that hits for 6k to 8K a shot at range. Necromancers have a high sustained damage, and high EHP combines well with this to make, in all but the worst circumstances, a very deadly combination.

Though necromancers do have their flaws, don’t let that cloud your judgement. There are many things necros do wel.

I’m still considering the torment set myself. The confusion procs, all in all, are a bit unreliable. When comparing the two, it all boils down to one question:

Will the confusion inflict more damage than the torment?

I’m not so sure on that. The superior runes of torment put nearly any condi necro build I run 100% torment duration, so this gives an additional 3 to 5 seconds for Tainted Shackles. This comes to a total of 9-15 extra ticks of damage overall from tainted shackles, but that is just the fringe benefit.

The real benefit comes from the proc on heal. Though the cooldown was nerfed to be nigh unusable with other classes’ heals, it goes fairly well with Consume Conditions and Summon Blood Fiend. The proc on heal causes 2 stacks AoE torment for 20 seconds, which adds an additional 40 ticks of torment to the damage output.

The real key here being the AoE nature of it all. The additional duration from tainted shackles and the heal proc hit up to 5 enemies, so overall it ends up being upwards to 45-75 additional ticks with tainted shackles, and 200 additional ticks with the heal. Then throw on epidemic to double up the damage, and things can get pretty wicked. Things can also get pretty complicated, too, depending on the foe you fight. Since torment requires motion to do full damage, in PVE this ends up being around 75% of bleeding damage, but against kite-able enemies and in PVP it is 150% bleeding damage for that duration.

The real trick in the comparison is whether or not terror will be properly fixed to be an interrupt. If it is, then Perplexity gets another firm foot to stand on. If you do a lot of 1 vs. 1 fights, small skirmishes, or are concerned with bosses, then Perplexity is probably the way to go. However, I’m going to roll with tormenting and cause more mass havoc.

The strange thing is, lately all I ever see is necro and ranger hate.

I think the biggest issue with mesmer confusion is the short durations.

Engineer main here. In WvW I’ll often use prybar, which has 5 stacks of 5 second confusion, and it can work wonders sometimes. I also have a 70% condition duration, which translates into an 8.5 second confusion. Sometimes I’ll take out zerker thieves that ambush me just by whacking them with the pry bar, then hiding behind the gear shield as they smack themselves silly.

The best skill to inflict confusion with a mesmer is Cry of Frustration. Now, not looking at any condition duration or any additional traits, this gives you up to 3 stacks of confusion for 3 seconds. To give a rough comparison between an untraited cry of frustration and an untraited pry bar, the pry bar lasts 66% longer, does 66% more damage, and recharges 100% quicker, leading to a total improved effectiveness of kitten in the confusion department.

I run a condi mesmer as well, an the biggest drawback to confusion has always been that I can never maintain it. Condi mesmers never have a good reason to go into domination, so the only duration increase mesmers get is with master of misdirection. The hard part being that the illusions pool has very high competition in its ranks, so often times there isn’t even the 33% increase.

The other sources of confusion are indirect, and just as short lived. The only thing the mesmer can take comfort in is the fact that they get plenty of ambient confusion from traits and combo fields, which is the only way that their bursts of confusion can go unnoticed. With that said, I think that nearly every skill and trait the mesmer has that inflicts confusion should last at least 5 seconds as a base duration, maybe more.

It might not seem like much, but with mesmer confusion being a standard of 3 seconds, this is a 66% damage and uptime increase on nearly every confusion skill they have.

There are some that need more of a buff. Chaos Armor and Confusiong Enchantments should have a confusion base duration of 8 seconds. Whirl finishers should also be around 7 to 8 seconds, due to how sparsely confusion is applied in them. Blinding befuddlement should also have a duration of 8 seconds or so, largely due to the internal cooldown on the skill.

With that, I would almost fear mesmers becoming overpowered with confusion. That duration increase would mean a lot for condition mesmers.

Also I like the idea of a 1 to 2 second confusion as part of the scepter’s auto attack chain

I’m not sure suggestions to improve turrets is really in the realm of the bugs forum.

Guild events and fractals are any level. However, it is highly recommended to be as high level as possible while in these.

Dungeons you can find here:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dungeons#List_of_dungeons

There are gold sinks in the new events. While each of the new rune/sigil recipes require gears, they also require gold to purchase. Tickets themselves also require gold, which I imagine is being spent by players fighting Liadri over and over again.

Daecollo.9578:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The big problem with the OP’s suggestion is that it is trying to get rid of everything that makes conditions worth using in the first place. Not to mention that conditions already necessitate precision for procs, and also necessitate toughness and vitality to survive long enough to take effect.

Not true, a condition player can still kite/use his conditions to keep people away from him. He does not need to melee to deal good damage.

So you are making all condition users indistinguishable from power ranged attacks…

Look, if your suggestion for conditions is stuff like “Make them crit, but make them also affected by protection and weakness”, then you should just save everyone the trouble and say “get rid of conditions, make condition attacks do more damage”.

My biggest gripe is the fake difficulty of it all.

#1: The camera. It is extremely limited, making it so you can’t see what is going on. Half the fight is zoomed on the back of my character’s head.
#2: The random object pull. This would be fine if we could see the whole field, and that stupid pulling orb wouldn’t get “obstructed” every time you attacked it. But, game glitches and camera angles, ho! It isn’t like the random pull isn’t pure RNG here.
#3: One hit kill mechanics are never fun. They just discriminate against builds.
#4: The grates on the ground make it so you can’t see the AoE circles that well. In the second phase of the fight, I basically have to guess whenever I’m in an AoE or not.
#5: OH THE LAG! This comes from two sources.
a)Zone lag. Due to the large amount of people zerging this area at 3:00 AM, every action you take can have anywhere from a 0.5 to 1 second delay on it. Because of this, you’ll end up squatting stationary in on area trying to pick up an orb of light, resulting in death.
b)There are huge lag spikes that delay the game 5-10 seconds, and you get these every few minutes. If you get one in the fight, fight is over.
#6: Time limit. Due to the extremely limited space of the gauntlet, to make it so no on can abuse the “whole server shares 6 domes” system they made, they put a time limit in the fight, so you have to rush ahead to beat the bosses when the smart thing to do otherwise would’ve been to wait for a better opportunity. Again, this just discriminates against builds.
#7: It is punishing and expensive. The truffle soups are 30 silver each, and you have to pay to get more tickets, and then you have to pay the repair bill. On average, each “fight” costs about 10 silver. Worst part is when people don’t rez you, and you have to run throughout the entire map to get another shot, getting more people to queue up before you and wasting more time off of food bonuses.

It isn’t challenging. It isn’t fun. The biggest difficulty with the whole thing seems to be that the event is horribly designed. All it Liadri is, is expensive and frustrating. To this point, after 30 or so tries, I’ve just given up. I’ve blown way more money than I would earn by defeating Liadri, and I’m not spending another cent or wasting another hour on the grind to complete this event.

You know what was challenging? Molten Facility. Aetherblade Retreat. And they weren’t challenging because you couldn’t see anything.

The big problem with the OP’s suggestion is that it is trying to get rid of everything that makes conditions worth using in the first place. Not to mention that conditions already necessitate precision for procs, and also necessitate toughness and vitality to survive long enough to take effect.

The hard part is that there isn’t any one “effective” way to run an engineer. You could run a build completely different from others, and still contribute meaningfully.