Guild Wars 2

I posted some of this in another thread, but I figure this is a good enough idea that I can reprint it elsewhere. Though these solutions are simple in concept, they are not necessarily simple to execute.

#1: Bleeding.

Problem: every class and their grandmother inflicts bleeding. It makes any two condition builds in the same location redundant, because of how heavily every class depends on bleeds to do damage.

Solution: spread out the primary condition for damage out more. This will probably require inventing a new condition along the way, but for now I’ll provide a simple example: It has never made much sense to me that mesmer illusions and necromancers inflicted bleeding with their magic at a distance. It seems like this was done not as any sort of theme, but because bleeding is the default method for condition damage. What would make much more sense is if Mesmers and Necromancers, instead of doing bleeding as a default form of damage, used Torment as their default form of damage.

By relegating a class or two to dealing primarily with torment instead of bleeding, this allows other classes who inflict bleeding to work side-by-side with Condi Necros and Condi Mesmers without becoming redundant and useless.

#2: Poison.

Problem: Useless in PVE because it does low damage, stacks in duration, and enemies don’t heal.

Solution: Make it so enemies in PVE heal. We already see this done with WvW enemies. It should be the standard for anything rank veteran or higher: reduce their HP a bit, give them a healing skill. Poison reduces that healing skill by 33%, ergo poison now contributes meaningfully to PVE.

For example, if an enemy had 100,000 HP, instead give him 75,000 HP and give him a skill on a somewhat long cooldown that heals 25,000 HP. Now, that enemy will have an effective HP of 100,000, but also can be interrupted while healing and have healing reduced by poison, making it meaningful to the battle.

#3: Confusion:

Problem: It is really short duration, and slow enemy actions make it so many times it does nothing.

Solution: Don’t frontload enemies so much. Make it so enemies, on top of their infrequent high damaging attacks, have a series of quick but medium damaging attacks that are not channels or a glorified sequence of a single attack. Their big attacks will have to be reeled in a bit, but this will make it so confusion can inflict a meaningful amount of damage with its incredibly short durations, and also make it so building defensively and for support is more valuable now that dodge doesn’t stop everything.

#4: Burning:

Problem: By stacking in duration, it is quickly overwritten by other players unintentional burns, making burning a non-reliable way to do damage.

Solution: Make it so, while burning’s duration increases on a target, that burning will always retain the damage of the user with the highest malice. Whenever burning is applied, it is easy to do a quick check: Does the new guy have more or less malice? If more, then it is his burn. If less, then it just adds to the previous burn’s duration.

Hopefully, these fixes, however difficult to implement, will make it so condition classes are more potent in the game, and that the game itself will be more engaging and diverse.

The biggest problem with conditions in dungeons is definitely the cap. Each condition that is not a support condition (as above, have their own massive problems) that does damage does so in an incredibly limiting way.

#1:Bleeding. This is the go-to damage condition, dealing out the most damage that any condition can reasonably inflict. The problem with bleeding is that everyone and their grandmother causes bleeding. Literally. every single class in the game is good at stacking bleeds. This makes any two condition classes redundant, no matter what spectrum they come form.

#2: Poison. This skill is only available to half the classes in the game, and they do it well: If you have a class that inflicts poison, than it is guaranteed that the target will have poison on them permanently. It only does damage equal to 2 stacks of bleeding, so for the few classes that have it, the skill is nigh useless in dungeons. In PVP the purpose of poison is to cover bleeds, and also to reduce the effectiveness of healing. Problem is, dungeon mobs don’t heal. So… it is basically useless. And also redundant if you have two classes that inflict poison.

#3: Confusion. Confusion causes a high amount of damage whenever an enemy takes action. It hits pretty hard in the right circumstances, but the right circumstances are rare. This is because all enemy attacks in the game are channels, slow to execute, spaced far apart, and do really high damage. Even with an 8 second duration, confusion rarely ticks more than twice against a standard mob, often ticking only once. Therein lies the other rub: all confusion is extremely short duration, making it so anything but the most tactical use results in a waste of trait and utility space. The longest base duration for confusion is 5 seconds, seriously.

#4: Burning. Burning is a high damage and low investment condition that stacks in duration. This suffers from a big problem in that, unlike poison, you actually care about the damage it inflicts. This is an issue because every class in the game except thief causes burning. If you use burning as an engineer, or mesmer, or ranger, your high damage burns are constantly overwritten by low damage burns from any of the above using an attack that causes burning. Guardians and Elementalists are the big offender, regularly overwriting every burn you place and doing it really quickly. This makes using burning as a form of condition damage moot, since it is highly unreliable.

Torment: This is a strange answer arenanet has to bleeds for the necromancer that was tacked on to thieves and mesmers to make other classes not feel left out. There is nothing inherently wrong with torment. Sure, most of the time enemies aren’t moving so it does only 75% of the damage as a bleed, but some enemies are movin so then it does more. The biggest issue with torment is that there’s no way to reliably inflict it. Torment is incredibly rare, meaning that even on classes it is in, torment is just a smidgen of ancillary damage on the whole condition damage pie.

So, how to solve this problem? Well… that’s actually quite simple.

Bleeding: Make less classes do bleeds, and more classes do other conditions. New conditions are welcome, however torment is an excellent option. I think that Mesmers and Necromancers should inflict bleeding much more rarely, instead inflicting torment as their primary source of condition damage.

Poison: Make enemy mobs heal themselves more often. Decrease the top HP of every silver mob, but give them a healing skill they can use. This makes it so control has an offensive use to stop the heal, and poison being on the target degrades the heal into nothing.

Confusion: Make enemies attack more. Anet is already going this direction, but it makes sense. Since players have attack chains, why don’t enemies? You can easily reduce the front-loading of damage into single big hits and give enemies stable forms of offense that do a good some of steady damage, while also letting confusion work much better. Also, as always, more access to confusion would be welcomed.

Burning: Make it so burning only goes off the condition damage of the highest malice user. If I apply a 10 second burn at 1600 condition damage, a guardian who applies an additional burn shouldn’t overwrite that with a 0 condition damage burn. It should stay akittens peak hotness, letting burning users maintain an offense no matter the group composition.

Torment: Simply more access to torment.

Range can already do well. Sometimes there are bosses you just don’t want to get close to.. Support is kind of a gray area, and conditions suffer from lolfunding issues. Right now, the big weak link in the chain is control.

There are two big problems with control:

#1: You end up getting swarmed with Silver mobs, and nearly every control skill is single target, short duration, long cooldown. It was designed like this due to the fact that in PVP, players hate neverending control chains, so they designed the game to limit as much control as possible. The problem is that when you have a pack of 4 or 5 silver mobs, each one can take away half of your health, and in a gigantic flashing gfx ball you have to pick out one that is going into an animation and quickly interrupt him.

It just isn’t practical. Nearly every control in the game should have an AoE component, or a much shorter recharge. That way you can either stun the whole group, or lay down meaningful stuns very quickly.

#2: Unshakeable. Half the people who play the game don’t know how it works. The other half who do know how it works think it is a stupid mechanic. It was put into the game in order to avoid chain-stunning a boss, and the result is that stuns (again, short duration on long cooldown) just bounce feebly off of the boss and make it so control heavy specs and builds are utterly useless against bosses.

It is bad enough in dungeons, but in the overworld you’ll end up with a champion getting 20 stacks of defiant after being dazed for half a second. This mechanic exists to completely shut down one of the many facets that a player can base their character around, and it is ridiculous. I’m going to borrow from another person’s suggestion here, and just say that Defiant should decay naturally. Maybe, one stack every 3 seconds or so. That way akittens worst Defiant is a hard timer for when you can use control again and akittens best it is much more quickly stripped away in a control heavy group.

Support suffers from a problem where no one actually knows what support is. When a thief uses smoke screen, is that support? Is that control? What do we classify these things as? For now, I’ll divide support into 3 different aspects, and touch on each of them.

Aspect 1: Disabling conditions. These are conditions that are put on the opponent not to inflict damage, but to otherwise inhibit their actions. Cripple, Chill, Immobilize, Blind, Weakness, Vulnerability. Cripple, Chill, and Immobilize are pretty good on their own, capable of slowing own dangerous enemies. There is a problem with the other ones, though: Blind, Weakness, and Vulnerability are all disabled by Unshakeable, working only half as well. With weakness now having short durations on long cooldowns, and vulnerability needing stacks to really contribute, it all but neutralizes the positive effects from these abilities. So basically, condition support is useless on any mob where you don’t have oodles of space to kite them.

Aspect 2: Boons and Buffs. This includes things like stacking might, layering protection, grating fury, etc. For the most part, these are fine if not difficult to build towards.

Aspect 3: Field manipulation. AKA the “others” category. Here I include things like healing, boon removal, condition cleansing, projectile stopping. These are often unsung, since they are only done well by a few classes, and are often hard to do in these classes. In general, healing and group cleansing tends to be a bit weak, requiring full build dedication for little payout in PVE. This can be remedied by making player to player healing more potent, and things are slowly going this way. Boon removal is rarely used, and it is rarely needed, so it ends up being one of those things where its never around when you need it, and when you need it you aren’t specced for boon removal, so making it universally more useful (AKA give enemies more boons) will make them more potent. Projectile manipulation is fine where it is.

Currently, I’m only so-so about my characters.

The biggest problem I have with my characters is that they have no personality, and little individuality. Despite my best efforts to pick armor skins and colors to be unique to them, ultimately my characters still feel like I’m just Engineer # 3657, Thief # 8921, or Guardian #1957484732857. When I go out looking for groups, or when I’m in a group, there’s nothing that distinguishes another player from my own. It is just “Oh look, another char warrior. I wonder if that one is a woman? I can’t tell either way, so whatever”.

The majority of customization of characters went into their faces. Problem is, I don’t see other player faces. The most I get is some little icon on the top-right of the screen that is covered with a mask or helmet most of the time, and then it is too small to really take notice of the distance between the bridge of their nose or their eyebrows. The characters themselves have no backstory, other than one of the 3 choices given to us from our character creation screen. They all sound the same and say the same things, posture the same way with identical looking skills, constrained wholly by the class system into being just another thief, or just another mesmer.

I think I might be spoiled in that regard. The MMO I came from was City of Heroes, which had 14 classes, 10 of them picking 1 of 10 primary and then 1 of 10 secondary powersets that were often fairly unique to their type of class, and then having to choose from among 9 class based ancillary power sets and 9 additional universal power pools, and they could all be customed colored. Also, the character creation let you make some of the strangest things possible, from gigantic axe-weilding guy in a bunny suit who had psychic powers somehow, to alien vampire elf queen that spewed fire and could control the weather. The limit was mostly your imagination, and everything you made had your own personal signature on it.

I think what could go a long way is having it so each character had an information page that would tell their back story or other interesting tidbits, and maybe if we had a lot more viable options for weapons and utilities. The fact is that, even though I am Engineer #3657, I want to look unique, play uniquely, and feel unique. I want to leave a lasting impression on others, and right now I am not getting any of that from any of my toons.

The only problem with disregarding balance is that when a clearly superior strategy emerges, it results in the removal of diversity because the rest of the game gets polarized around that strategy. This greatly hinders diversity in the game, instead of fostering it.

For an example: There was an old card game called Duel Masters. For a long time, a single card dominated this whole game, and its name was Corile. It had a simple effect: for the cost of 5 mana, you could summon him, then choose any creature on the field, and put it on top of the owners deck. Pacing meant everything in that game, and this ability to set you back a turn was devastating. It occurred at a crucial point in the game, setting players back a turn using a strange form of creature removal. The problem was compounded with the fact that you could use 4 of them in a 40 card deck, and that through some not-so-clever field manipulation you can use them multiple times, or an infinite number of times.

Setting the opponent back a turn potentially endlessly, combined with the -1 to card advantage it generated, it made it so the entire game was dictated by Corile. It did have one counter: if every creature you controlled generated advantage when summoned, then Corile’s benefit was moot. Because of this, you had to make decks using only creatures that had on-summon effects, or else risk infinite lockdown.

The only time Corile’s reign fell was when the game eventually outpaced Corile, making him too slow to function as a true lockdown. This was not accomplished by some change in present tactics, but through the release of new cards that worked faster to win.

Extra credit erroneously refers to what they have as imbalance. It is not the case. What they are doing is mistaking tactical paper-rock-scissors for imbalance. The idea of this is that A is beaten by B which is beaten by C which is beate n by D, repeating until eventually X is beaten by A again. It can be something as simple as a direct game rule, something as mediocre as an elemental system, or something as complex as situational weaknesses combined with precise tactics and prediction via a proper tool set.

The latter is what everyone should aim for. They shouldn’t make something imbalanced and just watch as it dominates the game in hopes that eventually someone else will become useful along the line.

Poplolita.2638:

I don’t know what’s the best way to fix the necromancer for the better for the moment, I have yet to think about it. I’ll probably post later.

In the other hand, after reading those 7 pages (Yes, I’m serious.) please, please,
Stop incessantly posting the same terrible idea over and over again – you know who you are. Stop replying to noobs, and ignore them if necessary? Try to avoid engaging in arguments unless its absolutely necessary. (it’s pointless to try and convince jmatb for example) And most important of all, think about each post you make, and always ask yourself this; “is this post necessary.” And no more ad hominem attacks – u say pve in ya post, me no listening to you, you suck kitten -. Seriously cut that kitten out.
This is a thread about “constructive” necromancer thoughts. Mod should probably consider adding a blacklist for such a crucial thread that will irremediably have an huge impact on necromancer playstyle in TPvp as well as in PVE, and WvWvW in the futur.

I suppose the hardest part about this is that the backhanded and condescending arguments that are use to troll other players can have just as much influence over the outcome of the game as my own. The hardest part about troll logic is that people fall for it, all the time. There isn’t some magical perception barrier that will make it so the people who design and make the game are immune to the incongruencies, scaremongering, or propaganda that gets used in these threads. Let alone, it doesn’t mean that arenanet won’t make a change under the idea that it is popular and that imbalances are fine as long as niches exist.

I’d love to have that much confidence in humanity, but I’ve seen it happen time and again when blatant trolls end up in control of a forum, and any decisions that come from that forum.

I also do think that the only reason that thread has grown so much is because it was started by phantaram, AKA the only name I recognize from tournament videos. Part of the reason I bring this up is to fix a strange page listing bug the forums get sometimes.

Yogscast. Just Yogscast. Saw the video they did about it in Beta, liked it, decided I wanted to play it.

The defensive problem with Necros in PVE is identical to the one in PVP: We have a finite bag of HP that melts quickly when attacked by multiple sources, or by a champion doing one big hit. Big problem is, nearly every champion has at least one big hit, if not more.

Other classes cope with this in the usual way: they have vigor to dodge more attacks, they use evade skills, they use blocks, and they use invulnerability. Some classes, like the guardian or the engineer, combine the use of protection and massive healing in order to mitigate a lot of damage. Necromancers have none of this, so we end up just taking the hits.

The problem being that you can’t win an attrition war with an NPC just based on HP. Anything above a veteran mob has at least 10 times your HP, and champions frequently have 50 times your HP. Some melee mobs aren’t a problem because you can just kite around them with cripple and chill, but ranged mobs with frequent damaging attacks will blow right through you. The battle ends up being about generating as much Life Force as possible so you can block their next lethal hit, and this doesn’t always work.

Many overworld champions hit for much more than a player’s maximum HP. Every temple boss except Lyssa can easily do this. Originally if you could dodge their other attacks you would generate enough Life Force to absorb a hit. But now that hits overflow from Death Shrouds, this tactic no longer works. This means that necros are now soft-bodied rez bait who’s only defense against ranged damage from champions is to hang back as far as possible and hope they don’t notice the Necromancer.

The “overflow” really wasn’t an issue for PVP, at least as far as I played in it. When not being focused down by 4 players or so, I sustained enough Life Force to absorb a lot of their ambushes from full. The only time overflow might be a problem is if DS is timed perfectly to align with something like Fire Grab or BackStab, which is an occurrence rarely encountered.

I’d just prefer it if they gave PVE necro something to let them fight champions better.

I’ve avoided discussing the PVE scene because of, ultimately, that’s on the sidelines for my personal goals, but since it is brought up a lot I might as well talk about it.

Doing PVE with a necro has always been a mixed bag. This is mostly because, even if I ask beforehand in a dungeon group if someone else is running a condi build, they never respond. I have to find out later that the thief is spamming death blossom, because saying “I am” in party chat is apparently too difficult to do. Maybe they’re just afraid that they’ll get kicked for saying yes by elitists, but don’t realize we can detect a condition build from a mile away.

The overlapping of burning is an extremely big problem here. In any group, if there is a guardian, elementalist, or engineer you might as well not have Dhuumfire. Warriors, Mesmers, and Rangers also apply burning when specced for it, making it so Dhuumfire is only a safe bet when paired with thieves, and maybe warriors since they rarely run their burns.

You’ll only want to run a condition build in a premade, but when done right it is pretty good. Enemies in PVE have a lot of HP, and the damage multiplication from Epidemic can be immense in the right circumstances. Lay down 13 AoE bleeds, fire epidemic, then everything in the room is at the cap. When fighting against multiple champions and bosses, this makes taking care of all of them at once really easy. With spectral wall, you can inflict terror on a group of enemies 2 to 3 times, doing quite a bit of damage and control. Combine that with AoE weakness as well as group condition transfers and regen, and the Necro can come out on top with their conditions.

I don’t have a plan to improve condi necros in PVE because, for the most part, thy are fine. I would like to see 2 things done:

#1: Terror does full damage through defiant.
#2: Dhuumfire causes either 4/5 stacks of confusion or 4/5 stacks of torment instead of burning. Rename it something else.

And I’ll be good. For the most part, the flaws with conditionmancers are flaws with conditions in general.

For most of PVE, though, I run a much different set. Knight armor w/ ruby orbs, ruby trinkets, berserker weapons, 30/0/10/0/30 build. The good ole powermancer. There’s only a few complaints I can have with the class, and the biggest complaint is that I can’t run full zerker without becoming incredibly squishy. So, I have to run either knight trinkts or knight armor so I can survive more of a hit.

The damage isn’t too bad, but it isn’t too good, either. PVE is ruled by AoEs, and necromancers don’t have a cleave. If necros want AoE power, there’s only 3 things they can do:

1)Use a staff for it’s piercing auto attack and Putrid Mark
2)Use Wells and Bone Minions
3)Pick up Unyielding Blast.

I went with the latter. Unyielding Blast and Reapers Might lets me do piercing attacks from a distance, and they hit for around 5K each, so by hitting 3 or so enemies it does 15K per auto attack. That isn’t too bad, but unfortunately ikittens my defense with my offense, requiring me to sacrifice Death Shroud in order to do respectable damage.

The biggest problem being that, as a powermancer in PVE, you have to sacrifice a lot of utility in order to do AoE damage. We get 3 utility skills, and giving 2 of them over for AoE damage via wells means that we get one trick to let us “contribute” to our team, and with long cooldowns that is an exaggeration. It is for this reason that power mancers are stuck with running 10 in Death Magic: So they can take Ritual of Protection and go “See? I contribute! I give everyone really short protection!”.

This is two places where a conditionmancer really beats out a powermancer in PVE. They do more damage in an AoE, and they come with a whole lot more support utility by default. If conditions weren’t so messed up in PVE, the conditionmancer would be the norm.

To remedy this issue, I’ll have to take some other people’s suggestions and improve on the power weapons themselves:

Axe #1 Should cleave. Give it a small AoE and a 3 target cap.
Axe #3 Should be a blast finisher.
Dagger #2 should do 50% more damage and heal for 50% more.
Warhorn #5 should do double the damage.

Again: a lot of these ideas are not my ideas. While these sound powerful, in the grand scale of PVP these do very little. It is only in PVE that these are significant changes.

reedju.5786:

I feel like (for the most part) those who main necro want dhuumfire gone (because they know what we are capable of without it) and those who mainly fight necros want DS brought down (theyve faced burst before, but don’t realize how situational/squishy DS really is).

The supposed nerfs aimed at bringing necro in line for PvP, however, have started conflicts in balance between PvP/PvE players.

And then there are those that think condi necro should be a quasi-melee class…

Hopefully Arenanet has a better sense of what they want done with the necro than the community does because if not…I don’t even want to imagine it.

We never needed extra damage, we had a strong control/teamfight niche with (even if it was limited) some diversity. Now the undisputedly apex build is 30/20/0/0/20, for me simply the effect on class diversity, and the communities sanity is enough evidence that burning was a bad idea. It literally has no counterplay. Coming from a previously “UP” necro I’d rather return to that time when we could play well and get good results in return. Anyone who tries to argue that a skilless RNG ability is a good direction for this game can forget competitive play.

Yes the engi has it, but it doesn’t have any of our access to control or boonstripping. Also, it is only supplementary to the burning they have interesting ways to use. Too much is too much, the recent changes to DS, LF, weakness, blind (sorta? people act like we have so many applications of this when in reality we have a single weapon/utility/elite), and torment were plenty. Honestly if anyone should have had this much added at once it should have been warrior or any of the countless other unplayed condi classes (thief/mesmer/guard/ele/etc.)

To be honest, I’m not a fan of Dhuumfire. I don’t find it to be overpowered due to how frequently it goes wrong, but it does seem like it is a big bandaid to a problem that should’ve been solved other ways.

I was against giving Necromancers burning long before they got burning. If they needed more condition damage, then they should’ve received better access to poison, bleeds, and confusion. If they needed more raw power, then they should’ve just buffed the base damage of those attacks. It is a simple solution, but a relatively effective on.

I would’ve preferred confusion instead of burning. For one there’s play involved, since confusion is based on action instead of a straight DPS. Second, confusion is rarely used so it won’t be overwritten by other classes. It provides depth while providing either offense or defense through enemy inaction. It works great on an engineer for both purposes, so it would make sense that it would also work well on a necromancer.

I find the whole thing inelegant, and if Dhuumfire was removed I wouldn’t be sad about it. My concern is whether necromancers would loose too much by losing it. Without that burning proc, Necros do lose a lot of power in a 1 vs 1 situation, since the bleeds are slow to accumulate, and the auto attack chain is often interrupted before poison is applied.

I think the balance ideal is fundamentally broken in PVP as well. The idea with necros not having the other tools results in a very difficult balancing problem.

Necro survivability is incredibly finite at the moment, with Death Shroud as mitigation being limited by HP. In small scale fights of 1 vs. 1 or 2 vs. 2, it is currently overpowered, since a full bar gives Necromancers an incredible statistical advantage over other classes. However, when you get larger than that, DS offers very little comparative protection, being worn away quickly. Then, the necromancer’s lack of escapes and blocks/evades/invulnerability comes back in full force, getting them killed quickly.

There’s almost no balance to it. Either the necromancer is overpowered because it is a small scale fight, or the necromancer is really underpowered because it is a large scale fight. No other class seems to have such a polarized effectiveness, and the design philosophy of Anet can only make the problem worse. If you give the necros more damage or suvivability for team fights, this makes them more overpowered in small scale fights. If you scale them down their damage or survivability for small scale fights, then they become even worse in team fights and large scale fights.

Other than to drop the design philosophy, I can’t think of a solution to this problem.

azuzephyr.7280:

I was talking to you, and I stand by that there is no point talking about pvp in terms of numbers, especially in terms of bleed pressure when neither profession is reliant on it. Bleed might account for more damage than any one other source during an encounter by virtue of being atached to auto-attack, but my output comes from other sources, bleed is merely the most common filler.

I’m rank 48/84.59% win ratio and highest ladder rank being 59[albeit a currently retired one]. Never have me or my team wanted bleed pressure from any source, not from engi, or necro.

…No point of talking about numbers in PVP? What do you think governs the system of PVP? It is about how high your numbers are, at what rate those numbers come (divided by activation and animation time), how reliable those numbers are (procs and chances to hit), how available those numbers are (recharge time), and how those numbers defend against other numbers (vitality, toughness, protection, cleanses, invulnerability frequency, etc). It is these very numbers that Arenanet changes to balance classes, and since we have seen unquestionably the effect that these numbers have on the metagame, then it means that the numbers are a foundation of the game.

I’m going to stop you here, since your case for reasoning is that objectivity, mathematics, and logic have no place in discussion where they are fundamental. Get rid of those and you are left with nothing but unverifiable hearsay, incomplete anecdotes, and paranoia drudged up on the same level that the boogeyman is around every corner and is going to get you no matter how strong or well armed you are. This train of thought will devolve into nothing but a “But no, I can counter their counter by doing this counter on their other counter”, which will never produce anything meaningful.

I really do have to keep insisting that the nerf to terror wasn’t because of dhuumire, but because of terror. In that patch, at the same time we received dhuumire, we also received twice the amount of fear, in both AoE and on single targets.

Considering that terror damage wasn’t cut in half, this still comes out a big win.

azuzephyr.7280:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

azuzephyr.7280:

Why are people posting number logs like we’re talking about stand and cast pve, this is spvp, 10% extra bleed damage isn’t going to do anything to help our shortcoming in pvp

If you are talking to me, then it is simply objectivity. I refer to my analysis as potential, largely because there are countless ways things can go wrong. Regardless of circumstances, the potential skill exists, and player skill allows for greater achievement of that potential.

Please tell me the potential of a class who has meagre practical access to stability [in terms of actually putting it to use] at the cost of up to 50% of their ehp, versus the other professions whom all have better practical access mixed with hard walling abilities and escapes required for tournaments

I’d love to hear it, really

If you weren’t talking to me, then it is probably easier to just admit you weren’t talking to me instead of flailing wildly in to nonspecific and generalized accusations that have nothing to do with my prior analysis on engineer bleed pressure vs. necromancer bleed pressure.

I suppose the only advantage I’ve seen in the thread is that the Devs can distinguish between a lot of the QQ and things that are meaningful.

One of them brought up the fact that the trolls/zealots are in polar opposites on stances, arguing over each others heads and contradicting both one another, and themselves.

I’m trying to be reasonable in that thread, but the fact is that the thread isn’t a discussion. It is a monkey kitten fight. No one wants to talk about what necros have, the strengths of what they have, and the weaknesses of what they have. They just walk in already convinced that necros need a nerf or buff, and then stick to that story no matter what happens.

This will have to come after they fix the turret’s attack rate bug, damage bug, and break/stall bug.

azuzephyr.7280:

Why are people posting number logs like we’re talking about stand and cast pve, this is spvp, 10% extra bleed damage isn’t going to do anything to help our shortcoming in pvp

If you are talking to me, then it is simply objectivity. I refer to my analysis as potential, largely because there are countless ways things can go wrong. Regardless of circumstances, the potential skill exists, and player skill allows for greater achievement of that potential.

Dredlord.8076:

there is so much misinformation about necros in this thread from the nerf callers it is ridiculous…

I know the feeling. I spend two posts doing the math behind the AoE condition potential between Necromancers and Engineers, and then people still follow up by saying grenades are horrible. I get the feeling what is happening is the zealots/trolls have tunnel vision, and are ignoring everyone else other than the specific guy they are fighting with. They enter into this topic with an agenda to nerf/buff necros, and refuse to budge from it.

Sad part is, this is what it seems like for discussions on anything nowadays. From federal politics to inter-office politics. I swear it feels like I’m the last sane person on the planet sometimes.

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok, here’s the deal. I’m hearing different things from everyone I talk to.

1. Necro DS is too much and should be brought down
2. Necro damage is too much and should be brought down
3. Necro survivability is bad

Let me care to explain the differences in opinion: circumstance

Death Shroud can be quite nice in the right circumstances. DS literally doubles the Hit Points of the Necromancer (which is already high to begin with), and with further life force generation it increases their HP more and more. In small engagements, this is ridiculous. I don’t have a video of this, but I have an example:

In WvW I regularly have full Life Force because it is a lot easier to get there. Once while looking at the map and opening TS3, I heard my toon being attacked. It turned out that a mesmer had snuck up behind me and was attacking me. So I quickly changed windows, exited the map, and entered into combat. Sorry to say, this mesmer stood absolutely no chance. Their stealth did nothing against my marks + life transfer + tainted shackles, they couldn’t escape due to dark path, my bone minions and flesh golem bashed on that poor mesmer like they were fodder, and after I began to terror burst it was over.

The fact is that this player didn’t stand a chance: I had so much more HP that in an even fight I would’ve stomped them into the ground with barely a scratch.

But this is the ultimate two flaws of Death Shroud: it is inconvenient, and it is finite. You have to build specifically for Life Force generation, with many builds not capable of doing so. In lacking builds, this results in DS being a non-factor in their defense. I don’t have a lot of Life Force generation on my condition builds because I opt for things like Reaper’s Protection and Spiteful Spirit. The second issue is that the finite nature of DS puts a hard limit toward its damage mitigation.

When compared to blocks, dodges, and invulnerability the finite nature of DS is both good and bad. In 1 vs. 1 scenarios, great life force generation or a full bar gives a ton of survivability, because the scale of damage you are mitigating per second is quite small. One player can only dish out so much damage in that 2 second duration that most blocks take up. However, blocks and dodges don’t have a cap on the amount of damage they can mitigate. If you block at the right time, you can avoid a nuclear holocaust This makes blocks and dodges superior in large engagements, consisting of 3 or more players on any one side. Here, the damage and control quickly escalates, and when focused those block and dodges mitigate more damage than your whole HP bar. Death Shroud… does not do this. It is a limited source of damage absorption that grows slowly, so it is quickly eaten up by enemy DPS while offering no direct immunity from any of their attacks. The conditions they apply are still there, the control that hits you still lingers, the damage is taken away from DS, never to return.

In these multiple engagements is where we get complaints that Necros are too vulnerable. Weakness and protection can reduce some of the damage done, but the damage isn’t truly stopped, and those can be stripped away or cleansed quickly. The necro can’t escape, which is another way to mitigate focus fire, and players know this. I can’t count how many times in sPVP or WvW I’ve rounded a corner only to see 4 guys that proceed to kill me quickly, despite Weakening Shroud + Spectral armor at the same time. The necromancer is completely helpless in these circumstances. It is for this reason that in tPVP they always focus on the Necromancer first. Not because they are the most dangerous class, but because they are the easiest class to kill, instantly balancing the fight in the favor of whomever killed the Necro.

The lack of healing on all builds not completely dedicated to vampirism doesn’t help, either. This adds to the finite nature of Necromancer survivability.

As for a fix for this problem, I’m not sure. By default I would say to just give necromancers the tools they are missing and be done with it, but you guys said you don’t want to do that. Instead, we are left with a class where we have to keep ramping up their damage or their durability so they can survive team engagements, but this makes them ever more overpowered in small engagements.

Because of this, engineers are really good at applying bleeds in an AoE. Their skills do more direct damage, apply more long term bleeds, and fly further. The disadvantage being that grenades are much harder to use. So, how is it that the Necromancer gets so much AoE focus? Well, that comes down to their ace move: Epidemic.

Something I didn’t include in this was the Necro auto attack, which fires off 2 × 5 bleeds every 1.25 seconds or so, and factoring barbed precision this is 9 bleed ticks per second. This is really good on a single target basis, but in AoE it isn’t that good at all, since the AoEs can hit up to 5 targets, making them 5 times better. However, in 1 vs. 1 the scepter is undoubtedly king for the Necromancer, since in long term it applies more bleeding and poison to boot. It is here that necromancers get access to something that engineers don’t: condition burst.

Engineer conditions are gradual by design. They’re good at AoE bleeds, but it takes awhile to truly build them up, and many times the RNG is not kind them. Engineers have readily available access to confusion, but not a lot of it, firing it off in short bursts as counter play more than as a source of damage. The main damage source for condition engineers comes from their incredible access to burning, and this doesn’t stack in intensity, so they can’t layer it up for greater damage.

Necromancers have the option to do two things. First, they have the option to layer up every condition they have at once. This takes a rather long combo to pull off (Grasping dead + enfeebling blood + weakening shroud + Dark Path + Mark of Blood + Putrid Mark + Signet of Spite OR Blood is Power) and that can be neutralized by good cleansing and dodge/blocks rather quickly. The second thing in their arsenal is Epidemic, which is the only technique in the game that acts as a force multiplier instead of an addition. Epidemic multiplies the damage done on one target to another, regardless of where the source of those conditions come from. Despite the fact that it is situational and unwieldy, Epidemic is arguably one of the strongest moves in the game, from both an offensive and defensive perspective.

This gives necromancers true killing power as far as a condition build goes. With the deadliest stun in game via Terror, they can lock down and burst down a single target, and with an elaborate chain + epidemic they can burst all conditions into a massive AoE.

This seems like it might be overpowered, but it really isn’t. In order to layer up massive terror, you opponent has to first be hit by it, not break out of it, and not have stability. A player with knowledge of positioning can stun break out of the combo then move out of optimal terror position, rendering the combo meaningless. When all is said and done, in both WvW and in sPVP I’ve only managed to use a full 7 second (not 100% duration) terror burst once, since most players are smart enough to know when it is coming, and to get out of the way / counter play when it does come.

With condition bursts, the fact remains that it takes forever for those conditions to actually inflict damage, even if you layer them up all at once. Counter-control and escapes completely mess up the combo, since you have to blow nearly every relevant cooldown to have meaningful condition burst, and if they happen to pack a total condition cleanse on themselves, then everything can be for not. Epidemic as a force multiplier only works against groups, so the necro always suffers from the threat of being focused down and controlled, and then with increased group cleansing there is always the threat that Epidemic will simply miss or be neutralized instantly.

I say this a lot, and I’m going to keep saying it: A condition necro is ultimately not in control of the fight. Their defense, their offense, both are in the opponents court. We just lay down our skills and see what happens, lacking a lot of the depth that other classes have in engagement.

To be honest, I only read about to the 3rd page, because after that it sounded a bunch like “waaah waah whaaah” and “Neayyeameaemaea” to me. So, I’ll address some of the relevant points:

On engineers and bleeding: Since I also play an engineer a lot, I have experience with this. The ability for Engineers to inflict bleeding in an AoE is readily seen by comparing their AoE bleed capabilities. For this, I will assume that the engineer is using grenadier, but ignoring condition duration.

Shrapnel Grenade: 3 bleeds, 12 second duration, recharge every 5 seconds (4 when traited). This comes to 3 × 12 / 5 = 7.2 bleed ticks per second, and 9 bleed ticks per second with the recharge increase.

Mark of Blood: 3 Bleeds, 8 seconds, duration, recharges every 6 seconds (4.75 when traited). This comes to 3 × 8 / 6 = 4 bleed ticks per second, and 5.1 bleed ticks per second with the recharge increase.

Grasping Dead: 3 bleeds, 7 second duration, recharges 10 seconds. Comes to 2.1 bleed ticks per second.

Enfeebling Blood: 2 bleeds, 10 second duration, 25 second recharge (20 when traited). Comes to 1 bleed tick per second when traited with recharge, and 0.8 bleeds per second when not traited.

If we are to ignore the cooldown on weapon swaps, the engineer has the Necromancer beat in long term damage if the necro combines all 3 AoE skills with youthful abandon. This is when things become much more complicated: we have to factor in procs.

Engineers get several procs that go along with grenades. Ignoring Incendiary Powder because engineers get many sources of burning outside of grenades, we have 2 procs that concern us:

Shrapnel: 15% chance, 12 seconds of bleed, occurs with every explosion.
Sharpshooter: 30% chance for 3 second bleed on critical hit.

Engineer grenades hit 3 times, and each of these has a chance to proc on use. It is also worth mentioning that the Sigil of Earth is much more likely to proc in these circumstances against a single target. For simplicity, I’ll just use a 25% crit rate for both classes, assuming that these are builds that have the relevant traits, but don’t bother building up too much precision. You may use different numbers if you like.

So, this means that each grenade, we get 12 × 0.15 = 1.8 bleed ticks per attack, coming to an additional 4.8 bleed ticks per attack factoring in all of the grenades. With Sharpshooter we have 0.3 × 0.25 × 3 = 0.225 bleed ticks per attack and on 3 grenades this comes to 0.675 bleed ticks per attack in total.

Necromancers themselves have a similar trait: barbed precision. This gives a 66% chance to inflict a 2 second bleed, and with a 25% crit rate this comes to 0.33 bleed ticks per attack. Since necromancers don’t get multiple attacks, this is only added to each of the bleed durations above.

Now, bleed ticks per attack and bleed ticks per second are not the same thing. If you attack more quickly than once a second, it goes up. If you attack slower than once a second, it goes down. So, for arguments sake, I will assume that the attacks are used approximately 0.75 seconds apart, increasing each of those bleed ticks per attack up by 33%. So, in total:

Engineers: 5.5 × 1.33 = 7.315 bleed ticks per second with grenades, and 16.315 bleed ticks per second with shrapnel grenade

Necromancer: 5.5 Bleed ticks per second with Mark of Blood, 2.5 with grasping dead, 1.4 with Enfeebling Blood.

EDIT: fixed a math error.

1)Either.
2)That circles back toward the whole “Conditionmancers aren’t in control of their own offense and defense” thing I talked about in my first post.

I mentioned it before: stability and stun breaks can easily interrupt the fear chain combo. However, should that player not have those available to them for some reason (warhorn, Flesh Golem, Reaper’s Protection, another teammate did something, whatever), 9 second of stun while being hit for 9,900 damage from terror alone is quite kitten ing. You throw other conditions on top of it (say, 6 stacks of bleeding and poison from general combat), and the stun chain means certain death to classes with low HP.

The chain itself can be hard to interrupt, though. The best you can hope for is to use the stun break at Doom, before you hit the spectral wall, and then dodge through reaper’s mark. If you use it after spectral wall, they’ll hit you with spectral grasp OR reaper’s mark, so you’ll end up taking another 2 seconds on top of what you have, unless you have full endurance and manage to dodge both. This can be hard, though, since most Necromancers will only layer their stuns as a finishing move, after the battle has gone on for a bit.

jcbroe.4329:

Really the biggest issue comes up when you have Terror and Dhuumfire combined. There wasn’t too much of an issue before Dhuumfire was added to the game, but when it was, people immediately called it broken, specifically in Terror builds.

I find the buff to fear to be the reason for the highest increase in damage from condition necros. The burn from Dhuumfire is nice, but it suffers from several problems:

#1: Requires some fairly specific builds to use effectively.
#2: It’s internal cooldown drastically decreases the effectiveness of the proc against multiple targets.
#3: it has a habit of procing on things like ranger spirits, mesmer clones, summoned thieves, summoned elementals, etc.
#4: The damage is quickly overwritten by the ambient attacks done by Guardians, Elementalists, and Engineers. While engineers usually run a condition build, Guards and Eles never do, so your burning can easily be overridden by theirs.
#5: Since burning doesn’t stack in intensity, it becomes redundant and ineffective the moment a condi ranger or engineer is around.

People tend to blame Dhuumfire for the power that necros received, but this is forgetting that the Necromancer received over a dozen meaningful buffs to their condition builds alone in the balance patch. Necromancers were all around better, period. Dhuumfire is just the most noticeable one because it was a hotly debated topic before the buffs were given. There were 2 other things than Dhuumfire that really impacted condition necros:

A)AoE long duration Torment and Immobilize. All builds received this, effectively making it a move that does 4.5 × 10 second bleeds that bypass the condition cap, as well as an immobilize.
B)Necromancer Fear was buffed massively. First, Doom was made 50% more effective. Second, Spectral Wall was turned into an area denial, sustaining fear + protection wall that could combo fear multiple times an hit countless opponents.

B is the biggest one. This means that necromancers received more fear, better fear, 3x the AoE fear, and fear became much more tactical. Originally a necro would fear you for maybe once for a second, maybe two if they used reaper’s mark, but that was it. Terror was a no-show in a lot of builds because over the course of combat it only ticked once or twice, and it was almost wholly a defensive mechanic. Now players have learned to stack fear immensely, creating a devastating lockdown + damage combo the game had never seen before. For example, with the new fear it is very possible to

1) Doom (3 seconds)
2)Spectral wall (2 seconds)
3) Reaper’s Mark (2 seconds)
4)Spectral Wall again (2 seconds); this is done by running past the player, forcing them to run back in to spectral wall again. That, or use Spectral Grasp like I do and cheese it.

Layering up to 9 seconds of fear: More than twice what was possible with a 100% fear duration build pre-patch. This isn’t helped by the fact that terror ticks for about 50% more damage than burning does, and it isn’t redundant or neutralized. It even works well in groups, since both Reaper’s Mark and Spectral Wall cause fear in an AoE, hitting whole teams for up to 4 seconds of fear in total while some poor soul was capped at 9, and the necromancer was under protection the whole time.

BTW: Necros don’t have access to every damaging condition. They lack confusion, with the only way of obtaining it being to transfer it over, or if they use the bone minion to combo field off of spectral wall. Of course, if you use spectral wall as an ethereal field to inflict confusion, then you aren’t doing it right.

I think the number one thing turrets need to get is fixed. Seriously, the recharge bug, the oversized hit box, and the (maybe) damage bug are plummeting the viability of turrets. I do not enjoy the fact that net turret’s overcharge just makes the net turret stop working.

Before then I had a rather beautiful turret build that used the control from turrets alongside of the grenade kit to do a lot of damage and additional control in a more reliable fashion. A few weeks later I start seeing similar builds winning 1 vs. 1 tournaments.

Anyway, for all the flaws that we have with turrets, there are many bonuses that turrets get.

#1: Immunity to conditions.
#2: Low maintenance. You just place them then forget.
#3: Their immobility allows them to be spread out without being inside of everyone’s AoEs.
#4: They have potent control effects and can sustain near permanent AoE burning.
#5: They’re all blast finishers, as well as potential knock backs when needed.

Sure, they don’t do as much damage as mesmer phantasms, and they don’t follow you around stealing boons like necromancer minions, but in sPVP they are very useful. They offer point control, and sPVP is all about point control.

That said, there are several things I’d like to see done.

#1: Bug fix them. They’ve never worked properly.
#2: The damage done by the thumper turret and the rifle turret is pathetic.
#3: Increase their toughness a bit. Maybe… 15-20%

And then I think they’ll be good.

So long as people drink water, they will cry over things.

It was a bug fix more than a buff. That said, Necros were also nerfed in a lot of ways, too. Spectral Walk, for example is no longer a viable method of Life Force Gain. Death Shroud no longer fully absorbs the last hit taken. Terror damage was reduced…

It wasn’t all fun and games. Now we can tank physical damage as well as condition damage in DS.

But we do have a lot of power. My concern is that this power may be working against us. The devs have stated multiple times that they are not giving a necromancer the tools other classes have for survival (stealth, disengage, vigor, invulerability, etc), so to compensate in a world where active defense is the only defense, they give necros a lot of passive defense and a crap ton of damage to boot.

Do we have too much damage? I’m not so sure. We have good AoE conditions, but the fact is that necros apply bleeds slowly, only 2 every 1.5 seconds or so with the scepter, and 3 every 4.75 seconds with the staff. To get bursts of conditions as a necro, I have to do some complicated maneuvers (spectral grasp + Weakening Shroud + Dark Path + Chillblains + Mark of blood into scepter/dagger for grasping dead and enfeebling blood, coming to 13 bleeds after blowing all my cooldowns), and our ace move Epidemic is hard to use, since if they cleanse before use it does nothing and if their partner cleanses after use it does nothing.

It just doesn’t have “Oh crap I’m at the cap!” feel that Condi rangers give, or the “My cleanses, they do NOTHING!” feel that Condi mesmers give, or that “OMG I’M ON FIRE!!!” effect that engineers have. The Mes and the Ranger are tricky and hard to fight, whereas the engineer is oppressive with either direct damage or high controls. The one gimmick we have to lay on the hurt as a conditionmancer is to stagger our fears to maximize terror damage. Against classes with low HP and if we’re lucky enough to have dhuumire proc, this can be quite dangerous. However, a stun breaker and/or stability ruins the chain.

It is rare for me to run a power necro other than a tanky minion master in PVP (which dies to AoEs and becomes helpless very quickly), but Power Necros suffer from a lack of reliable AoE and also have issues at range. Without any cleave, the necro relies on wells for AoE damage, but wells have the bitter flaw that players can simply choose not to stand in them, making them hard to use to that effect. Our ranged power weapon, the Axe, has incredibly short range and does so-so damage at best. Instead, we often rely on Life Blast for our ranged attack, which eats up our defense as we are using it.

Condi necros are slow to start and not in control of their own damage, power necros have tunnel vision and highly delayed AoE, minion masters are vulnerable to AoEs. Our offensive options, for all of their statistical clout, are quite limiting and have their own weaknesses. There are countless times as a Condi Necro where, despite spamming all of my AoEs, I can’t make a dent in an enemy player’s HP because they have dodged/blocked/cleansed literally everything I have done. Instead, my HP is plummeting for their constant attacks, and I have absolutely no way to defend against them.

While the Engineer suffers from the problem that the Devs have no idea what they want the class to do, the Necro suffers from the problem where the Devs have a clear idea what they want to do, and it just doesn’t work too well.

I’ve been playing a necro in sPVP since launch, and also I use a necro as my main in WvW. The necromancer, for all their strengths, has quite a few weaknesses.

The biggest problem with necros, and condition necros in general, is that both their offense and their defense is ultimately not in their own hands. While other classes get vigor or endurance regen for dodges, barriers that stop or reflect projectiles, shields that block multiple attacks, or straight up invulnerability, necromancers don’t get any of that. Their form of defense is to use blinds, chill/cripple, weakness a couple of scattered stuns, and life force generation/Death Shroud. The big problem with all these defenses is that they are stopped by stability, can be cleansed away, or require the opponent to make mistakes. Because of this, Necromancers don’t have a truly innate form of defense that they can use, other than being a big bag of HP. We have to rely on AoEs and Marks to land hits because we lack the lockdown abilities and the speed to land hits otherwise.

Combine this with the lack of mobility and disengage/maintaining engagement, and we come to what is the true problem with the necromancer: Our survivability is not in our control. How well we do is highly dependent on our opponent, and if they are built correctly AKA have a lot of condition cleanse or if they make good calls, there isn’t much the necro can do to fight back. That is the most frustrating part of using the necromancer in WvW: When I turn a corner on the map, my fate is ultimately decided by what is around that corner, and not what I can do. If there’s 4 enemy players there, I can’t escape or defeat them all so I die. If there is nothing there, then I am safe and I can continue going on. Whenever I get attacked by another player, whether I win is really about how they are built, and how good of a player they are.

I rarely ever make “skill shots” or pull wins from behind as a Necro. Either I win by a lot or I get pwned, and the lack of control on this matter just makes the Necro feel a bit helpless. They have a high skill floor, but a low skill ceiling, and this shows up a lot in play. I think this is where a lot of complaints while playing a necro comes from: while we can be considered bastions of power when on the field, we are also very helpless.

Necromancers have a lot of staying power with a full DS bar. It literally doubles our HP, giving us a ton of sustain in small scale fights. The two problems with it are that you have to get the Life Force to use it in the first place, and the second is that in large scale bouts DS melts in an instant. The bigger the fight, the more valuable dodge and reflects and blocks become, but the durability of DS is finite. Without an escape, there’s no way to stop being focused, so if you fall into that pack of ants you are done for.

The guardian has appeal to it. It isn’t as bland as the warrior, it isn’t as squishy as the thief, it isn’t as complicated as the mesmer. The guardian has a ton of utilities that are both strong and easy to use, and a class mechanic that rewards players for both doing nothing and using the class mechanic. The guardian is in a good place in PVE and PVP; very few people pick up the class, then throw it away in confused impotence.

It is used as a main a lot because it is good. I nearly mained the guardian myself, but I decided to start with the Engineer because I liked the idea of the Elixir Gun.

They don’t want thieves pole-positioning at 1200 while also spamming high mobility skills and stealth.

The shorter range is the tradeoff you get for stealth. You can easily close distances or create distances. A skilled thief would be able to keep a player at 1200 range indefinitely with that weapon through various dodges and rolls that comes with the class. This is unfair to any class that doesn’t have a viable 1200 range weapon, since it makes thieves impossible to fight against otherwise.

IMO the biggest problem with barbed precision is that it doesn’t do much.

66% chance to inflict a 1 second bleed. One bleed is anywhere from 105-145 damage on proc, but only 0.66 x crit chance of it happening. That… really isn’t a lot. Against a single target this ability might as well not exist. When fighting multiple targets you’ll get sparse bits of condition damage scattered aimlessly among them. For comparison purposes, we’ll assume a 50% crit rate. so in all barbed precision gives you 0.33 bleeds per attack.

To compare, precise strikes by warriors has a 33% chance for a 3 second bleed. Engineers have a 30% chance for a 3 second bleed. Mesmers have 100% chance for 5 seconds, but only from illusions. Doing the math, this comes to 0.5 bleeds per hit, 0.45 bleeds per hit, and finally 2.5 bleeds per hit.

The worst out of the bunch (engineers) inflicts 36% more bleeds per hit than necromancers of equal precision. This is only the the surface, however. The second issue with necromancers is that their condition attacks don’t attack rapidly. You can fire off a few plinks with the scepter, but this is slow to execute, so conditions don’t build up that quickly at all.

Warriors, Engineers, and Mesmers all attack much more rapidly. Engineers hit up to 3 times as much with grenades, making their procs 3x more effective. I don’t have a particular attack count for Warriors and Mesmers, however I definitely know that mesmer clones (particularly 3 sword clones) can attack at roughly the same rate as the scepter with a delay between them, so I would say 3 clones at half speed is roughly 50% more attacks per second than a necromancer.

It is here where rangers also benefit. They have Sharpened Edges, which is a trait that is identical to barbed precision. What rangers also have is twice the attack speed on their shortbow, as well as the off-hand warhorn and a pet that attacks alongside of them.

And this is why I run carrion on my necro. You only need, like, 20% crit chance in order to have a reliable dhuumire proc, so after a few Rampager components you’re good to go.

Zenith.7301:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose my big problem with giving different classes different tools is that necros got burning instead of something else (confusion or torment or something unique).

And by something unique you mean a crappier condition.

The problem with conditions is that you have some, like burning, which are too strong at the uptime they’re applied, while others like confusion and poison are too weak. Blleds only really start threatening at 6-7 stacks.

The only damage conditions that aren’t applied in intensity are burning and poison. Having a trait apply, say, 4 stacks of confusion for 5 seconds could put it on equal offensive footing to burning (roughly) while also being unique to the class.

I suppose my big problem with giving different classes different tools is that necros got burning instead of something else (confusion or torment or something unique).

I’ve seen stealth done better in MMOs before, through a system that was much more complicated.

The idea was this: each player had themselves a perception stat, and all NPCs had this stat, too. The stealth abilities granted to any player would subtract from this perception stat, and this would give the overall distance at which an enemy can be seen. So, for example, if a character had a perception of 500 feet, and stealth had a rating of 300, then the first character would see the invisible character at 200 feet.

This led to more diversity, with various classes having abilities that could increase their perception, as well as classes getting different and more powerful forms of stealth. There was even a buff item that could increase perception that was quite cheap, making it so should the situation call for it you could always see those invisible enemies should your class or build be vulnerable to them.

I think the biggest problem with GW2 stealth is that it is completely depthless. There is no counterplay other than randomly flailing feebly in the wind. There is no sophisticated method to determine of a player is visible or invisible in different circumstances. There is no active counter-skill that affects stealthed players greater than non-stealthed players, or anything of the sort. The most you can do with a stealthed opponent is to randomly guess where they might be and what they are doing, and unfortunately smart players use things like Blink and Shadowstep to insure that your guess is always wrong.

Anyway, the big problem with offensive mitigation is that, ultimately, the ball is not in your court. On my Engineer when I activate Elixir S, I’m invulnerable for 3 seconds and there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it. Because the defensive aspect of this is wholly in my control and acts irrespective of what my opponent does, you can say that I have full control over this defensive ability. But Necromancers never get this option:

Blind: Only meaningful with near permanent sustain or on critical attacks. Opponents can choose to not stand in the blind field, cleanse it away, or just fire off a useless auto attack before doing something crucial.

Weakness: Doesn’t work half the time. Can be easily cleansed away, or with the new short durations of the skill simply outlasted. Does nothing with conditions. Best use is the endurance reduction.

Chill/Cripple: only effective against enemies with limited range (melee mostly). Does nothing to ranged attacks. Can be cleansed away.

Stuns: Have to hit the target, target must not have stability, and can be broken through with stun breakers. As to whether a stun will work is merely guessing.

Death Shroud: The defensive utility of this skill lies in the assumption that your opponent will waste their attacks on you while inside of it. If they just do something like retreat and wait for the natural degen to take effect, this means that Death Shroud mitigates nothing. Requires the build up of life force in the first place.

Because of this I found most of the QQ about necromancers to be completely unfounded. In any battle, the necromancer is not truly in control over any of their defenses, and half the time over their offenses, either. The person who decides the outcome of a Necro vs. Class X fight ultimately is Class X, and as skilled as a necromancer player can get we simply lack the tools as a class in order to be top tier. So we default to spewing out a bunch of AoEs and hoping they hit, and also hoping that the other classes just happen to not be using one of the many tools that can shut us down.

This patch has some buffs and some nerfs.

Buff: We take less damage in DS.

I was always perplexed as to why DS HP would drain in just a few hits while fighting power builds. Thankfully this has been fixed. It is fixed in our favor, so I count this as a buff.

Buff: Haunt now gives 10% life force. It’s meh.

Buff: Ghastly Claws: LF increased to 12% gain. It’s meh.

Buff: Spectral Grasp: LF gain increased to 15%. This is a pretty good one, actually.

Buff: Mark default size is increased by 50%. This is another pretty good one, since I myself have been running around without using Greater Marks, so I’m glad this buff was in place.

Nerf: DS now doesn’t absorb a full hit when low. This one really hurts, since I used this all the time in PVE. In PVP this isn’t too big of a nerf, since most good players wouldn’t blow their big hit on a Necro in DS.

Nerf: Greater Marks is now a master trait. This is kind of a “meh” nerf, since marks have had their size increased by quite a bit in general. This makes greater marks almost excessive. If they intended to nerf the 30/30/10 build, they failed: Now players just take the recharge and have bigger marks to start with.

Spectral Walk: 2% lifeforce, 1 second cool down. Now, I’ve seen a LOT of players use spectral walk as LF gain, a stun breaker, and a movement skill. Now that 1/3rd of its functionality has been nerfed into absolute oblivion, this ens up being an overall hit to necromancer survivability. Again.

Spectral Armor: 8% life force per hit, 1 second cool down. This can be seen as either a nerf or a buff, depending on the circumstances. In order to surpass its previous functionality of 3% per hit, you would have to be hit 3 times in a second. There are circumstances where this doesn’t happen (PVE), but in PVP these show up a lot. So overall in PVP this is a defensive nerf… again… in the worst way. Necros now don’t have any valuable mitigation vs. multi hitting abilities. The most we can do is pop into DS for retaliation and hope the counter damage hurts them enough.

Terror: now does 17% less damage. This is a strangely specific nerf, but nonetheless it hits conditionmancers everywhere.

I think that what Anet is trying to do is give us alternate sources of life force generation, while nerfing the burst from spectral armor/walk. This doesn’t work, since all of the buffs to LF generation came from power builds, and the spectrals worked defensively best on the condition builds.

My biggest concern is how this affects PVE, particularly when soloing champions or fighting temple bosses.

The whole “soaking up a big hit with DS” in PVP was quite hard and a bit of a crapshoot. You could pop into DS at 10%, but a good thief would just use cloak and dagger once stealth dropped, then follow up with a backstab after DS is gone. So basically unless you time it just right, you won’t be soaking up a big hit.

But in PVE, I used this tactic all the time. When fighting the Priest of Melandru or the Statue of Dwayna or something like that, I would use the little LF generation I would get to use DS to soak up a big attack. Since I don’t have vigor or endurance regen or blocks or dodges or invulnerability, I HAVE to use death shroud in order to soak up those ridiculous 30K damage hits. But now I can’t…

So shed a tear for me in PVE.

The big thing I have been hoping for is a fix to turrets so I can get back to sPVP.

Turrets are STILL NOT FIXED!!!

You know, I could’ve sworn I made a post explaining all of this stuff in another thread, specifically using the thief as an arbitrary example.

Oh yeah, I did:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Heavy-vs-Light-classes/first#post2465839

Tarsius.3170:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

When running solo in WvW (on Necro), whenever I see a guardian, I go the other way.

That’s funny, I would be tempted to do the same if I ran into a Necro on my roaming Guardian….

…does that mean if we tied a necro and a guardian together they’d float above the ground spinning wildly, just like when you tape a slice of buttered toast to the back of a cat?

Something like that. Or they’ll impose a charge on each other once they get close enough, causing them to collide violently until one obliterates the other.

On a serious note, though, guardians always give my Necro the toughest fight. They have plenty of cleanses, pack stun breaks/stability to bypass my terror, do a lot of damage with their melee specs, they are slightly more mobile than I, and they have just enough control to disable me. I don’t regularly pack corrupt boon or well of corruption (for in WvW I generally find I rarely use them), which are the sPVP counters to a guardian. Because of this, any fight with a guardian ends up being a tough one. The only class that gives me equal or more trouble is the Mesmer, AKA the best dueling class in the game.

I know they can’t have everything on every build. However, it seems like whenever I guess that they’re missing something (multiple cleanses, stun breaker, shadowsteps), I swear I get it wrong every time.

This won’t help players with different play times at all, instead making a big problem:

50% of all points in WvW will come down to the last 30 minutes of play.

It’s really simple. Servers will have to stack in order to grab all of the land before the lockdown, so they can keep getting points through the night. This makes it so all of the WvW play before the timeline is mostly meaningless, and after that half-hour window you can’t WvW anymore at all. This basically makes Border locking itself a much bigger problem than what it attempts to solve, and it discriminates against more timelines that way.

While I prefer to use a condition build, should I use a power build It would probably go something like this:

Armor: Knight with Ruby Orbs
Trinkets: Ruby
Weapons: Knight
Dagger/Warhorn, Staff
Sigil of Force / something else, Sigil of Force
Traits:
30/0/10/0/30
Trait abilities:
Spiteful Spirit, Reaper’s Might, Close to Death
Ritual of Protection
Unyielding Blast, Soul Marks, Foot in the Grave

Utilities:
Consume Conditions, Well of Suffering, Well of Corruption, Signet of the Locust/Spectral Grasp/Well of Power/ Blood is Power/ Whatever, Flesh Golem

Or something like that.

When running solo in WvW (on Necro), whenever I see a guardian, I go the other way.

So yeah, they are definitely worth it. Guardians bring a lot to the table in WvW. AoE retaliation, AoE stability, AoE Heals, Warding lines for mass enemy movement denial, Fire and Light Fields, AoE Might, AoE condition cleansing, projectile reflection, solid damage with their weapons, protection, a few bits of distanced control, and enemy pulling.

The only real weakness to guardians in WvW is that they don’t have excellent ranged skills. That… is about it. Guardians make a strong frontline and are almost always formidable on the field.

Damage gets nerfed a bit here and there. But otherwise, yeah players have learned to use their active defenses now, making them harder to hit and also harder to do damage to when hit.

Just because you haven’t heard word about it, doesn’t mean that nothing is being done.

Ur not doin it rite.

You enter WvW. You look at the map. You ascertain what is happening by looking at the map (big orange swords on stonemist’s inner layer. Gee, what is going on there?). If you cannot ascertain what is going on in the map, you ask what is going on in the map. After you find out what is going on the map, you decide to

A): Join or form a Havoc team of 5 players that goes around getting tanks and undefended towers.
B): Set up siege defenses and run supply at critical towers and keeps, as well as maintenance siege and upgrades at those locations.
C): Go to the commander shield and do whatever it is they are doing.
D): Go near the commander shield and scout specifics, reporting back to the commander group what you see (enemy groups, how well defended a tower is, how much time is left on guild claiming, etc).
E): Go solo and try to intercept yaks and pwn n00bs.
F): Put on your own commander tag and form another group that takes on larger missions.
F) a) If you don’t have a commander tag but have enough pull in a guild or on the map, do F but without the tag.
G)Sit on defense at a tower or keep and keep tabs/have a sandwich with a relaxing view of zerglings running by.
H)Group up as many as you can in one spot and LIVE FOR THE SWARM!!!
I)Enter Guild vs. Guild battles.
J)Decide the map is fine and your services are needed elsewhere.

And probably some other things I haven’t mentioned. There’s a limit to my creativity and experiences, after all.

Whenever something in the game goes wrong, it doesn’t shoot a “I’ve broke” flare into the sky for all of Arenanet to see.

Fact is, unless we report the problem, Anet won’t necessarily notice it.

I’m 90% sure that the thread has devolved into some random class vs. class thing involving rangers, so I’ll just go off on my own tangent in response to the OP.

Now, the thing with the game is that it is not designed around the philosophy that if you are more durable, you should be doing less damage. That is a rather antiquated design philosophy that doesn’t make sense when compared to a real life situation: If some guy is going to chop my head off with a long-axe, him wearing plate armor or him wearing nothing at all doesn’t change the fact that my head is coming off. From a game design standpoint it is also a bad design choice because it results in the entire game being designed around only those 2 aspects: How much damage you do, and how much damage you can take.

Instead, GW2 has taken the philosophy that classes are balanced around their versatility, preforming different roles and having different abilities that makes each class unique to themselves. The warrior is the “flip out and kill stuff” class. You whip out your greatsword, then you kill stuff with it. Every other class than that is much more complicated, having lower damage and lower durability (arguably) in order to accomplish much different feats.

For example, I’m using a zerker thief in my dungeon runs as of late. With 11K HP 2K armor, and less damage than a warrior, you’d be left wondering why anyone would bring a thief. But then I do some rally cool stuff on my thief:

A)Use Black Powder and Smoke Screen to permanently blind veteran mobs, letting the whole team fight them without fear of taking damage. 5 zerkers for the win.
B)Use scorpion wire to pull one selective enemy out from a dangerous group, and quickly DPS it down so we don’t have to fight the boss with 2 champions next to him.
C)Use Shadow Refuge to stealth a player while they are down and heal them, or stealth the group to escape from an encounter, or heal the group, or use it to leech life for the group, or use it to bypass troublesome areas for the group.
D) Use Dagger Storm to take the initial attack and reflect all projectiles back at the enemy, or use Smoke Screen to block projectiles.
E) Use the shortbow to spam AoE weakness on enemies, or spam blast finishers on any combo fielntlyd quickly and easily.
F)Use shortbow to dodge attacks, letting me permanently tank any high ranged damage with good timing.
G)Use bountiful theft or Lacerwhatever strike to constantly strip away dangerous boons fro my enemy and give t hem to myself.
H)Apply a massive amount of bleeds in an AoE with Caltrops and Death Blossom.
I)Use backstab to do higher single target damage against an enemy than what a warrior can do.

And the list just goes on and on. There are a whole lot of things that a thief can do that a warrior doesn’t do, and these things are why you’d want to bring a thief along. As it happens, this is true with pretty much every class in the game.

The game itself isn’t too hard, so you can use nearly any class composition you want and still make it through, so long as your team is competent. The only place this might not be the case is in high level fractals.

Nice. You only got hit for 6K. On builds without toughness I’ve been hit for 11K. That’s a 5K difference there.

Anyway, all of your complaints are meta specific. People are running a ton of condition cleanses because the recent buff to necromancers has made it so conditions were EVERYWHERE! There were literally dozens of complaints in separate threads that condition damage was too high, with people whining about how no matter how many cleanses they use, their conditions get reapplied instantly and they die just so fast from them. The rest of the more rational community has collectively said “learn to play” and they have: now players run a lot of condition cleanses, and that way they can beat the condition classes.

I also notice you play a thief. They are a distant #4 as far as condition classes go. Thieves can apply some poison and bleeds, with a few spots of weakness and torment, but that is about it. The best two condition classes (engineer and necromancer) work by applying so many conditions that opponents can’t cleanse them off. Blind, Chill, Poison, Bleed, Burn, Cripple, Weakness, Vulnerability, Confusion, Torment, all at the same time. This overwhelms player cleanses, letting them do steady damage despite people spamming cleanse.

Weakness itself is heavily RNG based. 50% chance to do 50% less damage means that some fights, it’ll never work. Other fights, it’ll cut down direct damage by half nearly the whole time. Using a necromancer in WvW myself with Weakening Shroud, I can confirm that Weakness has saved my rear multiple times, turning half the attacks my opponents dish out into feeble flailing.

But regardless, I will have to stress this greatly: Learn to play. The fact is that 100blades can only do a ton of damage if you just stand inside of those blades and take them to the face. If you dodge them, if you stun break out of their stun, if you counter-control them, if you keep your distance, if you pop in stealth, that whole 100 blades attack will miss. People figured this out a month after release.

The interesting thing is that power creep hasn’t leaked into the game. The top DPS from launch has been decreased greatly, with things such as the haste nerf, repeated damage nerfs, cooldowns on might and power building traits, and sometimes the flat out removal of the highest damaging techniques. The big difference here is that, as players have learned to play the game, they have become more comfortable running berserker gear, which does more damage. This means that while they do more damage themselves, they also take a lot of damage, and because of this it looks like power has crept into the game. The opposite is true, actually: for awhile the bunker meta was so strong in tPVP that Arenanet had to implement a counter-measure against boons to make it so you could even kill bunker Ele/Guard/Engi.

In all honesty, I can’t find much truth in your post. It all just looks like short-sighted QQ. Learn to play and increase your perception a bit, and maybe you’ll see things pay off. If someone makes a “tanky zerker”, pick apart what they’ve done to make it so a pure DPS build is durable, and learn from that.

I think there is several things that needs to be done with the pistol auto attack.

#1: Make it so the AoE explosion causes bleeds to things other than their target.
#2: Increase the bleed duration at base from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.

…I guess that is only a couple, but that will make pistols a lot better.