Guild Wars 2

@Ascii
Having the traits scale with HP doesn’t require the base heal to be lowered to compensate. You have suggested it to go up to 150% of its current value with high enough healing power. Keeping the base heal the same isn’t in contrast with that. It just means that it won’t scale as much with HP (e.g. it can scale from ~100% at ~150 HP to ~150% at ~1200 HP). This will still be a good enough boost for healing power builds.

With 5 unique conditions on a target (which is rare to maintain with a necro), the scepter #3 gives you 10 life force (11 with gluttony). With the update, it gives you 15 life force (16.5 with gluttony). The damage is ridiculous considering that a condition necro, doesn’t have much power.
In the end, this lackluster skill really needs more change than that to become even slightly useful.
I would have liked a decrease in recharge (to probably 8 seconds) along with the life force boost.

So, unless you’re playing along a condition mesmer or engineer (who can inflict more unique conditions) or using corrupt boon (which is sadly nerfed in the upcoming patch), this skill is not gonna generate much life force for you.

I think the weapon set that is really lackluster in this regard is Scepter+Dagger (offhand). Scepter is the worst life force generator in my opinion and I don’t think the 2% per condition -> 3% per condition is going to matter much. However, I need to see it in practice after the patch.

I go with full Nightmare but runes of the Undead, Necromancer and Grenth are also good options (grenth for heavy chill builds).

Is this a bug or is it intentional? I got both Dragon Ball achievements and neither is counting toward my Dragon Bash Experience achievement.
Why would they do this? I’m stuck getting my 8th achievement.

A build/class/playstyle doesn’t need to be totally unbeatable to be overpowered. If there’s a build that doesn’t sacrifice enough for its huge gains, or is just way too simple (i.e. cheap) to pull out, is considered OP. If a build’s weaknesses don’t match up with their strengths, the build is OP.
Mesmers, at their current state are exactly that. Of course, it’s natural for the mesmer community to be defensive about it.
Remeber being OP is not equal to being god mode!

It won’t make this ability OP, on the contrary, I don’t think such a change is even needed cause the trait already serves its purpose as it is and 5 seconds is quite a long time to stay in death shroud during a fight (unless you’re buying time for your heal to recharge).
I personally think this trait is already in a good position, and probably the only reason it’s not used very often is because it has to compete for the staff or minion traits.

This trait is pretty much our only reliable defense against Mesmer’s illusionary leap+swap+blurred frenzy chain.

I would assume they would make this skill identical to its above-ground counterpart as this would have the same functionality underwater as well.

I don’t see any justification for nerfing this skill. Necros were meant to be able to control boons. This skill was our bunker breaker, it was one of the few skills we had that made us unique in tournaments. Limiting it this way, makes our effectiveness in this role to do a nose dive.
I’m afraid they did to this skill, what they did to corrosive poison cloud.
With all the boosts we got, this nerf makes the entire patch bitter for me.

Oh and by the way, something being “insanely powerful under ideal circumstances” can’t be called OP.

Reducing the base heal of vampiric traits will make them totally useless for non-healing power builds.

Mesmers aren’t OP, they are cheap!
lol troll!

Making vampiric traits scale with healing power, is a double-edged sword. It will require the base healing of vampirics to be reduced and made to scale to higher amounts with a high enough healing power.
This pretty much forces vampiric necromancers to spec in healing power and take healing power gear.

If they keep the base heal and improve the healing just slightly (very slightly) with healing power, it would not be a bad idea though. It won’t make it too powerful and will give the healing power necro builds, something to be happy about.

What’s funny is that I used to run staff without greater marks for the first 6 months of the game’s release (I have played necro since beta) and didn’t feel that much of a problem with it, but ever since I started using the greater marks, I could never go back to not using it. Staff without greater marks, is half a staff!

The strength of this skill really depends on how much torment it puts on the enemy, for how long, and how long its recharge is.
2 torments, while moving is equal to 3 bleeds. There’s no way for just a few stacks of torment to make a person stay in place and get immobilized instead of running away. Unless the person gets around 8+ stacks of torment during the full channeling of the skill, it’s not gonna deter anyone.
I’m more interested in the AoE immobilize effect however.

Memsers can do that, but guess what, Necro fear builds tend to have that ability too. Wait for mesmers to get their interrupt buffs the next patch, and then come and complain! You’ll hate to face them.

Yes, supposedly solving life force gain does not fix the problems in the blood magic line. However, Vampiric Rituals is indirectly affected by the reduced recharge on wells. It’s still a bit underwhelming though.

Negating this wall’s effects is way easier than line of warding in pvp. You can simply just dodge through it.
I believe it’s gonna be way better than line of warding in pve though, the duration is almost twice as much as line of warding and mobs don’t know how to dodge through a wall

Spectral Armor and Walk effect only last for a few seconds (in or out of DS), won’t bypass the LF decay and certainly won’t replenish your life force enough to compensate heavy incoming damage.
How you guys equal that change to perma DS, is really beyond me!

I don’t understand all the hype there is about a possible perma stability necromancer build. You guys really think that such a thing didn’t occur to the developers or they did nothing about it? What’s there to say that they haven’t given some internal cooldown for FitG (if there’s not one there already). Weakening Shroud doesn’t say about any cooldown but it has a 15second cooldown. I guess (as it would be logical) that FitG will have something of a 9 or 10 seconds internal cooldown as well (or if it doesn’t they will give it one soon after they realize lol)

Yes, staff marks are worthless without the Death Magic II trait. What they should do, as others have suggested, is to make the greater marks radius (just the radius) the default for staff and change the Staff Mastery to make marks unblockable and reduced recharge.
Currently, staff without death magic II is absolutely worthless.

One problem though, is that staff, as it is, is the most commonly used necromancer weapon in structured pvp and WvW, and I guess if they give it such a buff, it will be even more of a must.

Azraeel.1238:

You guys complain way too much!!!!!

If this is true, they gave you almost everything they promised. More damage, More mobility, and staying in fight longer. You didn’t get ways to escape, but they never promised that!

In fact, they did give us a slightly better way to escape melee damage with Dark Binding (DS #5)

DS gets a fifth skill, they’ve tried to buff life force gain of various weapons, although I don’t think the one on scepter is going to be much at all (just 2% per condi to 3%), with the nerf to corrupt boon, we now get even less unique conditions to use scepter #3 on.
But I agree, Burning in Spite and Banshee’s Wail on Curses (has been so since the beginning) are pretty stupid.

Some of the changes are interesting, although I expected to see more changes similar to Spectral Wall. Most of the blood magic majors are still as useless as they used to be.

These buffs aren’t any better than the buffs other classes are getting.

What I hate is the nerf to Corrupt Boon (up to 5 boons removed) which depends though partly on what type of boons does it prioritize. If stability and vigor are covered by other boons and are not prioritized, the skill is going to have a nose dive in usefulness.

All that hype with the burning and we get it as a grandmaster Spite trait?!!! Only useful for hybrid builds.

DS in its current state would have been good, if we had better life force generation, but it takes a long time to build life force and it can be depleted in matter of seconds.

As far as I remember, necromancers were pretty happy after the update which improved minions (bug fixes mostly) and the axe and focus. The joy didn’t last very long though.
I certainly expect something much bigger than that this time cause a few bug fixes won’t cut it any more. I think all classes will get some major buffs and if the necromancer is to stay in line with the rest, the update to them should be grand.

Spectral Grasp has been getting some cool buffs through the last couple of patches. The life force you gain, the pull distance fix, etc. Similar to Spectral Walk, this skill is a multi-purpose skill with several functions: pull, chill and life force gain which makes it an interesting tool.
In tournaments, I use it most often in forest and temple maps but the reason this skill isn’t very popular is because there are other utilities that the necro needs much more desperately than Spectral Grasp in tournaments. The other problem with this skill is that it’s very hard to hit.

What the necromancer needs the most is the ability to be a real attrition class. We need some hard defense other than reliance on a fast depleting life force and the useless high health. Currently, in tournaments, necromancers are a favorite focus fire target due to their defensive inability.
A boost to weakness and more reliable ways for necro to apply this condition can go a long way.

Here’s a sample of what will be updated:

Necro:
- New Death Magic grandmaster trait: “Don ’t just stand there! Do something!”: Your minions will stop just walking around and looking pretty and actually try attacking your enemies. (50 second cooldown)

Mesmer:
- Your illusion’s response time has been improved to 0.0000000001 second.

I don’t have too much problem facing engineers in general when I’m using my bunker-breaker conditionmancer. It’s the AR variation that gives me trouble.

I don’t know how high you rank in the leaderboards Brannidus but you fail by suggesting lich form on a “pure” conditionmancer.
Engineers are the only class with two downed state hard CC and the necromancer is the class with little access to stability for downing foes (except for the FitG and plague exploit). Your so-called “extremely long cooldown on #3”, Maketso, is as long as the necromancer’s #3 which, through actual practice and not theoretical babble, has quite a normal cooldown. The chance of an engineer managing to cast #3 on a necro without stability is roughly 50/50 depending on various factors.
But have you read my post fully, you would have realized that’s not my immediate issue. It’s elixir R (which usually takes effect before he even needs #3) and much more important than that, Automated Response. So far, thanks for dodging the actual issue and for the useless comments.

There’s one particular suggestion here that I like from Dadnir and Myrmidian:

Oh and a last thing, flesh golem active skill on a down player bump him out of elixir R heal zone.

I usually already have my golem’s charge used in the fight (for control lock as well as depriving the AR engineer the time he needs to remove his conditions), but that’s surely something I’m going to consider next time I face an engineer with elixir R.

@ Galandor:
Although my title is a bit misleading, I think I made it clear in my post that I’m not calling anything “OP”. Whether AR or Elixir R are OP or not is not mine to decide although I would still argue against “perfect” counters which applies to your scenario.
Besides, I trust you have the ability to distinguish between “amazing downed skill set” (my wording) and “best downed skills in the game” (your interpretation).

Ok, I’d argue that the best and most viable necromancer build in tournaments is the conditionmancer (and its varieties). Some might not agree with me, but that’s what I believe.
However, this is not what I want to talk about, yeah, forget what I said.

As much as my post might give you guys the impression, this is not my attempt to call for nerfs or complain (if I wanted to do that I’d be in the engineer forum not here). I’m here to vent my frustration with engineers running Automated Response and Elixir R and search for a solution.
Automated Response makes engineers completely immune to conditions under 25% health. Elixir R makes the engineer’s already amazing downed skill set, even more amazing by allowing them to rez themselves.
When I’m running a condition build with rabid, using scepter/dagger and staff, I have pretty much close to no raw damage and almost all of my control mechanics come in the form of conditions. I fight the engi, he goes below 25% health and becomes immune to everything I throw at him and the laughable raw damage left to me is not enough to kill him. At this point, the engineer doesn’t even try to heal himself cause he’s practically immune to a conditionmancer.
If by any chance, the engineer fails to survive my condition/control lock on him and fails to remove the conditions already on him at 25% health (something any half-decent engineer can do because they have enough in their disposal for that), he will die… but it’s not over cause he has a pull and an aoe knockback… but that’s not a problem… he has elixir R to rez himself, wipe the dust off his clothes, stretch a bit and start over. The only thing I can do against such an engineer solo, is to just grin, wave and run away.
At least that’s been my sad experience against them. I would like to hear the opinion of other necromancers and their tactical advice when I face something like that as a pure conditionmancer.

TL&DR: As an experienced necromancer, I am seeking advice on how best to tactically face an engineer running Automated Response and Elixir R as a pure conditionmancer.

My problem is more with the rate of life force gain in sPvP rather than its degen.

Yes! Nerf Engineers please! After you nerfed the elementalists, the rangers, the guardians, the mesmers and the thieves!

It’s not the classes that need to be buffed or nerfed, it’s certain builds.

You can keep regeneration on you and your nearby allies almost constantly with the staff. Mark of Blood is too good a skill for regeneration to pass.
However, the idea of your build would work or not depending on what you actually want to do with it.
If you want to be a back-liner in pve that is tasked at healing the party and dishing out condition damage at the same time, then the shaman set (vit/healing/cond) can work like a charm. Most mobs and bosses won’t target you cause of your extremely high health and yet low toughness.
However, if you want to use this as a tanking build, it will fail not only for the previous reason, but also because a high health pool doesn’t necessarily make you tanky as you will have a harder time replenishing that health (even with your high healing power) since you also don’t have very high toughness. A high health pool, in combination with DS though can really help you survive the “oh kitten” moments but not a long fight of attrition if you’re the one being targeted.
The shaman set can also work relatively well for minion masters both because of the current aggro mechanism and because you can keep your minions alive longer.
As for a choice of runes, I’d say if you’re getting a healing build, then I don’t think runes of undead would be the best choice. Why not go all they way and pick a healing power rune instead. I could recommend Dwayna or Monk (monk is from the AC dungeon) but you can go with something else in that category.

Ruufio.1496:

According to the class balance philosophies, Necromancers should be the best for disabling movement speed…

I don’t remember the exact words in the philosophy statement regarding the necro but what I remember is that it hardly ever said that necros are “best” in anything. It was all just necros can do this and can do that, some of which were even wrong (necro’s can’t combine condition and raw damage very good for example).

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Reaper’s Protection in particular is hilarious if you have terror. What he thinks is going to be his big burst moment instead gets him hurt heavily (1200/second for 3 seconds is not difficult to achieve) and resets the range advantage that you want.

What’s funny is that I actually saw a thread in the thief forums once that was trying to report a bug on how the thief got feared himself when he used skull fear! I’m not making fun of that cause I might have made the same mistake if I was a thief and didn’t know about reaper’s protection, but it shows how frustrating this can be to a thief.

Shemsu.8721:

Guess What? ALL pvp in this game is focused on keeping points, both spvp tpvp and WvWvW are all about capturing and holding points. So all this QQ is about a mechanic that is terrible for the SOLE focus all pvp goals in the game.

You can’t be any more wrong.
WvW is about capturing and holding “points”? lol? Are you trolling? You compare capturing keeps and areas of interest to capturing points in tournaments?
Also, sPvP is not about capturing points much but about massing up glory for yourself, at least with the current pointing system.
The only pvp in the game that is focused purely on keeping and holding capture points is tournament.
You don’t realize how stupid you sounded when you said that.\

Avariz.8241:

This thread is so long. I can not properly refere to earlier points brought up. So I just say replace the thief stealth invisibility with degree of transparance similar to the mesner’s phantasmal. The degree of transparance should be trade off from speed, quickness, and burst. For example higher the speed, quickness, and burst rating a thief has lower the transparance and higher the visibility. IE thieves should not be 100% invisible. If they are 100% invisible then they should have trade-off of minium speed, quickness, and burst. Of cause the trade off point could be a fixed constant on a sliding scale or a moving point along the sliding scale depending on what the thief’s action is at the time.

I disagree. Stealth is fine as a mechanic as it is (except for the culling issue which has to be fixed). But it should cost more. The down time between cloaks should be longer. It should remain a viable option for the thief but they should not be able to use it as often as now.

I would have agreed with the OP before they fixed the illusions being able to attack from behind obstacles, but not so much now (I’m a necromancer too).
Mesmers are powerful, there’s no denying that but they are not unbeatable. If you find yourself in a chaotic fight and you see a mesmer, you must remember that you’re fighting them where they are the strongest (mesmer clones are all about creating chaos and an already chaotic fight is in their favor). But I personally have had little problem dealing with most mesmers as a necromancer.

OP, I won’t tell you to L2P (I hate that stupid over-abused phrase), but if you want to know how to beat a mesmer that spams clones, I suggest you take one and do some practice with the mesmer. Get to know their skills and figure out the tricks they use and their weaknesses. After a short time playing one and against one, detecting the real mesmer among all his/her clones becomes a piece of cake.

frans.8092:

Burjis.3087:

Your facts are half complete. …

Perhaps you have your fact half complete? The thief that focusses on stealth and survival is not the thief that drains half of your life bubble in 2 seconds.

It surprises me that a thief player can give such a thoughtless response about their own profession (I am assuming you’re even a thief player). You only need 20 points in shadow arts for all the traits I talked about in my post. Unless you only run on 20 trait points, you can do that.
But nice try lol

Woaden.9425:

Also, play paid tourneys in sPvP… notice all the thieves on the newb groups.. then notice the smaller amount in the great groups.

Yes, that is very true. And guess what? It’s because tournaments are focused on keeping points and stealth doesn’t work for that.
Everywhere stealth is useful, the thief shows as overpowered. Everywhere stealth is useless, the thief sucks in that mode. That’s why I say stealth is the thief’s problem. If the thief for example had more evades and party support and less stealths, it would have been good enough for tournaments as well.

Whatever you do, don’t go full on the same armor. Mixing and matching the sets makes you look more unique. I for instance use arah armor on my male human necromancer except for the head instead of which I use the dry bone hood. They match pretty nicely. I’ve also seen a sylvari female necromancer with the dry bone hood but with the rest of her armor being TA. It looked flowery but pretty unique and cool.

Yeah, although as you yourself stated in a previous post, speccing in spite on a condition build is a waste. The same points can be spent in death magic or soul reaping for more survivability, not to mention that reaper’s protection is a necessity in fear builds.

rylark.3418:

I dunno why people create fake “facts” so Anet nerfs thief, many times they’re just over reacting on 3 stealths, we can’t go back to stealth for 3sec. If you can’t do anything, that’s not because thieve’s OP. You can’t spam stealth, that’s impossible. That’s just QQ, not facts.

Your facts are half complete. Cloak and Dagger is in practice a 4 initiative skill in a stealth build (cause of the 2 you get back from trait). Stealth lasts 4 seconds with trait. You recover that initiative in less than 6 seconds (that’s without Patience). The thieves themselves don’t notice it, but the victim can’t see the thief immediately after they break stealth due to culling. So one actually only has roughly 2 seconds window to react to that not 3. This time is enough for the next cloak and dagger. But we haven’t considered the utilities and the healing skill yet have we? Not to mention that the thief really doesn’t require too much time to kill someone.
When a thief attacks from stealth, if their damage was dealt in a 2-3 seconds window, players would have been able to react, but then, a correctly built thief can drain half your health within less than 2 seconds after breaking stealth (which is usually started by an immobilize, chill or petrify). You might want to make us believe that this part requires too much skill, but I consider myself horrible at thief and even I can pull that out with a sub-optimal build.
Besides, I didn’t say the thief can go into stealth 100% of the times though, but the thief can effectively keep that up to 80% while actually dealing more than enough damage. That pretty much passes as spamming to me. Now even 50% uptime on something like this is overpowered and gimmicky in my book for the reasons I’ve already stated in my previous posts.
A thief abusing stealth requires much less skill, attention and luck to kill someone than the person trying to defend against it.

I actually don’t go Nightmare + Lyssa. I go full Nightmare as I like the final 5% chance to fear on hit (which is also AoE).

Also, for the combination, I would take 20% to all durations over the 10% extra to just bleed as it offers me a much more versatile play style with increased CC condition durations than the extra damage I receive from the bleed’s last tick.
But yes, if getting the last tick on bleed is important, lyssa + krait + afflicted + rare veggie pizza would be better. But to me, this game is not just about pure damage.

Also, the reason I use runes of nightmare in sPvP is to maximize the distance I can push my targets away (from points mainly) which makes your 4 nightmare + 2 lyssa suggestion somewhat more compelling than pure nightmare. You can’t get the extra tick from neither bleeds nor terror anyway.

Even though the idea of having different death shroud skills were circulating around even before the game was released, it never affected Anet’s decisions. On a personal note though, I think it’s a very cool idea.

Giving necromancers a 5th death shroud skill that varies depending on the currently equipped weapon (you can already change weapons in DS) is a nice idea.

An alternative to the idea can be to just create variations for life blast and plague blast depending on the weapon. They can even have different names. They should increase the cast time of the improved blast skills probably by 100% to compensate.

Staff: Transfers a condition to the enemy.
Scepter: Causes bleeding with each hit.
Axe: Deal damage in an area around the target.
Dagger: Deals high single target damage.
Spear: Self centered AoE damage which replenishes a very small amount of life force (doesn’t transfer conditions)
Trident: Ranged AoE that transfers one condition to the enemies it hits.

This would also probably require some changes to the related traits:
Unyielding Blast: Death Shroud Blast skills become unblockable and their cast time is reduced by 20%.
Reaper’s Might: Death Shroud Blast skills grant two stacks of might for 15 seconds.

This change would be much more simple to implement than introducing a whole new skill or completely different death shroud skill sets but at the same time makes death shroud much more interesting, would complement the rest of your build better and turns a relatively boring and useless skill into an interesting one.

I am pretty confident that Anet won’t make such changes but it’s alright to dream eh?

Wait… what?!! Necro is an attrition class? This is just a laughable myth preached by Anet.
They are better at attrition than maybe… warrior and ranger!!! Yay!

Assuming you’re fighting a thief of your same skill level.
Tell me. How many dodges can you do in a fight? No matter what, the thief is almost always at your face. But that’s not the problem really. It’s quite possible to kite a thief enough to tire him out. At the end, a fight against such a thief ends depending on which one of you have made the least mistakes and have reacted better to eachother’s tricks.
But when the said thief is in stealth 80% of the time during the fight, what are you going to dodge? Air? Or maybe use some of that sixth sense of yours to guess when he’s going to attack? When I see a thief abusing stealth, it’s no longer a matter of what I might do wrong or what I should do. You can’t see anything to react to. In this situation, all you see yourself doing is spamming as many aoes as you can hoping that it might miraculously hit the thief. But then there comes cooldowns. Even if you give the fight twice the effort than the thief, you still have to rely on luck! Even if you win, it’s not been because you were better, it was because you got lucky. Such a fight is not fair, is not right nor is it fun (maybe only to the thief fans). Even if you win, you don’t feel you had a good fight.
The problem is not the thief’s damage and teleports. It’s the fact that they can abuse stealth which is the clear reason why the thief’s effectiveness varies so much between pve and pvp.
Of course, even if you give a profession the “Win The Game” skill, there will be fans of that profession that still think: It’s not OP, you just need to learn how to counter it and that this is an “L2P” issue!

Ironically, plague form (or lich form) can be countered very nicely with a necromancer. I always love it when someone pops plague form only to be corrupt booned by me

Plague form is best when you’re playing as a bunker support. Blinding people on a point for 20 seconds is very good and can help your bunker (primarily guardian) recover. If you’re attacking a bunker along with some allies, pop it, spam the 3rd skill. Weakness and poison really devastates bunkers that rely on dodge and healing and then leaves them more vulnerable for your allies to take down.

But I disagree with Talentless. This skill is hardly OP (not even close) and conditions aren’t its only counter. Any smart player knows to just avoid melee and kill the necro from ranged. After all, you can hardly ever kill anybody with plague form itself. It’s just something you can use to buy your team some time in addition to what I explained above.

Unfortunately the order of whisper’s armor is rare. The best place to get a rabid exotic set is TA. What’s amazing about it is that they come with Nightmare runes
I however went with Arah armor set (except for the head) and got the runes separately from TA.

As a necro, I can solo some champion mobs as well. It takes a long time but it’s doable.
Necro is a very good class for normal pve (personal story, events, solo exploring, etc.)

If I was a developer, I wouldn’t have changed Death Shroud at all (at least not the ground one). I love death shroud and it has been very useful to me as a class mechanic.
Some tweaks might be nice but to overhaul the whole thing is a no no for me.
I would however change a lot of other stuff about the necromancer, but to stay on-topic, here are some related stuff that I would like:
1. I’d increase all life force gain from skills and decrease life force gain from kills to make it easier to build up life force in pvp and boss battles and harder and more challenging in regular pve. It sounds ridiculous to me that you can 1 shot a rabit and get 10% life force (11% with gluttony) and yet get so little from a skill like feast of corruption.
2. I’d make Foot In The Grave to give you 5 seconds of stability instead of 3.