I believe, the problem with the thief isn’t its damage, it’s not its immobilizing affects or their ability to move quickly throughout a fight with their shadow steps and such, but it’s their stealth.
Stealth in my opinion would have been fine if it was a powerful but rare ability. However, that’s not the case with the thief. Right now, other than the horrible players (that are common for any thought-to-be-op classes in any game), during most of my fights against a good thief I can only see them like 25% of the times. All the time I have to do guess work, throw around aoes and just hope that it might hit the almost-perma invisible thief which is tremendously helped by the stupid culling which increases their effective stealth duration. They just stealth, hit you once or twice and before you can even target them, they’re back into stealth.
There has been many times that a thief coming out of stealth was able to do a backstab and two heartseekers before I could even see them on the screen (I just try to figure it out from the waving dagger effects to know who or where they are hitting).
All vampiric traits (vampiric, vampiric precision, vampiric master, vampiric rituals) health gain should be affected by healing power and damage affected by power and there… half of the problem is solved.
Also bloodthirst should affect all forms of life siphon.
Transfusion and Deathly Invigoration should also get some love.
The level at which necromancers can heal is currently laughable compared to most other classes.
But I understand Anet’s cautious approach toward this as it can easily turn into something overpowered.
Let’s not confuse “survivability” with the ability to “escape”. Necromancers have good survivability but they aren’t very good at escaping fights when it heats up.
Necromancers could use some additional defensive abilities which could go well with what is already established with the class. For example, I seriously don’t understand why Spectral Armor is left as it is. It could be given stability or vigor or something that the necro is really lacking in a skill that is no longer used to any good extent. There are other skills and traits that require some love, but all in all, necro is not bad on the defensive side of the spectrum.
I’ve tested this in sPvP before and it’s apparent to me that rune of necromancer increases fear duration more than rune of nightmare. But due to the nature of my test, I can not determine the numbers but I’m inclined to believe that if the rune of nightmare gives +20% increase, then rune of necromancer probably gives more than 20% fear duration. Since I don’t want to revive that thread, I’ll post the two screenshots here (this is new but everytime I’ve tested this, the results were the same). On the left picture, there’s the npc in the HotM that I feared with my staff with full rune of necromancer set. On the right is the same npc being feared from the same angle with full nightmare set.
If rune of nightmare is 20%, then you won’t need rare veggie pizzas and the superior veggie pizzas would be enough which means you don’t have to waste your money on the former (unless you’re a min maxer).
I’m off to test this in pve :p
Edit: So I tested this in pve with just the superior veggie pizzas and it’s correct. You get at least 100% fear duration increase with Master of Terror, Superior Veggie Pizzas and Runes of Nightmare cause my 1 second fears ticked twice (that means they are at least 2 seconds now) even without using Rare Veggie Pizzas and just using the lower variation.
Nemesis, I am really happy to see this build. I’ve been using something quite similar to what you’re presenting here for a long time, long before the boost to terror, because it’s a very annoying build for the opponents. Of course, the new terror makes it much better.
However, I go with a different set of runes:
Superior Rune of the Nightmare
They give you 10% condition duration, but I use the Rare Veggie Pizza as food (40% condition duration, +70 Condition Damage). There you can get the additional 50% duration you need. But what is nice about the runes of nightmare is that it gives you an additional random fear (5% chance to cause fear when hit). This fear is AoE and 1 sec (2 sec with this build).
Also, the superiority of nightmare rune as compared to the rune of necromancer is that it increases the duration of all your conditions not just fear and if you use the top tier pizza, you won’t need the additional 10%.
This rune is a bit harder to get than the others as they only drop in TA or can be purchased with TA tokens.
All in all, I give a big thumbs up to this thread as the fearomancer (as I call it) is probably one of the strongest pvp builds for the necromancer in my opinion.
Some weapons have very little life force build up. Scepter combined with Dagger OH which are the bread and butter of condition builds have very little life force build up.
I have always said that necros need more life force build up through their skills and less through enemy deaths. That will make it a bit more balanced. Even if you kill a 1 shot critter, you get 10 life force (11 with gluttony) but when you are in a long attrition fight, your life force pool is much harder to fill. This sounds very ironic for an “attrition” class.
There are relatively a good number of necros in spvp and free tournaments. I don’t play paid tournaments so I can’t tell.
But I have to object with your “as necros, thieves are easy bait” phrase. Yeah, if you are both 1v1 coming at eachother in open space with full health, then yeah, you can beat the thief easy, but wait… good thieves don’t do that. You can hardly see them coming. You are already in a fight or low health from another fight, then they jump at you in stealth, stealth away, jump at you again, rinse and repeat until you’re dead. It’s not impossible to deal with that situation, but it’s hard with necromancers. So, “easy bait” is a bit too much.
Out of my personal experience, having enough life force before a fight begins seems to be a very important factor on the outcome of the fight. It’s hard to beat a necromancer 1v1 if the necro sees the enemy coming and is already at full life force, but seeing as how slow you can generate life force in spvp, that’s a big if!
I use a condition build in fractals (mostly with pugs) and it’s been relatively good and has enough survivability up to my current fractal level (26). I don’t know about higher levels.
I like your decision to use death shroud for survivability as it has been a life saver for me in more than one occasion.
I haven’t tried high crit chance/crit damage (which I believe your build essentially is) in pve so I can’t tell you how it will work. But I guess there’s one way to find out: Try it.
High toughness affects aggro. It doesn’t cause the “why does he only targets me” type of thing. Aggro has a much more complicated formula than toughness and health alone but I personally have indeed noticed that bosses tend to target me more often when I’m running in a toughness gear than with a health gear.
Mark of Blood along with Mark of Evasion, can give your party (usually frontlines as they are the ones close to a mob) constant regeneration. I believe with enough healing power, those can heal over 300 a tick. Your well of blood also heals for a lot in total.
All this put together, don’t expect your support skills to be much appreciated by the party as the current mindset of players leans more toward guardian for support and for good reason. People even prefer banner warriors over necromancers in their group.
If you think you can change that mindset, you’ll have my respect
Unfortunately the necromancer currently doesn’t have the healing capabilities of some other classes at the moment. Anything with “vampiric” in its name is not affected by healing power. You can give your frontlines permanent regeneration, but that’s about it. Every other healing ability we have are lackluster at best.
I suggest you wait for a potential update to life stealing, otherwise, I’m afraid you’re not going to be satisfied.
If your fights usually drag on, high initial health pool doesn’t help as you are only as hard to kill as you can heal that life pool back. That’s the primary reason why a lot of people prefer toughness over vitality in pve.
However, in GW2 pve, generally, the more toughness you have the more likely you draw aggro and the more health you have, the less aggro you will build up.
In the end, it’s a choice of prefixes you can get. If you’re a power build, soldier set (both vit and tough) is the best imo. If you want a balance between power/condition and some survival, carrion (Condition damage, Power, Vitality) would be best. Otherwise, rabid (Condition, Toughness, Precision) is a good set for pure conditionmancers with enough survivability.
Yeah, now that’s correct
I’m working toward having something similar as an alternative PvE build. I have a full fledged condition gear set (after going through 3 full sets of various exotic gear combinations) and want to get a full soldier set like the one you have in this thread.
Have everything except the trinkets. The accessories and the amulet is gonna be the hardest part to get due to the need for badges of honor.
I’m not gonna tell you if necromancers are good or bad but from my understanding after playing it for so long, here’s what they can be good at in various areas:
Regular PvE: They are one of the best against huge number of mobs because of how their deaths can keep your LF pool up. They also have many movement increasing skills for mapping and jumping puzzles. And they are perfect at spreading conditions. Dungeons: They can be a good backline damage dealer class with conditions or a relatively good survivalist if built right. Hotjoin PvP: They are a fun class to play that’s all I can say about hot join. Necromancers can shine very well in big spvp zerg fights (not talking about WvW). Tournaments: Out of all the roles I’ve tried in tournaments , a bunker support (one who supports another bunker in the team) is the best the necromancer can pull out.
Important: They are not the best in any of the above roles, but they just can do them relatively well.
Here’s what the necromancer is sometimes falsely advertised as:
Defensive class: It can survive but so many other classes can do the defensive role better than the necromancer. You can only think of necromancer as a relatively durable support/damage class but not as a tank.
Attrition class: Total lie if you ask me. They can hope to be an attrition class but they are worse at this than Ele, Theif, Guardian and Mesmer. Yeah, you get the picture lol
Compared to the other long cooldown 25% HP skills of other classes, it is by far the least appealing. A little bit of minor AOE damage, a speed buff, and an AOE cripple can hardly compete with invulnerability, a free stealth, etc.
Don’t worry, almost everything the necro has is less appealing comparing to other classes. We aren’t supposed to have a good 25% hp trait, we have lots of health!
Buffed optional final HP and Armor: 31,242 HP 3143 Armor
No matter how much I theory craft, I can’t reach that. Can you show me a picture in which you’ve actually achieved 31,242 HP in an overflow (cause I want to assume that’s what you’ve accomplished without wvw bonuses)?
Royal Signet of Doric
Lost Seal of Usoku
Koss on Koss
Emerald Pendant
Invader’s Earrings
Sorrows Embrace/ Ascalonian Catacombs/ Invaders/ HotW gear
Invader Weapons (Or PTV Fractal Weapons if they come out )/ SE/hotw/AC weapons
All Crests of the Soldier x14 (weapons, armor, accessories)
Adding all the stats on the stuff you posted, gives you 959 base power, 667 base toughness and vitality and only x11 slots for Crests (with dual weapons). Remember, ascended gear (2 rings and 1 back item) don’t have free slots for crests.
So adding that 667 base vitality to 11×14 from crests, that’s 821. 20 points in Blood Magic = 200 vit which brings the sum up to 1021.
2. Loaf of Omnomberry Bread: +100 vitality, +70 toughness, +10 Experience from kills
Now if you use a 100vit food, it’s gonna be a total of 1121 vitality (I don’t know how you managed 1187). So, 18,372 base HP + 11,210 from vit = 29,582 total HP with food.
Of course, if you’re also adding the Robust WvW bonus, that’s gonna be 1%-10% more hp but you haven’t specified that in your post.
The more I’m thinking about it, the more I like the idea of jagged horrors actually just blowing up. Probably doing aoe bleed when they blow up.
Anet really has to consider putting this idea to the test.
I don’t hate Reanimator itself at all.
Just the fact that we are the only class that can’t use its toughness trait line in the fight against Giganticus Lupicus.
Solution? Very simple: Prevent Risen Grubs from summoning on Jagged Horrors in the same way that they don’t spawn on mesmer illusions.
Necro needs higher life force build up through skills and lower life force build up through enemy deaths.
Their life steals require to scale better with healing power.
These changes can dramatically improve a necromancer’s attrition ability in pvp.
And the utility skill Spectral Armor should give them stability for a short time. That can solve many of the necromancer’s defense problems.
Condition damage is pretty good in wvw in small group fights. But you surely can’t expect a zerg of 20 people most of whom have aoe condition removals to not affect your conditions.
Right now, Epidemic is in a very good place and shape because of the sheer zerg condition removals in wvw. If they nerf those condition removals, you can also expect another nerf to Epidemic right after it (which I would hate) because every necro and their moms will start abusing it in zerg fights.
Why do you guys think they will nerf Wells and Marks? Just because they said “some” AoE builds are too strong for the opportunity cost?
How did you just translate that to “We’re gonna nerf every working aoe skill to ultimate uselessness”?
Players will proceed to flood this board with complaints because Anet didn’t devote an entire balancing patch to Necros.
The problem is not with the fact that we didn’t get patched. The problem is that the changes we keep seeing to the necromancer aren’t much in line with the actual problems of this class.
But the real culprit is the philosophy statement. Most of what I saw in that philosophy can be applied to most other classes as well. People would have complained less about the balancing process but honestly, they lost hope when they saw such a bleak (and mostly false) look at the necromancer from that philosophy statement.
And no, I’m not gonna leave the game. Not gonna leave necromancer either. Never expected Anet to just wave their wand and make everything perfectly balanced in one patch. But at least we can joke about it.
Update to Necromancer Philosophy:
Necromancers have way too much health and their DS is so OP even though nobody knows how to use it well. They have the ability to attack. They can walk around and can even jump. They have the ability to dodge too. Many of their weapon skills can deal damage and even though they don’t have many ways to protect themselves but they have really cool looking minions that start to engage the enemy when the battle is over.
List of necromancer changes:
- Increased the recharge on Wail of Doom to 60 seconds and reduced the daze to 1 second.
- Increased the AoE size of Crimson Tide to solve the problem of kraits getting stuck in walls underwater.
- Moved the Reanimator minor trait to Grandmaster and Replaced the Adept slot with a troll face.
- Changed the description of passive on Plague Signet to “Transfers conditions from nearby allies to yourself every time you yawn” to match the skill better.
- Spectral Armor utility skill now does absolutely nothing cause nobody takes it anyway. The trait remains intact.
- Changed the Passive speed increase on Signet of the Locust to 5% cause necromancers were having too much fun with it.
- Reduced the AoE radius of Corrosive Poison Cloud to 60.
- Removed all life steals from the game to stop people from complaining about it.
Total Stat Spread:
+2355 power
+2153 Toughness "
+2153 Vitality "
I don’t understand. How did you manage 2153 vitality? I try to add up the stats on the gear you posted but I can never get that high. Is that without boosts?
it’s not +2153 +916 base. Its 2153 total, and that’s with ALL the ascended pieces.
It still doesn’t add up. Tell me where I’m wrong please:
The following are for the minor stats (vitality or toughness):
Chest 72
Legs 48
Head 32
Shoulders 24
Gloves 24
Boots 24
Necklace 64
Ascended Rings 68×2
Accessory 40×2
Ascended Back 35
2x 1h weapons 64×2
The raw armor and weapons are: 667
Since your back and rings are ascended, you can’t upgrade them further, so you only have 11 more slots for Crest of Soldier:
11×14 = 154
Also, 200 points from your traits in Blood Magic, that’s a total of 1021, added with the 916 base, it will be 1937. I still can’t get that high.
I primarily use a Pact Quarterstaff skin (transmuted an exotic carrion staff to that skin).
Didn’t know about the Deathwish but I’m sure it’s gonna be expensive.
As for armor, what I always wanted to go for and eventually managed was an Arah armor set with the exception of the hood which is Shadow. Screenshot attached. You don’t need the boots or the shoulderguards to be Arah but then it’s best to have the shoulderguards for cutscenes and underwater as your hood just disappears.
Total Stat Spread:
+2355 power
+2153 Toughness "
+2153 Vitality "
I don’t understand. How did you manage 2153 vitality? I try to add up the stats on the gear you posted but I can never get that high. Is that without boosts?
I would not quit the game nor the necromancer regardless of any imbalance there might be with this class. I may end up playing other classes more often in sPvP though but Necro will remain my main at least in PvE.
[troll]
I however, have absolutely zero hope that they would ever drastically change anything about the class.
You guys should know better.
This is the same company that introduced a revamp to the dervish after ~3 years of its existence and never delivered the promised changes to the ever broken Paragon in GW1.
So if you guys are lucky, after a couple of years, you might see a revamp to this class, make it OP, then slowly nerf stuff enough to make the class underpowered again.
Or, if you are unlucky, you can just wait for GW3 which may just end up having a better necromancer!
Good luck!
[/troll]
The poison and weakness was 5s and 10s respectively. Now it only lasts 3s and 3s. This skill is now useless in both offence and defence.
lol, you speak as if this skill had any uses anywhere ever!
And you know, if this skill belonged to the mesmer, it would have probably also applied daze from time to time, maybe confusion too, and definitly wouldn’t have weakened yourself. But then, this skill belongs to the necromancer instead, so it will stay abysmal because the extra hp necromancer has apparently compensates everything!!
Even though I, as a necromancer player, loved the fact that Fear wasn’t affected by Defiance, but try to be fair guys.
Necros were never meant to be able to fear through every special ability of a boss.
It’s at the end of their Dec 14th balance thread where they talk about some of the things they have balanced or going to balance.
But as I said, they never said anything about Epidemic specifically. People just like to assume that Epidemic is one of the “low opportunity cost” and “too strong” AoE skills that Anet is worried about.
However I don’t mind if they limit epidemic to 5 targets like many other AoE spells if they fix other stuff about the necromancer.
And just because Anet said they are going to look into AoE skills, does it mean they will nerf Epidemic?!!
Seriously? That bad a reputation does Anet have with balance?
More and more i think their problem is that DS and such are inherently bunker-ish, but they want to eliminate bunkers as a viable build because it leads to static sPVP play where the focus will be on keeping the bunkers standing on the capture points.
So they try to do anything and everything to force us to move…
Yeah and that would have made sense if they actually did something about other bunker and insane healing attrition classes. How is it that after so long, Guardians are still THE bunker class and no matter what they change about them, they are very reluctant to do something to them as a whole? Why is it that many other classes can go through an attrition fight better than the necromancer? Not only does an elementalist or thief can survive better with an attrition build, they also deal more damage in that mode. And then Anet is only cautious about necromancers being able to bunker or having high sustainable health gain through the yet-broken life siphoning abilities.
If their philosophy was that, they would have already done something to prevent people from winning Forest by just defending only two points.
Stuff like that seem to only be considered overpowered if they are in the Necromancer’s arsenal.
Oh man. You said it all much better than I could ever have in regard to why necromancer’s attrition just fails.
It’s good to point out though that when talking about “rules and boundaries” or “philosophies” they don’t have to be currently true. It simply means that we can hope that in the future, necromancer will improve along those lines as I certainly don’t think the current state of the necromancer would live up to that.
One of the things that I really expected to see in the necromancer philosophies but couldn’t find was the necromancer’s ability to manage conditions relatively better than other classes. Mesmer though is a very dangerous and close runner up to this and I’m afraid some more neglects to the necromancer and some buffs to the mesmer would even take that away from us.
I read the patch notes right before going to work and I left house with a big sigh.
They decreased the health degen of the jagged horror while ironically, that wasn’t what people were complaining about.
They made defiance affect fear which was our only cool ability in boss fights (I know it used to be that way before as well).
They looked into vampiric, but all they could see was that it was wrongly triggered on allies (as if it even mattered with its insignificant health gain).
They buffed Gluttony from a completely bugged trait to an utterly weak one (it’s still an improvement lol).
They didn’t care enough to look into so many bugged or fail traits and instead, they increased or decreased some random numbers.
But what really made me sad was not the changes, but what I saw as their “rules and boundaries” with classes. I’m very disappointed that the current necromancer can hardly live up to what was claimed there and I’ve honestly seen other classes play those roles better.
Regeneration can go up to ~350 hp per second if you go big on healing power. I sometimes use a high healing build with wells which is pretty tough but I just laughed when I read that a build based on regeneration is considered OP and I’m still laughing. That build is very easy to counter. It’s inferior to guardian or even engineer defensive/healing builds. Trust me, I’ve seen eles doing that more effectively than necromancers.
Besides, what’s the point of staying alive if you can’t even keep your butt on a capture point because you don’t have stability cause you can’t waste 30 points on SR when you need boon duration and toughness (which are essential for regen builds).
Plain wrong, not even close to my build what you describe here. It doesn’t completly rely on regeneration it rather utilizes it very well.
Which part of that was “plain wrong” to you?
Of course no build would just sit and use regen alone cause that doesn’t work. You can’t show me a regen build that I haven’t seen before. The fact that you call your mysterious build OP and hint regeneration is laughable.
And you don’t show anything. Unless you show me videos of you defending points in tournaments against 3+ people in more than a couple of occasions, I won’t consider your build OP and even then, a video like that is something regular for guardian bunkers.
For now you can just excuse me for considering you delusional.
edit: or… you may just be a troll.
Regeneration can go up to ~350 hp per second if you go big on healing power. I sometimes use a high healing build with wells which is pretty tough but I just laughed when I read that a build based on regeneration is considered OP and I’m still laughing. That build is very easy to counter. It’s inferior to guardian or even engineer defensive/healing builds. Trust me, I’ve seen eles doing that more effectively than necromancers.
Besides, what’s the point of staying alive if you can’t even keep your butt on a capture point because you don’t have stability cause you can’t waste 30 points on SR when you need boon duration and toughness (which are essential for regen builds).
The same thing happens to me from time to time in heavily crowded areas like Claw of Jormag or karma farming zergs.
The sound stops and instead you keep hearing something like a siren alarm (or beeping as some may call it). It continues on until I restart my game.
Being a necro nerd, I disagree with such a change to Consume Conditions as it’s fine as it is. I already only bother with Consume Conditions as it is, if it gets any better than that, you may as well just throw the other necro heals out of the window.
You can 1v1 almost any class with the right build. But each build you bring to pvp has its own counters. I learned that by playing the class I believed to be unbeatable and that’s the best way you can learn their weaknesses which then you will use to your advantage when you’re facing them.
My question to the OP however was to the claim that the bunker meta is moving from guardian to necromancer. I don’t necessarily go against something I can’t verify nor do I consider myself that great a player to reject something based on theory alone. If there’s a build you think would be great for point defense I’d like to try it as I personally haven’t been successful in making a satisfying build for that role.
Regardless of that, I think the reason why necromancers are looked down upon is because it usually takes more effort for a necromancer to play to its full potential than most other classes (even a mesmer). Again, I found that out by trying other classes. Necromancer in pvp is not beginner friendly.
Yeah, my post was aimed at the OP cause he believes that there’s a necro bunker build that if isn’t above the guardian, would be on par with it. I haven’t been able to find a good enough point defense necro build but if anybody can claim there’s a way for the necro to take that role effectively, I’m interested in finding out.
I’m interested in knowing what necromancer build can really bunker better than a guardian. I’ve experimented around for some necro point defense builds but I haven’t found one that I’m satisfied with yet. (if anyone can forward me a link or something I’d be grateful).
As for necromancers in PvE, I believe the only weakness of the necromancer is in zerg farming groups. It’s hard to tag many kills at times with our limited and often long-recharging aoe burst attacks. For mobs with higher health, this isn’t a problem as a good use of epidemic can make you tag all the mobs but it is hard to tag low health mobs in a zerg of 20+ players farming in the same area.
One of the weaknesses of the necromancer in spvp is their lack of reliable ability to push (or keep) the enemy out of capture points. This is crucial in spvp. a 1 second fear only manages to push someone standing in the middle of a capture point to the edge of the capture point which is not enough in most cases whereas most classes have some sort of knock back or throw or something that throws you way off the capture point.
Currently, it’s possible to turn doom into a 2 second fear but it requires you to ruin your build in other aspects.
I’m a henge player and wouldn’t mind some update to the pointing system but the suggestions in the OP sound more desperate than rational. It’s not acceptable specially for someone like me who isn’t available on US prime times.
WvW is a 24/7 battleground and making it act different in different time slots wouldn’t make sense.
I believe there’s already a system in the game that gives bonus to servers with a significantly lower population in WvW at any given time (last time I saw something like that was in the beta I believe so I can’t verify if it’s still in the game). If there has to be a dynamic element to score distribution, it should be based on the number of players available in WvW not on the time of day.
I have this problem too. I have lost my progress for unknown reasons (well, it’s not very unknown now that I’ve read this thread) on more than one occasion.
Why would I lose that progress if I log off from the game! That makes no sense.
