You also gotta remember that forum folk are the vocal minority
Necromancers, because of the theme, are incredibly popular by the masses – and only a few are truly bothered by the shortcommings of the profession because the game does not incentify to push yourself to 110% anyway
Despite all the sceptical jokes I make though, you should whisper me in game and ask about Warriors… Because oh man, despite it being a pick everywhere in the game… man… I got my complaints… Of course, it does not invalidate Necromancers being trash most of the times in “endgame” content \o/
Agree, but if you have alts the shortcomings become painfully obvious.
A couple of months ago I leveled to 80, and geared, an alt warrior. After two years of using a necro as main I wanted to see the difference with a more “meta” profession in PvE. The results were so depressing that my necro will never see a dungeon again.
I love my necro, and I’m still having fun using him for open world PvE. But the difference is so big that I can’t enjoy anymore using a necro in dungeons. Even my friends are bummed when they see that I’m bringing my necromancer in fractals because the warrior hasn’t enough AR yet.
As a necromancer, we probably receive the most harassment from thieves and mesmers, and arguably rangers.
As conditionmancer I’ve never had troubles with thieves. If you see a thief stealth place all your marks under your feet and wait. When they try to back stab you they get a condi bomb that cc, damages and trows them out of stealth.
Usually thieves are so over confident of their stealth that any AoE trap trows them off. The necromancer has wells and marks. On the engineer I’ve used successfully box of nails.
Probably you still won’t kill them (depends on how skilled they are), but it’s easy to scare them away. If you can place on them some long duration condition, you can follow the trail of damage pop-ups to where they are hiding and finish the job. Thieves have poor condi removal.
These are just ideas of how it could work of course. What are your guys’ thoughts? Should we sacrifice attrition for more active support power?
Feel free to post some thoughts.
What attrition?
^This.
+1
Cele engi is a real attrition build. The whole Blood Magic trait line pales in comparison of the regen given by the heal turret and the related tool belt skill. Weakness is a condition that allows you to literally facetank burst damage from power builds (it’s a dps loss of more than 25% for them). On my engi weakness has a shorter duration but it’s on an auto attack so it’s impossible to clear. On my necromancer weakness is available on 2 skills and a (bad) grand master trait with long cool downs, so it’s easily cleansed.
Just to clear up a lot of misconceptions in this thread.
Necros do decent dps in PVE, not great, but not terrible and in general close to warrior dps(thief and ele do way way more than warriors).
For casual PvE? Sure. But for dungeons, fractals and other instanced group content? They are terrible compared to the other classes.
Even if you compare a meta build optimized for DPS, warriors do ~25% more damage than necromancers. http://gw2dps.david-reess.de/ If you add boons, buffs, and use a condition build, the gap is even wider.
I main a condi necro and made a warrior to try firsthand the difference. Now when I do dungeons I always take my norn warrior. The base DPS is way better than necro, even if my gear and build are not fully meta.
didn’t any of you notice that Burning and poison are now Stackable (but Anet did say they are still testing the numbers on this)
so LB>Burn stack stack stack. thats one bonus much more than loosing 4 bleeds.
But they reduced the damage of burning and poison of 60%. Can we stack those 2 conditions fast enough to make this change worthwhile?
Still the prices of superior sigil of smoldering/venom doubled in less than 2 hours and are still rising. I guess people are thinking that fire and and poison will be the new condi meta.
I’m not understanding the discussion here. If DS is replaced it MUST be replaced with at least a set of defensive skills. We have no active defensive outside of it (SArmor lol), and will be even more of an easy kill.
We have no active defense because we have death shroud. What we are hoping for is to get an active defense instead of death shroud. That and the use of life force to boost our builds choices instead of making them irrelevant when we enter death shroud.
Without DS, perhaps the game’s most powerful damage avoidance mechanic, Necromancer would be an easy kill for everything frome PvP to PvE. The profession would need to be totally reworked into something completely different – something like Revy, in which case Necromancer would be replaced.
In my experience staying outside of melee range, the profession condition cleanse/control, fear, spectral skills, the huge health poll and plain dodging, allows you to manage incoming damage on the vast majority of situations.
I feel the urge to use DS as “damage avoidance mechanic” only when I’m under focus fire or I screwed up and took a huge spike of damage and there is still pressure on me. In these cases entering death shroud buys you only some seconds to despair at your powerlessness because you are locked out of your build, your heal and you can’t run away.
Usually I use DS only for the time necessary to cast 3, 4 and 5. Staying in DS longer would just hurt your build. The only exception are powermancers for 11111111… reasons.
The specialization is a good opportunity to make happy who thinks that the trade off for a “second healthbar” is a bad deal. Everyone else who likes DS can still keep playing the necromancer.
I really doubt it will remove DS. It is just too core to the profession’s mechanics for one trait line and a set of skills to realistically completely remove DS. I do see us getting new ways to use LF that might give us ways to spend LF outside of DS for strong defensive options that make DS less of a big deal.
They said they are making some core changes. Equipping a specialization should unlock a weapon, a trait line, a heal, 4 utility skills, an elite skill and a change to the core mechanic of the class.
Maybe you are right and removing DS is too much for the devs. Still it would get rid of the “2nd health bar” stigma when you equip the specialization. Hopefully the specialization will be balanced better for the above reason.
In HoT the new specializations will change the core mechanics of the professions.
It seems that the necromancer specialization will change the use of the life force, potentially removing the death shroud mechanic. If it’s true, I believe this will get rid of 99% of the necromancer’s problems.
I was hiding on cliff and every now and then I was jumping to avoid inactivity. One jump made me slide down the cliff untill I ended up on a platform out of the map.
