Guild Wars 2

I’ll pass on the lessons. And when you say “burst condition damage”, you’re talking about doing an extra 1k/second while the player is feared. The rest of the damage is set up from all of your other abilities, which probably took at least 3-4 seconds to pile on. Considering burn stacking potential in the game now, 6 seconds for all of your damage to get rolling doesn’t seem very bursty.

The main reason it feels bursty is because no one seems to notice what is happening until their health starts dropping. They don’t see the bleeds stacking 2 at a time over the first several seconds.

ellesee.8297:

I think you might be playing the class wrong! Condi Necro isn’t an attrition build at all! It’s very much a burst build! It’s the condi equivalent of SD Fresh Air Ele! And losing to burn Guardians and condi Mesmers! That’s just crazy! I smell some L2P issues! Also I would never run Master of Corruptions with Consume Conditions! Self blind on a class with long cast times and slow animations? No thanks!

Wahoo! Bye frands!

I can’t tell if you’re serious when you say it’s the condi equivalent to SD Fresh Air Ele. How many damaging conditions can you stack in the time it takes an SD Fresh Air Ele to do thousands of damage instantly? Maybe 2 bleeds? Burn Guardian seems more like SD Fresh AIr Ele, but perhaps I’m missing some specific nuance to the Fresh Air Ele that makes the analogy sound.

zinkz.7045:

Ross Biddle.2367:

http://www.sirlin.net/ptw-book/introducingthe-scrub

In Street Fighter, the scrub labels a wide variety of tactics and situations “cheap.” This “cheapness” is truly the mantra of the scrub. Performing a throw on someone is often called cheap. A throw is a special kind of move that grabs an opponent and damages him, even when the opponent is defending against all other kinds of attacks. The entire purpose of the throw is to be able to damage an opponent who sits and blocks and doesn’t attack. As far as the game is concerned, throwing is an integral part of the design—it’s meant to be there—yet the scrub has constructed his own set of principles in his mind that state he should be totally impervious to all attacks while blocking. The scrub thinks of blocking as a kind of magic shield that will protect him indefinitely. Why? Exploring the reasoning is futile since the notion is ridiculous from the start.

cheese = cheap

That paragraph doesn’t make any sense, unless you are working on the basis that the game is perfectly balanced and everything requires equal amounts of skill, as of yet I have never played an MMO that even comes close to that, so they are indeed many things that are low skilled / poorly balanced / forgiving (cheese/cheap), which is part of the reason video games have such a laughable skill cap compared to things like sport or chess, that take real skill, and have real balance, the author is apparently some sort of scrub not to have worked this out, or maybe he is just thick.

You’re missing the point. Players are incredibly quick to label something as low-skill cheese, but all that does is give them an excuse to lose. What other purpose does it serve? To call something out as imbalanced? In that regard it’s useless, because it provides no description as to why it is unbalanced, nor does it provide any ideas as how to not make it unbalanced.

So at the end of the day, it’s an excuse word designed to make players feel better about losing to something. Sometimes the “cheese” is actually unbalanced and could use a tweak. Sometimes the player just couldn’t be bothered to try to figure out how to beat it, nor could they be bothered to consider that, perhaps that build is designed to beat theirs if played very well.

One of the purposes of the article is to show that truly great players of a game won’t get mired in their emotional muck when playing/learning. The second you label something as “cheesey”, you no longer approach it with the conviction you otherwise might to beat it. You stunt your own growth because you think that you’re doing something more difficult, and therefore you should win. But the other guy wins because he’s using some cheese-easy strat, and it’s suddenly the game’s fault.

Was it cheesey for a team to play Manute Bol (see: https://i.imgur.com/ZzsWQ.jpg) as a center in basketball? He’s so much taller than everyone else, he has a much easier time, and people have to specifically try a lot harder to play around him given his natural talents.

PU is naturally gifted at something, but does that make it cheesey? Not necessarily. The only issue I had with PU a long while back was that it provided block every single time the Mesmer was back out of stealth, and I call that an “issue” it made fighting it as a Powermancer that much more difficult. But that doesn’t mean that just because I have a difficult time against it that it’s “cheesey”.

I do find it amusing how you think coordination with a physical ball is “real skill”, but coordination with a mouse and keyboard is… I don’t know what you’d call it. Fake skill.

Xillllix.3485:

Morwath.9817:

Condi builds should be as viable as Power builds.

No it shouldn’t. Condis are passive, you just stack them up and numbers win for you instead of skill. MMOs where passive skills are too strong are the most boring ones to play and are more unbalanced (for example ESO, where a single guy can take out a whole zerg).

Power skills requires your opponent to dodge every single burst and promotes active gameplay which relies on reflexes and skill.

How have years passed, and people still don’t realize you can dodge condi application?

Lettuce.2945:

jportell.2197:

StickerHappy.8052:

I think most of the bad mesmers pre patch are now being carried by traits post patch.

Prismatic Understanding. I guarantee if this trait gets nerfed or adjusted in someway the FOTM mesmers will disappear. All of these “super good pro mesmers” are running this garbage trait and getting carried by it.

Might want to adjust your signature then. Since your main build consists of the “garbage” PU trait. Lol’d.

You’re going to try to peg him on a post for a build he last updated a year ago?

I suppose that’s about par for the course for an MMO forum.

I’ve never understood the point of anecdotal “call out” threads.

Being able to kill a bad player on any class, and a class needing design tweaks are horses of two different colors.

I’m not the most avid tPvPer, but I think this is a really good idea anyway.

I was having a hoot running a Condi build in WvW earlier today.

I think the title of the thread should be “Bringing condi cleanse and having to dodge condi application is the worst”. I’m pretty sure that’s the issue.

At least he requested this thread be closed. I’ve never seen a more selfish, potentially game-hindering idea touted so brashly.

I’m also having trouble getting over the amount of intelligence credited to builders. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at some of the flowery wording.

Pepsi.8907:

The formula itself is at fault, the base damage is way too high, giving the opportunity for mediocre condi damage to stack what would be considered high damage normally available only to high condi build
Thus making conditions based build extremely strong in the area regarding burning.
Yes it makes condi build from Guardian and ele viable, but at the moment it’s way too strong

Is everyone who has access to Burning doing too much Burning damage? Or do those classes who are doing the most outrageous amounts get too many stacks of burning on their abilities?

The equation isn’t the only dial to turn on this.

I actually roll a Spite/Curses/Soul Reaping build. I really, really like it.

While we’re at it, we probably want to make sure teams have their map strategies, composition strategies, and rotation strategies hidden to ensure other teams can’t copy them. Why stop hiding creativity at an individual player’s build? It would be really unfair if a team thought of a really good comp and strategy for a map, then another team just copies it.

Spectator mode should just blank the screen, so you only see the points tick at the top. That way we can make sure that a team’s genius is appropriately kept secret.

I’ll make sure to propose that, in DOTA 2, all skill and item builds that pro players use are kept secret as well. It’s really a shame when a community learns and grows together.

Peutrifectus.4830:

He’ll man, I like sharing my builds. Even if I get the old, “kitten that hurt, what build?” in chat, I’ll quite happily go into as much detail as you want.

I will also happily share every single detail of my build with anyone who asks, for any reason. Maybe they want to use it, maybe they want to better understand it so they can fight it. Doesn’t matter.

I favor execution over a build.

Do we really want to slow down the development of the meta? Are you asking ANet to make changes even more slowly?

I don’t remember the last time I looked at someone else’s build, but I firmly believe all information should be freely shared. Tools for learning the game should not be restricted.

I’m sorry you feel that being OP is “enjoying life”.

It really doesn’t seem like the burning calculation is at fault. It seems more like burn stacks are just too prevalent in some cases.

Are bunker Necros finally in the meta? If so, this is actually a wonderful day.

Though, how tanky do you think a Necro should be?

If you want to be able to keep yourself condition-free, you’re too biased to be involved in a discussion about conditions.

If there’s a problem, it’s that condition cleansing and condition application are in an arms race, and solving a spam problem would require a very sharp reduction in both. Including on runes/sigils/etc. And while they’re at it, they can reduce the number of boons flying around as well. But I doubt any of that will happen.

Honestly, minions doing damage as part of Necro attrition makes sense, as the Necro often doesn’t have the stability to stand and deliver. If I didn’t hate summons, I’d play minions in a heartbeat, especially since they all have actives instead of simply being passive damage.

And having a bunker/bruiser Necro build makes the most sense to me for tPvP. Everyone complains about how Necro has mobility, but why is Necro put into a position that requires mobility? Why not try to enable the Necro play a role that works for the Necro: a hard-to-kill attrition build that can stand on point and force rotation?

Oh, I see what he means now.

But I still don’t believe I’ve seen an argument for Backstab that doesn’t:

A. Attack the skill of another player.
B. Invoke the ability of some other class.
C. Lament about how without it, the Thief class would be sullen/downtrodden/stepped all over/etc.
D. Describe an anecdotal situation where landing Backstab is, like, hard and stuff.

None of those do anything to actually support the ability’s design, they just distract the conversation.

And if something is only ever used to kill bad players, why is it so heavily defended? That makes it sound like it’s poorly designed and should be changed to something that isn’t poorly designed. Unless, of course, you just want to stab bad players for 8-10k damage, only to tell them it’s a L2P issue. But if that’s what you want, then I don’t trust your judgment on what is or isn’t good design.

nekretaal.6485:

And that’s why we haven’t been using plague signet for 3 years.

The plague signet passive is worse than having no passive.

Speak for yourself, I’ve been using Plague Signet as a WvW roamer for a really long time. Even on a 60 second cooldown, even back when Blind would make it miss (that change made me so happy, by the way). Extraordinarily solid defensive/offensive utility against condi-heavy builds. Even against non-condi builds, passing a key Immob off or having the extra stun break was almost always useful.

@OP: Why did you keep calling it “guildwards 2”?

Also, I enjoy my Necro. A lot.

Vaux.7502:

A thief’s stealth lasts 3 seconds outside of a minute long stealth cooldown. Do you understand how EASY it is to avoid a backstab for 3 seconds? It’s like impossible NOT to do.

And you idiots acting like thieves shouldn’t be able to get a backstab off when using a minute long cooldown make me laugh, other classes get to pull off bigger burst much easier, without the use of ANY cooldowns.

If Thieves could only enter stealth once per minute, I’d have no problem with Backstab. Do you think Thieves can only enter stealth every 60 seconds? How frequently do you think Thieves can stealth?

And here’s a fun fact: the burst is a cooldown for other classes, in almost every situation.

They specifically designed the game around not having cast bars, so you would have to watch the character and not some bars. I personally hope they don’t provide cast bars.

And as much as saying “just make it an option” sounds like a nice compromise, if it goes against the design philosophy of the game, I think it’s a bad idea.

This is what it’s like for an ability to actually have a trade-off. Risk vs. Reward. It’s actually pretty neat, other classes should try it.

Maris.3164:

You cannot spam Backstab because of revealed. Revealed is the cooldown. To land a Backstab you first need to stealth, then you need to correctly land the hit on the player’s back. This is actually not easy against smart players because the stealth has a limited time. You don’t even need to dodge you know. You can just keep spinning around or run back and forth. There is no risk atm facing a thief because they will die from your random aoe anyway. Two hits.

You people don’t understand what you’re doing here. You’re complaining about a class that is already greatly weakened after the patch. You keep doing this even when every other class is currently way stronger and can one shot the thief. If Anet has any sense they will not listen to your random complaining just because of biased thinking and inexperience.

And lastly, If you get Backstabbed twice in a row, it IS a l2p issue. Anything can one shot a thief now, anything. And honestly, you cannot die to a thief now. At least, you shouldn’t be dying to a thief.

You can spam Backstab, because if you miss, or if it is dodged, or if it is blocked, or if the player is invuln, you just keep using it. I once was standing in Well of Darkness, pulsing blind every second, thinking I was safe from a Thief. He just spammed Backstab, and hit me between blind pulses. I think that was the moment I truly decided Backstab was designed terribly.

And the design of other classes at the moment doesn’t free Backstab from being silly. The smoke and mirrors arguments that try to misdirect attention only show me that the best defense for the ability is to try to get people to stop talking about it.

Just imagine any other class being able to spam a burst ability just because it is blocked/dodged/invuln’d. Picture a Warrior Skullcracking repeatedly until it lands, or Mesmer clones not shattering if the player dodges, or an Elementalist Fire Grabbing over and over until it hits, or anything, really. Imagine dodging Signet of Spite from a Necro, then he just Signet of Spites you again. Even if you picture all of this within a simple 3 second grace period, where you can only spam for 3 seconds, it’s still a completely ridiculous notion.

I always thought Backstab shouldn’t be damage, but some sort of utility instead, then re-route the damage component into some other abilit(y/ies). However, it’s never going to be changed, so I stopped fighting it. I was amused to see the patch note that they made it so Backstab didn’t unstealth the Thief on a miss. My change of choice almost made it into the game. tear

My favorite part is when people think that spinning around randomly to try to counter someone is good game design.

I have always thought it was silly that a Thief remains stealthed while spamming Backstab, though. Not many things were more frustrating than successfully dodging a Thief’s Backstab, only to be Backstabbed once my dodge roll ends. The risk/reward doesn’t seem to match up, but that goes for a whole slew of insta-cast abilities that hard-burst.

sephiroth.4217:

Dahkeus.8243:

Well…it’s not surprising at all that a game she doesn’t play is confusing to her.

This would really be the same case for any MMO out there.

May be true, I have a friend who I tried to get into GW2 but he has the same problem as OP…. He’s the biggest gamer I know too, even creates his own games and separate programs to overlay games he already owns.

If I remember correctly he said “The coding is faulty, the animations make zero kittening sense and the game looks like it was designed for primary school”…

I’ve tried showing him there is more to the game but unfortunately when I showed him PvP he made comments confirming the age group of the game by looking at play styles and various other “stand still and spam builds”… The only thing he thought GW2 had going for it was the thief mobility and playstyle

I almost exclusively only know nerds, and I’ve never once heard any of them try to say “the coding is faulty” with a game. I’d be curious to see what sort of grown-up games he plays.

I would definitely argue there are too many flashy AoEs, too much boon spam, too much condition spam, and the graphical effects don’t seem to match up with the affect abilities have on the game (huge damage in tiny animations, etc.). They give you the ability to dodge, but pack a lot of damage into instants for some classes, and as mentioned, those instants are often not super flashy, so a viewer has no idea what happened.

However, I think part of the problem is that from a spectator perspective, the game focuses you on said combat, and not on a larger strategy. Most often, a spectator sport will reel you in by allowing you to first understand a simple concept players are trying to achieve, such as:

• Get the ball into the other team’s goal, and keep the ball from going into yours (generalize “ball” and “goal”, and you have football, basketball, hockey, and soccer already)
• Destroy the enemy team’s throne before they destroy yours (most of the popular MOBAs)
• Wipe the enemy team/player off the map (round-based games, RTSes for the most part, though the RTS genre is sadly dying)

Conquest doesn’t really lend itself to a super easy explanation that you can watch from a distance. “Get to 500 points first” is abstract. You have to understand how points are achieved in every instance (deaths, nodes, etc.) in order to understand what might be impactful. Someone dying in a teamfight might not be as meaningful as a clever node-decap in a 1v1 off on the side of the map. So if you don’t really understand how a team wins conceptually, all you can do is focus on the fights.

And yes, the fights are a visual nightmare to try to follow. There are so many effects flying around, but it’s difficult to tell what means what. As a new spectator, you now have trouble following what is happening in a fight, it can be difficult to see how one team is gaining ground besides a simple “they have two nodes to the other team’s one”. But depending on where points are at, that might be OK, or it might be just enough to swing the victory. How can you tell? Without experience, you can’t.

All things considered, I think the game mode kills PvP the most. Many other popular spectator e-sports also have down-time. There’s a period where you are anticipating the next play, whether it is a laning phase, waiting for Rosh to spawn (DOTA 2), setting up for the next down in football. Some sports do pull off constant action, but usually anticipation slowly builds as a team maneuvers around a goal. There is still time to relax when the ball/puck is being recovered by the defending side as they push it into offense. But with Conquest, it’s just people slamming into each other for the duration, mostly.

If you had something to hold onto so you could watch fights from a distance and think more about the outcome than the little details, you could probably get past the visuals that bombard you at the start, because then it isn’t about the fighting. And if it IS going to be about the fighting, then the fighting needs to be something you can sit, watch, and generally understand (big, flashy animations are big damage; boons are special cases where you are more powerful; conditions are special cases where you are weaker). Right now, you can pretty easily see someone with 5 unique boons and 4-5 unique conditions, and at a glance, it’s difficult to tell how he’s doing. Maybe he’s fine and it doesn’t matter. Maybe he’s getting wrecked. If I could change one thing about the game, it would honestly be a huge reduction in boons, conditions, and condition removal, but I digress.

I do love conversations like this though.

I’d say level one and see how you like it.

The tragedy of MMO PvP is that progression will inevitably draw a larger crowd than equality. As long as the progression is flavor-based over power-based, I don’t have an issue. People don’t seem to want to play games for fun or the thrill of competition anymore, unfortunately (see: all of the XP/progression in basically every type of game, besides maybe RTS. But no one makes RTSes anymore. I bet they would if they could find a progression component to sell.).

This reminds me of a thread I saw in the Thief forums where people were complaining about having to use an F2 hotkey for their stolen ability, even though it provided additional flexibility. I don’t want to tell anyone how to play, but I have an extraordinarily difficult time empathizing with anyone who doesn’t want to put in a bit of extra effort for free flexibility on a skill.

I thought someone said double-clicking puts it at your feet. If you want to actually click an ability to cast, now you just have to double click, not click-point-click.

I think at the very least, this is a good representation of the fact that you legitimately can’t please everyone with… anything, really.

StickerHappy.8052:

Why is the comparison with top tier? as if any of us will play on that level,. Most of us have lives, show more love to your class guys.

Ranger/Mesmer brother here feels you.

Ideally, all classes would have at least one build that is top-tier competitive for each facet of the game. Each class missing from the top-tier meta stagnates said meta a little bit more from a lack of variety.

I’m honestly not sold that the problem is the Necro design. I tend to think the Necro class is designed pretty well with avoidable cast times, specific weaknesses, etc. If anything, all of the instants/immunities/multi-second blocks/blind spams/etc. out there are the issue. To survive as part of that world, Necro probably needs to end up adopting some of that world’s toolset.

Part of the issue could also very well be the game mode used in top-tier PvP.

I’m not saying Necro design is perfect, but I also think the design of many other classes is, at the very least, questionable. Plus, the game is cats and dogs living together right now from a balance perspective, it sounds like.

WhiteCrow.5310:

Ricky Rouse.1583:

Mortar kit dealing the same amount of damage as grenade auto attacks? Better gut it by 28% a day after patch release. don’t want the precious grenade kit not being #1.

Grenade Kit piercing and throwing 13 grenades at once? Better let that stew for a couple days, who knows what could happen!

Honestly, it really calls into question their QA process. How do things like this get into the live servers? It’s incredible.

The only way to not have something like this happen is to do a full regression test on every single trait with every single ability every time anything is changed for a class. Or if a mechanic is changed that might pertain to the class. Preferably, you would do every permutation of trait selection for every class, and for each, use every possible weapon and every single utility to make sure nothing is bugged.

Does that sound reasonable? Because it shouldn’t. I don’t know what their QA process is, but this bug slipping in doesn’t really surprise me, especially with the large system change and overhaul of traits. It could have slipped for any of a number of reasons.

A friend of mine who plays WoW always shares the random bugs that happen, because we like to discuss how in the blazes it could even be a thing. The best one, in my opinion, was when the Orc shoulder graphic took like a 50% reduction in size one patch. For like, no reason. It took months for them to fix, and they had no mention of changing anything related to that anywhere in the notes.

In short, bugs happen. #software

The biggest issue, in my opinion, is the lack of action around it.

Aenesthesia.1697:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Good on you for choosing what is fun. It’s the reason I only ever care to play my Necromancer, as well. The meta/balance will constantly ebb and flow, but if you choose something you like, you can just focus on enjoying the game and not rolling the new hotness.

why are you polarizing things like this? you make it sound like only the necro is fun, when it has the dumbest (does that word even exist?) rotation save for the ranger and warrior…

I make it sound like I have fun with the Necromancer over all other classes, regardless of placement in the meta. And that’s the truth. Fun is completely subjective.

The crux of the comment was that the player chose the route of fun, and I agree with that route. I don’t know what rotation you’re even talking about with ‘rotation’, but if you don’t find Necromancer fun, that’s fine. Enjoy a different class, and more power to you as well. But your perception of how fun Necromancer is doesn’t mean anything to me.

Leman, I’m not so sure you enjoy the Necro class. I think the Necro class has been an “underdog” in your preferred mode of play, and you enjoy being the underdog first and foremost.

“On necro, it’s always the same: generate life force, do some damage with autos, cleanse conditions, do some cc. There is no ingenuity in it and when you have used your available skills, you always end up doing autos, because all other skills are either on cooldown or some of them are not worth using (either because of the opportunity cost – Fears/Chillblains or their non-viability – Life Siphon, wink wink).”

You have no good things to say about the Necro playstyle, but you love Necro? What exactly do you love, if not the simple fact that they have been fairly absent from top-tier PvP play for a good while?

Also, I used the word “crusade” because you seem to think everyone needs to agree with you, and those who don’t either don’t understand or don’t matter. You say things could be “better”, and your idea of a goal should be “effective, difficult, and fun”. What if difficult isn’t always fun for people? Should everything in the game be difficult? What even is “difficult” to you? Is it having to put some effort into a bit of muscle memory, or pressing a couple buttons in a certain sequence for damage, or what exactly?

I don’t expect answers to those questions, but you’re layering the subjectivity on extremely thick under the seeming pretense of objectivity (EDIT: You added a thing to your most recent post that mentioned how opinions may vary. So nevermind on the pretense thing). It would be like you trying to tell me that I would have more fun running to rap music than my typical electronic selection. You point to a guy who also listens to rap music while he runs and say “See, he gets it. Just imagine how much more fun it would be to listen to rap!”. But I don’t like rap music.

It also isn’t that Necros who enjoy their time playing Necro don’t respect themselves. That seems a bit silly to say. I enjoy building Life Force and using Shroud as a defensive and offensive mechanic. I enjoy swapping utilities around to maximize effectiveness of whatever encounter I run into. I love pulling people off of WvW walls and immobilizing them immediately on landing. I love when I’m nearly out of health, then I pop Spectral Armor, go into DS, and float for several seconds, knowing that the other person is thinking “No no no, he’s almost dead, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah”. I love when a class like Warrior forgets to save Zerker Stance for running away, and I chain-chill/boon strip them into oblivion, ruining their escape. I love trying to catch and crush slippery classes instead of being one myself. I love how I can do miracles against an enemy spamming boons.

I love the aesthetic, I love the playstyle, and I love how Necro feels in this game. It isn’t perfect, and there are a large number of QoL/design decisions I’d love to see made across the entire game. However, top-tier PvP is a unique animal, and that meta is probably going to be in flux until the expac releases and settles anyway.

Anchoku.8142:

I continue to be amazed by the lack of beta testing.

Believe it or not, developers are just regular people, and treading the line between ambitious changes and approaching deadlines can be difficult for anyone.

As long as they are on top of the issues, I’d rather see them get more adventurous then go back to the snail-paced tiny tweaks.

I still use Consume Conditions. The 10 stacks of vuln haven’t bothered me yet, and removing all damaging conditions at once is still a potentially large but “hidden” source of healing.

Viable: capable of working successfully. Feasible. The bar for comparison that always shifts just above someone’s reach when arguing design/balance on forums.

Also, it’s OK if you don’t like Necro. You don’t have to try to convince us that we don’t like it either in some crusade to show ANet that no one likes Necro and it should be changed to what you like.

Yep, I’ve been wanting this for a while.

Good on you for choosing what is fun. It’s the reason I only ever care to play my Necromancer, as well. The meta/balance will constantly ebb and flow, but if you choose something you like, you can just focus on enjoying the game and not rolling the new hotness.

Personally, I’d put them into a Power build with boon/condition management, like one of the Signet builds these days. I’d probably advise them to be a bit glassier too, from a stats perspective, with Staff/D+F as the weapons of choice to start. Here’s a list of reasons why:

1. Power over Condi. Not because of any sort of effectiveness argument, that’s not what I’m looking for. With Power, you watch your abilities land, you see how much damage they do, and you see how that directly affects an enemy’s health pool. When they dodge, you see them dodge your abilities. You get a feel for trying to land abilities and their effectiveness. I feel like with Condis, it can be difficult to trace down what was impactful about your play when you “spam” all of your abilities, and the condis add up because the enemy didn’t dodge a few times. Suddenly they’re bleeding out and it’s like “Oh, yay!”. I’d rather a new player become familiar with the slower cast times. Plus, I feel Power has stronger interaction with Death Shroud, but that could just be bias.

2. Boon/Condi management. I don’t know how many other classes really watch boons/condis, but I would want a new player to become very familiar with watching their own conditions as well as the enemy’s boons. It’s training, and it also gives the new player a feel of the flavor of the class. You’re about messing up the enemy’s comfort and keeping those pesky conditions off, but which ones do you transfer? When do you boon strip/corrupt and when do you let it ride? Good questions for a new player to ask and dabble with.

3. Glassier over Tankier. I prefer trial by fire, personally. The glassy builds really demonstrate what can destroy an opponent and what is supplementary. You need to learn what to dodge, when to use your dodges, and how to maximize your survivability through abilities, not gear. DS management and use of things like Spectral Armor come into play here, and hopefully, the player tries to think outside the box to survive.

4. Weapons. Staff gives you a good feel for dropping AoE circles, since that seems like it happens fairly frequently as a Necro throughout their abilities. You have to learn how to use them while moving, learn you can drop them behind you, lead targets, etc. It isn’t overly difficult with Staff, and it’s pretty rewarding. Also, managing long cooldowns by timing Reaper’s Mark properly instead of just rotating through them comes into play. For Dagger+Focus, you get some boon strip, you get some long cast times, and you get effectiveness. You also get some combo potential (D3 into F4 into DS for the extra crit % on F4 hits really hard), and you ideally play around with D2 to learn when to use channeled abilities as part of your skillset.

Overall, Power is really effective, and still provides some slack when it comes to play once you learn how to manage your LF more effectively. Ideally, the new player would find some success, then get destroyed by better players, so they understand that the build can work but takes more than just brute force to really get to work well.

On a whim I figured I’d visit the Thief forums to get a pulse. I honestly can’t believe an increase in flexibility is a source of complaint, because using an extra button is kind of hard for a bit.

I’ll see myself out.

Maybe he’s just taking more damage than he was before?

Linnael.1069:

You guys are kidding yourselves if you think it was a pvp or wvw balance decision.

They did it to simplify gating stuff behind glider mastery.

I’m not familiar with glider mastery, but this sounds like it’s the case. They created content with vertical segments that they wanted to gate, and Necro’s ability to jump down a huge cliff circumvents that. Hence, change. Makes all the sense in the world, though I hate it when flavor dies.

I also don’t think anyone considers Edge of the Mist when thinking about balancing abilities. At least, I really hope they don’t.

Kodama.6453:

In my opinion it’s an unfair advantage because there is literally no other class in the game than necromancer who can follow you in this scenario. I agree necromancers got some mobility problems, so it would be great if you get some buffs in this. But it isn’t the answer to make it impossible to close the gap to you if you want to flee.

There are others classes with high mobility which are hard to follow that’s absolutely right but it isn’t IMPOSSIBLE to follow with other classes.

If a Warrior saves Zerker Stance, then uses GS/Sword to escape, how many classes can keep up? Thief, maybe? And speaking of Thieves, how many classes can keep up with them if they want to escape? Other Thieves?

I don’t think you are thinking this one through. I can count on probably 1 hand the number of times I’ve actually used verticality to escape in WvW, after over a thousand hours played. Do you find Necros just standing near cliffs hoping a fight comes there way? How many locations on the Borderlands that are relevant at all would this even be applicable to? Hill, and maybe Garri, though with Garri the big “let’s get out of here” cliff leads to water, if I recall.

There has to be some other reason for this change, such as it breaking maps unintentionally. Otherwise, it’s a completely silly removal of flavor.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Jeez. No one can get nice things without people crying and making it worse for everyone.

It’s difficult to keep an open mind when other classes receive weird and illogical changes and are met with silence, then a class loses a bit of uptime on a boon and a Red post swoops in to fix the “issue”.

Of course, this probably was something that wasn’t intended, and that made it really easy for them to both fix, and say they were going to fix. In the case of Consume Conditions for Necros, for example, it’s very intentional to receive 10 stacks of Vulnerability after using your heal and cleansing all of your conditions. If ANet is in no position to do anything about that design choice, they can’t really say anything.

But all of that logic aside, it’s actually pretty annoying. I don’t subscribe for one second to the idea that ANet plays favorites intentionally, but even for me, this particular example at this particular time is at least moderately irritating. I suppose that’s mostly because I want an explanation for the Necro CC change, as it doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m not even that worried about the effect it will have. I’m more worried about the logic behind it, because I don’t see any.

wolfyrik.2017:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Siva Mira.3546:

Alendar.3195:

ToSatellite.8295:

Gryph.8237:

Why can’t Anet see that this is just plain wrong. I’m can deal with all the other changes but this one. This one burns me

In before the Master of Corruption extra condition is actually burning.

Out of curiosity, did they ever say which conditions the trait will add to our corruption skills? I’d hate to have random self fears tacked on to my abilities…

IMO, it will be Blind.

Blind is an incredibly awful condition to self-apply, imo.

Actually blind makes sense, that way those of us who have Chilling Darkness will get chilled on top of the other conditions. Cos more conditions after cleansing conditions, is just what Necro players have been wanting, right? Right?

If this actually happened, my marbles would scatter into the void, lost forever.

Siva Mira.3546:

Alendar.3195:

ToSatellite.8295:

Gryph.8237:

Why can’t Anet see that this is just plain wrong. I’m can deal with all the other changes but this one. This one burns me

In before the Master of Corruption extra condition is actually burning.

Out of curiosity, did they ever say which conditions the trait will add to our corruption skills? I’d hate to have random self fears tacked on to my abilities…

IMO, it will be Blind.

Blind is an incredibly awful condition to self-apply, imo.

How about give a different heal something that makes it absolutely incredible, instead of making our best heal better?