One thing that bugs me about DS is that unless you’re in the middle of a group and able to regain your life force without taking much damage as you fight – it’s almost useless after the first use.
I was dueling in a PvP server with a friend for fun and to train. He was a ranger and I a necro, our first fight I had full life force, it went amazingly – I dealt damage, used elite to stay alive longer and deal damage, then used DS on and off to use fear and deal so moderate damage here and there and I managed to beat him.
However, after that first fight I used up all my life force and every single other fights after that first one I lost desperately – because since there weren’t many things dying around me or because I didn’t have either a gap of time or safety to up my life force, it was just gone for good.
So in conclusion, not only is the DS under powered unless you actually focus on it, and not only does it fit well in maybe 1-2 builds, but it’s such a limited use ability that unless we’re in a convenient and specific situation – it’s useless after one or two uses.
The ranger’s ability is having a pet with them at all times that do a variety of effects, the mesmer is the ability to shatter and do a variety of effects, guardians have their virtues either always in effect or they can use it for an instant effect and are able to get it back without much effort, just waiting for the cooldown. So in general every class has something that is in a way “always there” and can be of a very broad use, while for the necro to use his already limited ability he needs to be able to kill things first. Unlike other classes he doesn’t have an effect which is either always there or easily accessible – he either has full life force and can rely on the DS, or simply not and thus screwed.
They do work together but that’s very wrong. Regular is 25HP per hit, while critical is 33HP per critical hit.
So if you land a critical hit you gain both 25HP and 33HP – making that an amazing 58HP gain.
Well for starters you can’t really duel in the heart of the mists either, you could say “just join an empty server and duel there”, that’s fine and all – for some 3 minutes or less because people will ALWAYS enter sooner or later and people tend not to leave even if you ask them.
1/10 is not how a skill should work. The skill is completely unreliable and useless most of the time, and when it does work it feels like a blessing – a miracle. I’d rather have any other skill taking up space in my utility slot other than Spectral Grasp because I’m not oki with the 10% chance it might work IF it hits the target.
I used to think that the 25 stack limit of bleed made some sense. But after some thought I realized how insanely nonsensical it is. If people fight by using bleeds and their main damage comes from conditions, why the hell would you cap that? There’s no cap for direct damage, so why is there a cap for condition damage? It makes absolutely no sense.
So what if there are 100 stacks of bleed on the target? That means it’s how the people trying to kill it deal damage, why would you block half of the people from dealing any sort of decent damage to these creatures? If there’s 100 players who fight using direct damage, you don’t cap the other 75 of these 100 players from not dealing damage because the first 25 are already dealing damage to it.
I tried using this skill once or twice when I realized how amazingly wonderful it could be, especially in WvW since I could pull someone from the other team directly in the middle of ours.
However not once did this skill work for me, first of all it’s a non homing projectile so it’s ridiculously easy to simply dodge. But most importantly the first time I finally managed to hit someone with it, they simply tipped over exactly where they were standing and weren’t pulled even an inch closer to me.
Oh but Delryn – you might say – there was probably something in the way, maybe a rock. It was a completely plain terrain with absolutely nothing in the way what so ever and it still didn’t work. This skill sucks completely as it currently is.
I guess it makes sense not to give health regen to pets because of botting. Since people could be iddle and let pets kill whatever was nearby and thus doing chain events without any effort.
Also as far as the Blood Fiend goes, I used to believe his attacks healed himself as well, I find it completely ridiculous how it doesn’t. Why would anyone in their right mind (especially in PvP) use the blood fiend as a healing mechanism when it’s so extremely unreliable and fragile.
All the other minions I think are fine, the Bone Minions I also believe to be fine, after all their ability is to kill themselves, they’re meant to be disposable creatures used to AoE damage, that’s why their cooldown is so insanely short.
(PS: I hate the Shadow Fiend and the Jagged Horror)
Different classes are different. Necromancer can shift conditions from allies on to enemies with a weapon attack, alot of classes can’t do that even with utilities.
Combos are ment to be in group play rather than just one guy making and using his own combo finishers anyway.
It’s silly to compare other classes ability to combo with the necro’s ability to transfer conditions – the two are completely unrelated.
Guardians are good at healing and giving boons, thieves are good at burst (way too good) damage and mobility, necro is good at giving conditions and transferring them. None of this has absolutely anything what so ever to do with combos.
We’re talking about how useful a class can be by taking the effects of a field by using their combo finishers. Giving them armors, adding effects to their attacks and buffing them up in a variety of ways – whether it be with themselves or paired with others.
The necro however is extremely limited in that aspect, he has many fields which can give his allies a variety of nice effects and buffs, however he himself can’t ever take any sort of positive effect from an ally’s field because he lacks combo finishers in such horrible ways.
Most classes have a variety of different finishers in multiple weapons, necros have the auto attack on the staff and one long cooldown hard to use mark on the staff – that is it. If you’re not using a staff you literally have no combo finishers, and if you are – your combo finishers either suck or have a huge cool down and you’re stuck to one slow moving projectile finisher.
I was very sad that it took them so long to finally touch the necromancer, that’s true. However when they did they fixed a nice number of things all at once – which is why I imagine they took so long with it.
I also would prefer they just fix the AI, maybe at best being able to decide whether you want your pets to back off and not attack anything – for when you’re just travelling around the world for example.
Because let’s face it, having 45HP healing per hit is really not gonna make that much of a game breaking difference in the heat of battle when a thief is able to deal about 10k damage with a single hit.
“Oh what was that mister thief? You just dealt me 10k in one hit? Please sit still while I hit you about 222 times to recover the 10k damage you just dealt me. Yes, my 45HP healing per hit makes me so overpowered!”
It’s ridiculous how if you wanna have better healing you would have to invest ALL of your stats into healing power and just give up a huge chunk of something else if you want your healing to be mildly acceptable. You should be able to spend just a few points in healing with a few gears centered towards healing power here and there and get nice results – as a way to not exploit a large gain from a small number, they could implement something such as diminishing returns with healing power; if you have some points here and there it will make a difference, if you wanna be completely focused on healing you can, but it won’t be over powered since there would be diminishing returns.
For example; having 100 points in healing power would increase life syphon from 25HP per hit to 39HP – a 14HP per hit gain(each +1HP syphoned costs one extra point in healing power starting with only 1… hard to explain exactly how to got to that number).
While having 210 points in healing power would increase life syphon from 25HP per hit to 45HP – a 20HP per hit gain.
That way you could have some extra healing power if you added it here and there, because as it is now if I wanna get my syphon on hit from 25 to 45 I would probably have to make all of my gear completely healing power focused and still I doubt it’d get that high.
It’s so sad how nearly useless the life syphon on both crit and normal attack are.
Also the trait which increases health syphoning by 50% is either still bugged, or completely kitten I tested it out and I heal 25HP with each hit, with the +50% life syphon trait I healed 29HP with each hit. How amazingly pointless – considering that health syphon is a unique thing that we have, how very underpowered it is.
I tend to prefer going with the heal on crits instead of +50% health syphon, since at least half of my attacks are crits I end up healing 25HP on each hit, and about an extra 33HP with crits.
If the number 2 ability was changed to an aoe fear, it could not be more than 2 seconds and would have to break on damage. That is about the time it takes for players blown away by my guardians 2 ability.
That alone is enough. In fact I wouldn’t expect anything more, since anything more would be overpowered.
Also, it’d be nice to know if healing power affects the minor blood magic trait which syphons health on hit.
I really doubt it’ll happen any time soon. I wouldn’t be too surprised if they added more weapons with more skills which were more focused for minions in the far future, such as with expansions.
It would be a dream of mine to be able to have some 10 minions summoned at once.
I’ve come to realize how amazingly useful and powerful combos are. Playing a mesmer I have a variety of combo finishers such as projectile or leap, and so many times I use a glamour skill which reflects projectiles – against a melee type it would be useless, except that thanks to my combo finishers I’m able to add confusion to some attacks, able to give myself chaos armor granting me some nice random boons and the enemy random conditions. Playing with combo fields and finishers I’m able to do quite a lot more than what I would be able to do with just my regular simple plain attacks.
However since the necromancer has nearly none, to top it all off most of our fields give poison and projectile finish if I recall adds poison to attack, which doesn’t stack intensity – thus making it slightly not so great since we already have dozens of ways to poison.
If I were able to play around with combo fields and finishers with the necro in a variety of ways as I am with so many other classes, I’d be so better off.
I agree with Player One. Necros are not garbage, we can handle ourselves well enough but compared to other classes if the other person knows what they’re doing we almost always end up losing or struggle to survive.
To be fair we aren’t the only class in the game, and class bugs aren’t the only bugs in the game. There’s guild bugs, event bugs, skill point bugs, areas, dungeons, rebalancing, other classes, and etc.
Of course it’d be nice if we had more fixes, but I’m sure the people working there have lives too – and it’s been only one month since release and I’ve seen a lot of quick and nice fixes going around about a variety of things – including necromancers.
I think that’s an awesome idea, since health syphon currently is pretty sucky unless you’re doing dagger build – and still it’s mediocre at best. Even if it were very slight such as heal 5HP (at Lv80) for every tick of bleed you have, in many cases that could be up to 100HP a second. That wouldn’t be over powered and could even out our lame health syphon.
And even if people felt it’s underpowered if you don’t focus completely on bleeding the foe it would still be better then what we have. With a lot in power I only heal about 25HP per swing of my scepter, so for someone not completely focused on condition damage it could heal around 50HP per second, which is about what I heal without a dagger right now.
I think the staff is nice and creative. I only have a few issues with it;
-The autoattack is completely useless outside of PvE since if you see a huge dark hand making it’s merry casual slow way towards you – you most certainly will not stand around. It’s pathetically easily dodge able.
-Either the marks should already naturally be slightly larger or should be instant cast. Because they’re so tiny no one would be dumb enough to walk into it, and they take so long to cast the target will almost certainly not be where I cast it originally. The marks even often times suck in PvE as the enemies might move unpredictably.
-The marks really need to either cripple or immobilize or have a longer duration freeze if they wanna be so small. But more than anything they need to have shorter cooldowns, I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten stuck there after using all my marks and now all I can do is use the COMPLETELY useless autoattack and wait to cast the #2 every now and again since it has shorter cooldown.
The staff feels like in no way should it ever be used as a main weapon. I use it as a secondary weapon to switch into really briefly, place my marks around and switch it out as soon as I can because actually relying on it in battle whether it be PvE or PvP with its current state is simply not an option.
Also on another note as far as the minions go, I like all of them other than the Shadow Fiend and the Jagged Horror.
I loved the idea that instead of the super classic skeletons and zombies you instead summon up piles of random flesh and bone which you mould into your own horrific creation. I would obviously love it if they looked a bit more creepy and disgusting, but currently I actually am completely satisfied with how they look (other than the two I mentioned).
Even the Bone Minion, sure he looks like a small dog but that makes sense when you look into what he does, he’s just a walking bomb. If he looked more horrific sure it’d be better but I have no issues with how he looks currently, and since you summon multiple of them it makes sense they’re just smaller more discard able little walking bombs. I quite enjoy the others one, with the Blood Fiend having a giant gaping mouth with guts and intestines piled inside and all the rest.
However the Shadow Fiend just COMPLETELY breaks the pattern of flesh and bone, it doesn’t feel like a necromancer pet in any way. And it’s not like saying “oh but GW necromancer makes sense with it” since every single other pet you have is flesh and bone, having on that is just a ghost not only breaks the feel of a necromancer but also breaks the feel of the GW necromancer, especially since GW1 also would make no sense with that shadow thing.
And I hate the Jagged Horrors so much because they were just a lazily done copy paste of Bone Minions. Not to mention they are actually 100% useless unless you use the death nova thing which still doesn’t justify having it in any sort of way.
When trying to make a minion build I feel like I am FORCED into using death nova because if I don’t I feel like the Jagged Horror is just a completely wasted trait.
First off I agree completely with Nekroseth and just about all he said.
Secondly I don’t think the necromancer in this game is portrait especially bad. I think he does indeed feel and look like a necromancer which fits nicely into the lore of GW2. His spells all more or less closely relate to and resemble death – death in the way a necromancer would relate to it.
The only thing that bothers me are some specific skills which kind of cross the line a bit too much. As far as traits go I liked how they were portrait, with death magic, spite, curses, blood magic and soul reaping – all sound very necromancer-like.
What bugs me the most are his skill directly related to “shadow”, such as the DS which is called Death Shroud but simply because it has the word “death” in it means little to nothing as none of the skill have anything to do with death and the DS itself has nothing to do with death (the only thing that half has something to do with death is the life bar), the DS instead is just cloaking yourself with shadows.
I always found it cool how a necromancer wasn’t exactly a shadow mage, he was a death mage. The two being very different – so what really bugs me is the DS and the Shadow Fiend (if that’s what it’s called, I forget). So the Shadow Fiend even though it bugs me I can at least choose not to use it in fights, but the DS will always be there.
So not only does the DS feel like it completely breaks the appeal of a necromancer, it also sucks in general. It fits in 1-2 very specific builds at best, other than that it just sucks and almost everyone uses it as a ‘get away safe’ mechanism. If the skills are so near useless, why not instead make it more suited for a second life which helps you survive?
I think the DS not only looks bad when it comes to a necromancer but also plays bad.
I just put 5 points into that tree hoping expecting to have a cool little minion every 30 seconds, possibly more if I managed them well. As soon as I summoned it once and realised what happened I went straight to the trainer. It is the most pointless and useless trait bonus I’ve seen.
That made me laugh, I pictured your excited face, full of anticipation when suddenly you see a tiny copy paste version of the Bone Minion as its life quickittenicked away before dying within some 5 seconds doing absolutely nothing – leaving you there staring at the screen in complete confusion for a minute or two.
@Levian
I was going to say at one point but completely forgot. I think the underwater DS is PERFECT (except that the autoattack should be as fast as the on land autoattack). It’s useful for a variety of builds and actually helps you out when you’re in trouble. It’s actually useful in the sense you would actually wanna use it in battle since it transfers conditions, fears in an area and adds poison – as opposed to simply rely on your DS as a last hope quick get away mechanism.
I really enjoy the idea of a true minion necromancer, however I feel it’s very lacking in this game. You can give up one of your utility slots in exchange for ONE minion. As a necromancer you should have the option to have a (slightly) greater army of undead – even if they were to be all rather disposable.
So I was just giving some random thought about what would be a nice minion centred weapon for this class – as there are none. You could argue that the staff fills this need relatively decently, however just barely.
Thus I’ve come up with a rather loose and fun idea for a MM weapon, but before I write down what it’d be like first I need to address the Jagged Horrors;
What I think the Jagged Horrors should be like, is a very disposable creature (however one that is at least slightly useful). I think it should die with 1-3 hits however it’s health should not degenerate. It should deal minimal damage such as 100 or possibly even less but its attacks inflict one stack of bleed that lasts maybe 1-2 seconds, and attacking it also gives the attacker one stack of bleed (after all it is jagged and such).
My idea for the weapon would be something two handed.
#1: Autoattack that throws a bouncing scythe between foes that bounces up to 3 times, dealing about 400 damage on each hit and regenerating 2% life force per bounce.
#2: Summon 4 Jagged Horrors. (16sec CD)
#3: Explodes all Jagged Horrors dealing 500 damage in a 240 radius causing a 3sec poison. (60sec CD)
#4: Deals an area of effect damage in a radius of 600 around you, hitting up to 6 targets. Deals 600 damage to each target, for each target hit you and your minions gain 1 second of retaliation and regen. (24sec CD)
#5: Channel for 5 seconds unmoving while you syphon health from your target dealing 280 damage per second and healing you and your pets for 100HP per second. Gives one stack of might to you and your minions for each second channelled. (38sec CD)
Of course the numbers aren’t set in stone, that’s just some ideas I had and tried making sure it wouldn’t be too overpowered. Also on the #2 which summons 4 Horrors with a 14sec cooldown, I wouldn’t feel that’s really overpowered as the Scepter’s #2 causes an AoE which deals nice damage, deals great bleed and on top of that cripples foes with only a 10sec cooldown – so having a few minions which die quickly but make sure to add a small bleed with a 16sec cooldown does not feel overpowered at all.
Also I thought it would only make perfect sense to make sure the weapon adds some boons since the minion tree adds boon duration and we barely have any boons at all to go around.
TL;DR – Idea for a MM weapon which summons minions and adds boons to minions as the minion tree gives boon duration.
I actually agree completely on the shadow fiend. I love all the minions (other than the jagged horror since it’s just a copy paste of the bone minion) except the shadow fiend. It breaks the atmosphere of a fleshy bone dead rotting corpse necro completely, it’s a ghost not a corpse.
We are necromancers, not spiritualists.
As I’ve once said it just looks like something a Ritualist from GW1 would use but darker.
As far as how the necromancer is portrait I think it’s pretty decent with some few issues (as I’ve stated multiple times).
However talking about how he plays in the game and how he’s balanced and built is another thing. The traits for example, Curses adds precision and condition damage – fine I’m alright with it not being straight forward such as “this trait adds condition damage and condition duration, this one adds precision and critical damage”, I enjoyed the fact they’re spread out and thus involves some more thinking.
However even if you try to get things that would go together, there’s still horrible synergy. For example Curses add precision and condition damage while Life Reaping (if that’s what it’s called) adds critical damage and bigger life force pool. Awesome oki so you’d think the two would go well together, but no not at all.
In the Curses tree there’s a minor trait (thus you can’t change it) which adds fury to DS mode, so adding to the DS tree would make sense, except that the DS has absolutely nothing what so ever to do with conditions in any sort of way – so focusing conditions with the Curse trait tree you’re kinda screwed with the DS.
The list of bad synergy goes on and on.
I completely agree with Venom. As I’ve mentioned it all.
On another note I feel very comfortable underwater. I feel like underwater is where I manage to surpass so many other classes with the very nice aoe bleed attack on the trident and the amazing lingering poison cloud. And best of all we can use plague form underwater which completely kicks the butt of anything trying to fight us (since thank all the kittens in the world, mesmers cannot cancel it with their Moa morph).
@ Ascii
That made me laugh my kitty cat off.
All I really want from my minions is that they don’t sit next to me doing absolutely nothing while I’m getting mykitten kicked. It’s pretty simple; if you’re in combat there’s no reason your pets shouldn’t also be.
Being able to control what each individual pet does, if it stays back or attacks and such would be wonderful but that sounds a bit too overwhelming, complicated and precise to pull off.
Just having them fight what you’re fighting would be wonderful, or at least target the nearest enemy or the one with lowest health – SOMETHING other than standing around.
On a side note – the blood fiend should have a lot more HP and defence but deal less damage. Because currently it does indeed die way too quickly, and the health syphon it does is nearly useless. So if it had better survivability at the cost of dealing lower damage, but also syphoning exactly the damage it deals would be nice.
What does Arah have to do with PvP gear?
nice numbers but why so many commas instead of periods?
Other countries use commas instead of periods. He’s probably just not from the US.
I’m quite fine with how they tried to do the necro, the minions I found to be a wonderful and creative idea – instead of the done to death (haha~) zombies and skeletons, your minions are combined random pieces of flesh and bone; brilliant!
However you have a very small amount of minions, some of them are too simple and “cute” looking, the jagged horrors are just a copy paste of the Bone Minions. The Shadow Fiend is the only minion I detest completely because in no way is it rotting flesh, bones, undead material or anything – it’s just a shadow, a ghost; which doesn’t really do much for a necromancer as they are not spiritualists.
It’s like they took a pet from the GW1 Ritualist and just made it look darker.
Either way I love the skills with poison, bleed and all that.
The only thing that bothers me is the Death Shroud which I feel has kind of crossed a line, it’s just a shinny pretty glowy form of power that is very little related to what a necromancer is.
Also it’s upsetting that the necromancer’s only true traditional necromancer ability is the 5 point trait in death magic; the 30 second cooldown (useless) jagged horror summoning when a creature dies.
It’s indeed ridiculously loud and attention calling.
I think the staff in general isn’t that bad, some of the marks could have a sliiight decrease in their cooldowns, but more than anything I think having the staff’s autoattack be a homing scythe that bounces between targets and adds like 2% life force for each bounce would be fine.
Not like it’d be any sort of overpowered anyway, the thief’s bow autoattack is an arrow that bounces (makes no sense why an arrow would bounce), and with daggers he has an ability that makes the dagger bounce, which is ridiculously strong if there’s only two targets around since it bounces between them multiple times.
One should not believe everything they see on the internet. No way to know if the picture of his stats reflect the sigils and amulet he was wearing when he snapped the backstab crit damage pic.
I am aware of that and gave that thought, however I’ve seen some other vids and pics of his and they all seem to be consistent enough, with 25-26k HP and similar skills, I can’t say if he changed for toughness but since his HP is the same I doubt he really changed that dramatically – I doubt he changed his gear completely for that pic since other pics his stat seem to be similar.
On another note, in no way do I mean every other class has it easy while the necro has it tough. What I do mean is that for necro’s to achieve what most other classes can achieve, we need to put in twice the effort and usually still under perform.
I never use my staff as a main weapon since it’s completely useless as one – the auto attack is worthless and the marks have huge cooldowns, even with the reduced cooldown trait.
However as a secondary weapon it’s useful enough, I tend to just switch it in when I need it, place the marks as I see fit and switch it out as soon as possible.
I am indeed very very very (VERY) sad at the necro’s current state. Playing for me isn’t about how awesome I can be or how many people I can own, but about how much I enjoy and have fun playing and how well I identify with how I wanna play – necro is the way for me, no way around it.
Not like the necro is completely useless and trash, I still manage to do amazing things with it – however, to be on equal with most other classes I have to dedicate myself so much and play so amazingly skilfully and time everything so perfectly to just achieve what so many other classes can do (and usually do better) by just pressing a couple buttons every now and then.
I agree that the necromancer in this game feels like anything but a necromancer.
A necromancer is supposed to deal directly with death and flesh, I love the pets quite a lot but feel they’re so limited. Death Shroud though an interesting idea doesn’t relate much to a “necromancer” exactly, his special ability should mainly be about summoning creatures upon death instead of becoming darkness.
A necromancer is supposed to deal with death, upon hearing about the Death Shroud for the first time I assumed it’d be something like – if you die you transform yourself into an undead and continue fighting as like, your own minion. That makes a lot more sense than what it is now; cloaking yourself in darkness. For a necromancer it isn’t really about “darkness” but instead it’s more about “death”.
Currently I do feel like this class sounds more like a Warlock than a Necromancer.
I actually would prefer if it were a quick moving scythe that bounced between foes – not so much for the beauty of it (but yes, a scythe is much cooler than a hand), but more for the usefulness. Currently the slow moving hand it sends out is so easily avoided by other players that in most situations I feel lucky to just hit the guy once or twice. A fast moving scythe that bounces between foes would actually be useful.
When a glass cannon goes against a glass cannon thief, the thief usually would come up on top; sure that’s understandable – except this guy is not glass cannon, he has amazing armor for a necro and nice HP as well.
Thieves just deal way too much damage with little effort, glass cannon or not.
I am playing a Necro now from originally playing a Elementalist…
Let me say, Necro downed state is OP in comparison, with the ele, at this point I just sit there and let whatever it is attacking me kill me, with my necro, I atleast have a chance of fighting back as I lay there.
If you’re fighting against one other person and one person only. Because the moment there’s even just one other person fighting you, it’s an instant lose.
I had no idea how crappy the elementalist’s downed #2 was. However the #3 is amazingly powerful, too bad it’s true you’ll most likely be dead by the time you get to use it.
As a necro there are various times I manage to survive long enough to use #3 (and die the moment I finish using it), as an elementalist if I were able to use #3 I’d be set.
I do sometimes feel like it’s bugged, sometimes I get down and I’m surrounded, and just tokitten someone off I use my fear skill on them (cause let’s be honest, using that fear won’t buy you any sort of time other than tokitten one single person off) and after casting the fear they’re still there standing right next to me, not moved an inch.
@mangocheesecake
Agree completely, what’s even the point of going into downed state if it just means “oh well I’m dead anyway, might as well just sit here and let them finish me”, it should indeed give the enemies some frustration while trying to finish you off.
Also agree that our downed state is pretty decent other than the very (VERY) crucial CC skill #2, which is the crappy one target short duration fear.
Also necro’s are supposed to be the masters of fear, however we only got one from staff skill and it’s like a 1 second fear >.>
Agree, for some reason someone decided “hey, let’s make the necro’s only CC skill have large cooldowns, last no time at all – and on top of that, let’s only give him 2-3 of them to use. Oh and better yet, let’s make most of them single target!”
I’m gonna go with others and say the life drain on #1 is pretty much my favorite downed skill.
I agree our #1 is nice since it lets us constantly damage the enemy while healing letting us stick around for a while longer. But usually that doesn’t do you much since it’s not enough to kill someone and get up. The thief’s is a dagger which bounces between foes letting you damage everyone around, and the mesmer’s is one of my favorite since it adds confusion, stacking up confusion you can really deal damage to your target.
However the issue with downed state is trying to survive long enough to get someone to help get you up, and that’s what #2 is used for, and on that note our one target fear sucks.
Our #1 helps a bit since our fear sucks, but unless you’re in a very specific situation it’s not gonna do you much good anyway.
In WvW is where I feel I thrive the most, I run a very tanky and survivable build. People don’t realize how wonderfully tanky Plague Form is, because your HP gets nearly doubled and your toughness gets doubled, on top of that you can blind, cripple and weaken the target at will. I’m able to run in the middle of a crowd alone while in Plague Form, deal nice damage with poisons and bleeds and still manage to get out alive before it ends.
On top of that I like using Spectral Walk a lot since it not only lets me run away if I get overwhelmed but also let’s me use it to run in the middle of a crowd and more easily cast whatever it is I need to cast and then easily and safely teleport out of there.
I wouldn’t know about the other’s classes downed state other than necro, thief, guardian, mesmer, and ranger.
And it’s kind of silly to say our downed state is useful in PvE because just about anything is useful in PvE. Also it’s not as if it’d be nice to have some sort of over powered awesome downed state, just something that gives me a small hope for survivability. While those other classes I stated have a decent downed state survivability the necro has zero (in PvP/WvW) because fearing one target is useless. Also while the health drain is useful in PvE (just like almost anything), it’s useless in PvP unless under very specific isolated situations.
The mesmer can create a downed clone of itself and a phantasm to attack the foes, the guardian can push every single person next to it away and heal, the thief can teleport and go invisible. What does the necro do? He gives ONE single enemy a one second fear and places poison on the ground which people can simply move out of.
This has screwed me over many times in PvP and WvW, if my team’s with me and I get downed as a guardian I’m able to buy me some time while others try pushing the foes away and revive me. As a thief I can teleport to my allies to get revived, the mesmer buys me a lot of time as well.
However if I get downed as a necro I’m completely done for, even if my allies are there close by, because I can only fear one foe for one second I believe and that’s it, then I just sit there and watch someone else finish me off.
At the very least I should be able to fear every foe around me as my 2nd downed state ability, compared to the guardian it would be about the same. Compared to everything else the one target 1 sec fear is pathetic.