Guild Wars 2

The problem is not that DS counters condi necros. The problem is that it leaves them with no realistic counterplay options (since without minions, the ele could literally AFK auto attacking and not die to the necro. I have run the math). Yes, in a teamfight it is worthless (terrible design for a grandmaster trait). Against a power build, it’s worthless (terrible design for a grandmaster trait). In anything but a 1v1 against a specific build, it is worthless. Against that one build, however, it guarantees you victory.

Terrible design is terrible design. It doesn’t matter who specifically is getting shut down entirely or who isn’t. No matter how you look at it, Diamond Skin is just a bad idea.

Eles do need some extra defense against conditions, since their health pool gets ripped through so quickly by them, but this is not the way to do it.

No, but I’m pretty sure Engineers will phase out the necros, since their hybrid builds are better. Mesmers will come back in as well. Eles and thiefs will still be rare, just necro gets phased out too.

Willing to bet that is what will happen.

mini.6018:

Zomaarwat.3912:

I seem to remember engis having a similar immunity trait; what is the difference here exactly?

.Difference is You need to take down 25% of an engi using only power instead of just 10 %, tanks more damage , has more hp and it’s a lot more dangerous than ele.Just that.

The difference is that the Engineer can’t just out-heal the direct damage. If he does, he loses his immunity. You can still bring down a AR Engineer with condition builds, that last 25% just takes longer than the other 75%.

An ele, however, there is no playstyle tradeoff. You always want to be close to full health.

Overkillengine.6084:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I’d like to see PotH be replaced with something like gaining Retaliation (2 or 3 seconds) when stunned, personally.

Or how about granting the Necro retaliation when a minion dies? And none of this ICD hibbity jibbity either; it would already be capped by the number of minions you could have out.

Edit: of course this assumes the trait would also be made an major/optional trait instead of a minor deadweight trait for non mm builds.

I meant replace it in the current Death magic 15 minor trait slot. It would be a defensive trait that makes use of the boon duration stat.

Ryld.1340:

Sorry, was at work.

Necro has high up time of Regeneration with Staff. Necro has their heal skill. Necro also have Death Shroud to absorb damage.

Water auto attack also has pitiful damage.

High regen uptime with staff assumes that the ele is sitting in melee range. The necro can’t get the regen unless he is standing in the mark when it gets triggered. Again, Death Shroud is a one-time resource against a DS ele because the condition necro can’t gain life force (they require conditions on the target). Power necros can’t gain life force (or deal damage) either if the ele stays at >600 range.

Even doing the lowest damage auto-attack, the ele WILL wear down the necro to death.

magical giant.8650:

Balefire.7592:

Necros already suffered focus-fire issues and often needed a hand – now we need support to do damage as well?

Why do you think necromancers suffer focused fire? because you deal tons of damage and can wreck a whole team if not taken care of. So No I don’t think you need support dealing damage. When I have a necromancer on my team I usualy want to team up with him since necromancer and elementalist synergize really well together but as it turns out things get nasty when we fight. ^^

About the warrior trait of course it aint the same thing but it’s still a situational trait my point is that I belive people are taking things alittle to far on how good this trait is.

No, necros suffered from focus fire even before the notorious Dhuumfire patch. They get focus-fired because they can do nothing to prevent it and can’t escape. All that changed on that patch was now there was a bigger reason to focus the necro first and a bigger reason for your team to try and prevent it.

And the Warrior trait still applies to all classes pretty regularly, it’s just a question of magnitude. Obviously Guardians and eles get hit hardest with it, but necros and thieves usually have a boon or two as well. Diamond Skin really only applies to necros because they lack the direct damage to break it in a condi build or the ability to catch the ele to deal damage in a power build (since the ele can’t be snared and power necro is >600 range).

Should be pretty easy to test if poison reduces the healing or not. Get a necro or thief buddy and go into PvP. Have him get you poisoned with Shortbow #4 or Corrosive Poison Cloud (alternatively, ask them what their condition damage stat is, divide it by 10, and add 80) and see what it ticks for. Then, let him hit you a few times so that the base heal doesn’t heal you up to full. Get poisoned and compare numbers.

Bhawb.7408:

There are still some fixes that need to be done, but overall minions are usable in most situations, so long as you aren’t zerging.

They seem pretty useful while zerging too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbvjWD0W4SU

The new heal steals health, kinda. At max, 2k health, assuming they stand there and let us hit them when they have a giant red circle above their heads. It means they might have to dodge or use a non-auto-attack skill

I will definitely agree with you on the first two, though Asura size is the biggest problem most of the time. Screen clutter only really gets bad in team fights.

Warriors and condis, I think we need more time after the patch to confirm things.

Tricare.2946:

The Game Slayer.7632:

who are you to say that? im pretty sure the devs knew this, and they put it in the game knowing so. so the dev’s disagree with you. lol.

It’s a sign of horrible balance in a game when one trait can cancel out a whole professions build. This game isn’t suppose to be Rock, Paper, Scissors.

He doesn’t care. He’s one of the eles that wanted it.

Bhawb.7408:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Which is really sad, because more necros want that armor than any other dungeon armor.

Depends on your character. Female human Arah is a god awful set, compared to the otherwise pretty solid (albeit kittenty, not that I’m complaining) sets.

I was only comparing it to other dungeon armors :p

Oh, Eles needed some assistance all right, after the D/D cantrip nerfs (when that was still strong, most necros didn’t bother fighting because the ele could remove conditions faster than they were applied). That still doesn’t change the fact Diamond Skin was the wrong way to do it. Perhaps some cooldown reductions on the condition cleanses the ele has (because eles do actually have very good condition cleanse abilities compared to most classes) or reverting some (not all!) of the D/D cantrip nerfs would have been a better move.

The Game Slayer.7632:

alanis.6094:

The Game Slayer.7632:

What is the difference between kiting out the war for 8 seconds or doing physical damage for < 8 seconds. both are completely realistic counters.

If a conditionmancer could get an Diamond skin elementalist below 90% within 8 seconds by merely physical/power damage, this thread wouldn’t exist.

Except, you’ve literally done nothing to change your build and you think you can still steam-roll everything that walks your way. Too bad. I don’t feel sorry. This thread is ludicrous.

If we don’t change our build, it should still be possible. Difficult, yes, but possible. A character with no condition removal whatsoever can beat a condition damage necro. It will be very difficult, but it is possible. However, it’s mathematically impossible for a condi necro to beat a DS ele. Do you not see how this is a problem? This trait singlehandedly removes skill as a factor in a necro vs. ele fight.

Even if we do change our build, it would screw us over against everyone else to deal with literally one single build. A weapon change is not “small”. That is 1/3 of our skills. Unfortunately, that is the only way to manage it. You aren’t suggesting an edit to a build, you are saying we should use a terrible build because it’s the only way we can break past a horridly binary trait that reeks of terrible design.

I can attest to this as well in WvW. I cleansed the immobilize, but was unable to move. My server won that engagement, but a minute later, I was still stuck in that one spot, unable to turn or dodge roll.

Probably made Orr mobs even easier in the patch. Not sure why they’d do that, though.

Poison ticking for 900? kitten . That requires 8,200 condition damage!

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

Reading through this has confirm my non acceptance of necros in arah runs….

Which is really sad, because more necros want that armor than any other dungeon armor.

I’d like to see PotH be replaced with something like gaining Retaliation (2 or 3 seconds) when stunned, personally.

Auto-immune Response Engineers below 25% and just cleansed all of our conditions? Just keep fighting them. Unlike an ele, they can’t out-heal our physical damage. If they do, they lose their immunity to our far more dangerous conditions. They can’t negate us at that point, they have to endure us. It becomes more difficult for the necro, but it still is possible.

If an AR Engineer is immune to our conditions and somebody else shows up, the engineer is boned. If a DS Ele is immune to our conditions and somebody else shows up, the ele is exactly where they want to be (health-wise, at least).

Amstel Steel.2058:

SoV necro for a support/bunker. Not sure how it works on a competitive setting.

Terribly. A decent bunker necro uses any of the other available heals.

Blood Fiend for sustain/MM (which can be very effective bunkers)
Well of Blood for large healing/team support
Consume Conditions for general heal and condition clear.

On the other hand, removal of the ICD for the passive (and active) would allow it to be meaningful damage-mitigation. Unlike Healing Signet or any other passive regen signet, a necro really can’t heal up from the passive (ignoring clone spam mesmers).

Vortok.6975:

Perfect imbalance? You mean like MTG and Guild Wars 1? They throw a LOT of skills/cards to adapt to any deck/build. Tell me how i do that in GW2? Where’s all the skills that can allow me to adapt? I just think some peoples watch videos that they don’t understand.

A decent point with MtG. If you are having issues with something specific, you can adapt your deck pretty easily to account for it. This may require using another color (such as enchantment troubles when running red/black), or it may just involve some different cards (such as problematic creatures when running blue). The nature of the game means you can combine elements from anywhere to get a desired effect. Guild Wars 2 can’t quite accomplish that. The variety isn’t there.

As an aside, who else knew that Red has the second highest amount of counterspells in Magic?

Bweaty.9187:

Oh yeh, I forgot… Chill/Cripple/etc still auto-transfer from your minions too you, even if they out of Line of Sight.

Ummm…what? I’ve never seen this happen. Are you running Plague Signet?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

You talk about braindead play? There you are. An ele running X/X/30/20/X can stand perfectly still, using their weakest auto-attack option, and still bring down a condition necro with no fear whatsoever.

Going to repeat this. While condition necros were lower skill floor than many (even necros) like, the way to fix it is not to introduce an even more braindead counter.

Banjal.7328:

Its very easy to fix.

Take the ICD off both parts.lower the healing on hit to 100 and 200 for the active.Make it so it scales well with healing power.

The healing power scaling isn’t too bad, at least if you discount the initial self-heal. It’s 10% on the passive and 20% per siphon on the active. The ICD’s do kill the skill’s usefulness, though.

CMstorm.8679:

Terror builds still work :P or if u don’t want to take that, use axe/focus and have scepter/x for your swap. necro Condibuilds aren’t dead at all. You can’t just face roll all your Condi’s on a target and hope that they die now…pop into Lich Form. problem solved

Dropping everything we had didn’t work on skilled players of any profession before, and it still won’t work now (especially since it got directly nerfed). Now, though, you don’t even have to be skilled to make it not work if you’re an ele.

Popping into Lich From tells the ele to just turn around and leave you alone for 20 seconds, since you can’t do jack to stop them.

Banjal.7328:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

A good video, but it’s tough to tell if you were staying healthy because of the signet or because of the healing capabilities of your allies.

It wasn’t the signet,it was him being in a group with a Guard and Elem.He could have done all that with out the signet and his health would still look the same.

Sorry, I forgot [/sarcasm] at the end of that post.

Skrill.6170:

Actually there is a guy who got rank 80 now!
THIS is the real deal guys!!!

That’s not a dragon, that’s a Hellkite.

Yeah, Flesh of the Master is the minion HP trait.

However, Jon already stated that they will not be merging Protection of the Horde with Flesh of the Master. Since one is far better than the other, it just means PotH will never see use unless they do a major rework on it.

You apparently missed all of the posts bashing those nerfs. There were a lot of them.

hackks.3687:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Good in theory, but I doubt it would work in practice. You wouldn’t be able to hit them twice with Life Blast. Once, perhaps, but they would get up and dodge before the second goes off.

Or they dodge the Dark Path, making your whole combo meaningless. It’s not like they have anything else to dodge.

The first LB is practically a freebie if done correctly. Sorry, but if they’re dodging your important skills then you used them wrong.

You only need to register about 1.5K damage to take off 10% of an Ele’s HP. In full bunkertard (not doing any damage) they max out at around 20K HP. D/D Ele is more likely to have Zerker or Valk setup and will have between 12k and 15k HP.

There’s not a ton of work to be done there. You just have to change how you open the engagement. Or you could just have a teammate hit the Ele once and let you take over from there…

seriously, you guys would realize this is not the most challenging of obstacles if you just start looking for answers instead of claiming the sky is falling…

If our important skills are being dodged, we’re doing it wrong…

Our important skills are the only ones worth dodging in the first place. Other than the Dark Path or Charge, the Ele has literally nothing to fear from our skills, so saving their dodges for those is obvious. When there is no reason to dodge anything else, of course our important skills will be avoided.

As for kiting a warrior versus attacking the ele, the difference is pretty obvious. The warrior only has a set time where we can make no meaningful progress. The ele does not.

For the Mesmer, Warrior, Guardian, Elementalist, and Engineer healing skills, I have seen much debate about if the skills are good or not. Many posters on both sides of the debate have been expressing their views on the quality of these skills with a pretty even split.

For these skills, I say “Good Job ArenaNet. They are probably pretty close to balanced.” They could use numbers tweaks for sure, but the skill itself is probably balanced.

Ranger heal is a little odder. Nobody seems to feel strongly one way or another on it, but the fact it’s another spirit makes some people uneasy. Again, I feel it’s probably fairly close to balance, but it’s a trickier one that will require more time to really see.

Thieves and necros, though really feel screwed. Thieves lament the fact that their skill was designed as though they were running a full Venoms build to the point where the heal isn’t likely to see any use outside of those. Necros lament the fact that the new skill just plain sucks. On these, I feel ANet needs to re-examine how they decide to balance skills and traits. While they should keep the optimal situation in mind when working on them, these should not be balanced assuming that the optimal situation is how they will always be used. There is a discrepency among how various skills and traits are balanced and it is painfully obvious. This is even made more obvious when the new Warrior heal comes into account as its potential truly is limitless. I do not want to deny Warriors their new toy. It’s a great skill with optimal situations to use it. What I would like is for ANet to look into balancing everything based on regular use instead of optimal use. It is OK if something is powerful in its ideal situation. That’s rewarding the player for recognizing that situation and taking advantage of it. It is not OK if the ideal situation is the only time something is good.

Ryld.1340:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

jmatb.6307:

It’s easy to take the Ele’s health down low enough for your skill-less, braindead condi spam to work, but if someone builds to defend themselves against a condi build expect it to work!

Also, I do not recognize ANY of your account names and none of you Necro apologists are anywhere near top 500 on LB so why should anyone take your opinions seriously?

You do realize that with a mere 20 points in Water Magic and Signet of Renewal, you can stand and auto-attack in water attunement to completely negate the necro’s direct damage? You would heal 274/second if you only auto-attacked once per second, and all water attunement autos fire faster than that. A necro’s direct DPS (with 30 points in our Power line and wearing a Carrion amulet) against a diamond skin ele (minimum 2300 armor) is a bit less than that (only 279 against 2200 armor).

You talk about braindead play? There you are. An ele running X/X/30/20/X can stand perfectly still, using their weakest auto-attack option, and still bring down a condition necro with no fear whatsoever.

The necro won’t die to an autoattacking water attuned ele either.

And how would the necro not die? He is taking damage and, unlike on the ele, it sticks due to only having the #6 to regain health, and even with no power investment, the ele will deal more damage every 26 seconds than consume conditions can heal. Feast of Corruption would give no life force at all because there are no conditions on the target. Necrotic Grasp, the only other source of life force for condition necros, travels so slowly, you can cause it to miss with light strafing.

It may take a long time, but the necro would die. The ele might have to sidestep some slow-moving projectiles, though, so I guess my earlier portrayal isn’t 100% accurate.

Good in theory, but I doubt it would work in practice. You wouldn’t be able to hit them twice with Life Blast. Once, perhaps, but they would get up and dodge before the second goes off.

Or they dodge the Dark Path, making your whole combo meaningless. It’s not like they have anything else to dodge.

An example of a “perfect imbalance” counter to a condi necro: Guardian running Contemplation of Purity.

He takes what we were doing to him and turns it to his favor. However, any damage the necro dealt is still there and he can respond to it as well (frequently with a Corrupt Boon, to which the Guardian either anticipates with a dodge or re-stacks his boons knowing the corruption is now on cooldown). Even in the corruption situation, the Guardian is likely in a better spot than before thanks to stack reductions from the conversions.

Another example would be Berserker Stance Warriors. They become very difficult to touch as a condition build, but the necro can still kite and wait out the duration of the stance, letting any currently applied conditions do their thing.

Diamond Skin breaks this. There is no condition-counterplay because the conditions never get applied in the first place.

Feast of Corruption is the closest thing condition necros have to a physical damage “burst” and yes, it does require multiple conditions on the foe to deal meaningful damage.

Chill of Death is the next most damaging possibility, but since that only triggers when the target is below 50%, it’s irrelevant.

Only other option would be Reaper’s Might Life Blast and hope that the few stacks of Might we get is enough to break through. If the ele is outside of 600 range, the life blast itself most likely isn’t.

That’s it. 3 options, one of which is irrelevant entirely, one which is hard-countered by the very trait we’re trying to use it to bypass, and one that drains our only defense at all against a condition-immune foe.

Only trouble is that the direct-damage burst a condi necro has first requires the target to have a number of conditions. Which doesn’t work because they are immune.

Alternatively, it requires them to be below 50% health, which again is irrelevant since at that point we don’t care about Diamond Skin anymore.

Engineers aren’t as big of a problem because they can’t out-heal our direct damage or they lose their immunity.

jmatb.6307:

It’s easy to take the Ele’s health down low enough for your skill-less, braindead condi spam to work, but if someone builds to defend themselves against a condi build expect it to work!

Also, I do not recognize ANY of your account names and none of you Necro apologists are anywhere near top 500 on LB so why should anyone take your opinions seriously?

You do realize that with a mere 20 points in Water Magic and Signet of Renewal, you can stand and auto-attack in water attunement to completely negate the necro’s direct damage? You would heal 274/second if you only auto-attacked once per second, and all water attunement autos fire faster than that. A necro’s direct DPS (with 30 points in our Power line and wearing a Carrion amulet) against a diamond skin ele (minimum 2300 armor) is a bit less than that (only 279 against 2200 armor).

You talk about braindead play? There you are. An ele running X/X/30/20/X can stand perfectly still, using their weakest auto-attack option, and still bring down a condition necro with no fear whatsoever.

I do know, I’d just be interested to see if it actually does do better in your small-group roaming than the signet. Since you never use the active on the signet, I can’t imagine it would do too much worse.

You aren’t shining with that change, though. All you are doing is pushing necros out. Other condi builds (Warrior, Mesmer, Engineer) have better power coefficients and/or gap closers/CC that aren’t condition-based will still destroy eles.

And yes, the ele would kill the necro. Even 5 effective damage is greater than 0. I can garuntee the damage even a bunker ele puts out in 26 seconds is significantly greater than Consume Conditions heals for. Assuming a condition build, the necro can’t gain life force (since Feast of Corruption only gives life force per condition on the target with no base amount and staff 1 will never hit), so death shroud sustain is a one-time deal. It may take a bit, but a Diamond Skin bunker ele will kill any condi necro with no chance of counterplay.

For example, let’s ignore the regeneration boon entirely and just deal with Soothing Mist and Signet of Renewal. Assuming 20 points in Water Magic and no additional healing power, that is 274 health per second from auto-attacking (assuming 1 second per attack, though all water attunement autos are faster than that). This alone nearly equals the physical DPS of a condition necro (30 spite, Carrion amulet gives DPS of around 279 against 2200 armor, which a diamond skin ele has a bit higher than). Adding in any additional source of healing (or healing power) skews things even more in the ele’s favor.

TLDR: Diamond Skin turns bunker eles invincible against condition builds. Not just strong, but invincible. They don’t even have to do anything but auto-attack and move enough to keep the necro in their chosen range. Other bunker builds may have been difficult to kill, but they also required high skill on the bunker’s part. Diamond Skin ele? Just auto-attack and occasionally give yourself regen. Oh, and you’re a kittenty bunker because literally anyone else can come and stomp you with ease.

Bhawb.7408:

Glenn.3417:

What are they planning for Death Nova?
Wouldn’t be surprised if they completely screw over Minion Builds as well. >_>

Literally just slapping Reanimator on Death Nova.

Seriously, no offense, but I don’t understand why this has been so hard to understand for so many. Take Reanimator, put its effect into Death Nova, that’s it. It isn’t special.

In response to the removal of Reanimator, they will add a trait that has usefulness to all builds going into Death Magic (generally defensive builds), and is actually a defensive trait.

Exactly. When I made a thread to discuss new ideas for those minors, it basically got ignored by most, but many of those who did post kept talking about how to change Reanimator and Protection of the Horde, completely ignoring what Jon Sharp had already said regarding them (which I had linked in the first post!).

xev.9476:

Really? We’re upset because this jacks condi builds and we want the trait changed to accommodate power builds?

Since necro power builds rely on conditions as well, yes.

Necros don’t have any passive regen, so yes, the ele sitting in water attunement is killing us. Slowly, perhaps, but still killing us.

And the 750 is not only counting Soothing Mist and Regeneration, but also Signet of Restoration. Actually, this contributes more than Regeneration and is very much constant.

xev.9476:

Wtf makes people here think that just changing the trait to immunity to condition damage will solve the problem? Wow! So instead of pressuring or defeating a condi immune build we can instead chill or cripple them to potentially, and only very slightly, delay our demise. Oh boy! The problem isn’t just immunity to our cc, but also our damage.

Being able to CC them buys us time to actually bring them below 90%. Without being able to do that, we just die too fast.

More specifically, it means we can poison the ele and cut their healing. Cut healing means they have a much harder time staying above 90%.

I’d actually be interested in seeing you run Blood Fiend instead and see how it compares.

I just did a couple of CoF runs using Signet of the Locust as my actual heal and Signet of Vampirism in the #6 slot. I think I might have liked it better if I was on dagger mainhand instead of axe so I could supplement it with dagger 2. Regardless, my health fell pretty low in those runs, though I never went down. The problem there is that it is more because CoF is so downright easy than the signet doing anything useful.

A good video, but it’s tough to tell if you were staying healthy because of the signet or because of the healing capabilities of your allies.

Taldren.7523:

No ele is going to run this … its a bad joke. It works on maybe 2 classes with a specific build that has absolutely no power in it (or smart enough to lifeblast / lifetransfer before applying conditions).

You think this is not fun … show the same ele vs a thief or warrior and see how useful that spec is.

Which is exactly why the trait is in dire need of changing. It is only useful versus a couple of builds from a couple of classes, but against those builds, it is god mode. The trait is too binary.

I don’t know why people still think the passive does damage. It literally does 0 damage, with a 0% scaling from Power.

I would honestly consider the skill if they just removed the ICD’s on both passive and active. The cast time and recharge are still a bit excessive, but at least then I could see it getting some use.