Guild Wars 2

Really, I just feel that Hide in Shadows is broken rather than the entire thief class, since it is really the whole reason they can stealth and come out with full health.

My issue with Foul Current is that the self-combo it makes doesn’t do anything. A leap combo through a poison field adds weakness to the target hit, but Foul Current doesn’t actually hit anything.

That said, it poisons for an obscenely long time (seen 28 seconds with no condition duration before) if they stay in the field at all.

I think it would be nice to have a major trait that applied a percentage of your siphons as heals to nearby allies. It would let the support necro provide a constant stream of health to his allies in combat and would have a number of controls on it for balancing (initial siphon strength, percentage of heal, range of heal).

Heck, even moving it to #6 or 7 in the priority would be a great improvement.

It stands as a secondary option to Well of Corruption, since WoC deals damage, is AoE, and converts more boons total on a single target without the drawback of poisoning yourself. On the same cooldown.

In other words, I would take it if I thought I needed lots and lots of boon removal, but otherwise, it just doesn’t hit the bar.

I really hope that Corrupt Boon gets improved. Preferably to move Stability up into the top 5 boons for conversion.

For my standard condition damage build, the only duration increases I consider are Lingering Curse and Master of Terror (rare veggie pizza/koi cake in PvE and WvW too). I prefer making my conditions hit as hard as possible over making them last long due to the prevalence of condition removal. Master of Terror is a different story, since it guarantees a second tick of Terror from DS#2 with a possibility of a third and, more importantly, means the target is locked down just a bit longer.

Lingering Curse I take because I don’t really have a better option, but it also means my DPS doesn’t drop as much if I can’t attack for a couple seconds and makes kiting easier (Grasping Dead).

The only class that can really challenge a necro in the water is Ranger, honestly, and that is only because of their downed #3 being so ridiculous, especially when you can’t stomp. Mesmers give me a tough time, but that isn’t because of their damage output, rather the stealth/illusion spam so many use underwater.

(continued)
What I dislike:
1. Dhuumfire. Condition necros didn’t need more damage, they needed life force generation (which is still very slim on a condition build). The number of nerfs because of this ill-concieved trait to popular builds (like the non-Dhuumfire Terror-mancer) have upset lots of necros and tuned out build variance, especially in PvP where it is now “Dhuumfire+Terror or forget it” And then Dhuumfire itself gets nerfed for PvP. Suggestion: Remove it. Replace it with something that benefits in some way from condition duration, but deals less burst damage. Perhaps make it deal a few stacks of Torment (closest to current functionality), or make it give some benefit for presence of a condition on the opponent. Regardless, remove the Burning and revert the nerfs to other skills/traits because of it (Terror should stay Master tier, though). It’s toxic to the Necromancer.

2. Marks nerf. The reason to take the Greater Marks trait was diminished some, yet the trait itself got bumped up a tier. In addition, through a stealth nerf, Putrid Mark now only transfers 3 conditions per target from the Necromancer only. The thing that most angers us is the “from the Necromancer only” part. That skill was a fantastic support skill and now it’s worthless for that purpose. Suggestion: Return the ability to transfer conditions from allies to enemies with Putrid Mark. Merge Staff Mastery with Greater Marks and put the trait in Master tier, creating a new trait to replace Staff Mastery at the Adept level.

3. Death Shroud nerf and Spectrals cooldowns. These go hand in hand. While every necro is thankful the double-damage bug finally got fixed (this was not a buff, just a bug fix), the loss of our only damage avoidance ability is a very harsh blow, especially in PvE for large group events with hard-hitting bosses that WILL hit hard far more frequently than we can dodge and/or build up sufficient life force (even with the buffs to life force gain). Bosses can’t be Feared or effectively blinded due to Unshakeable and Weakness lasts a very short time on them. In addition, it lowered the skill ceiling both for playing a necro and for playing against one. Before, a necro would want to use death shroud to negate the damage (still have to take any sigil procs, traits, conditions, CC, or other debuffs on the attack) of a big hit. Likewise, those fighting a necro wanted to hold their burst back until they knew the necro couldn’t death shroud and mitigate a big hit.
It also removed the one escape mechanism that necromancers had in WvW. Likewise, the necro was already good enough at sustain in a 1v1 regarding Death Shroud. Adding the 1 second ICD decimated the sustain necros had when getting hit by multiple opponents, even if the life force granted by Spectral Armor went up significantly. Suggestion:Revert the Death Shroud overflow change and remove the ICD on Spectral Armor and Spectral Walk, dropping Spectral Armor’s life force gain to 3% or 4% per hit. This returns the necros only damage avoidance, raises the skill ceiling, and keeps necros pretty much the same for 1v1’s, and returns a bit of survivability when facing multiple foes.

4. Dhuumfire. Seriously, remove this trait. It has caused way too many problems.

Personal suggestion to the Devs:
Look into ways to make the Necromancer better rewarded for higher aggression. By the lore, Necromancers embody the school of Aggression magic, and we have some skills that represent that. Unholy Feast, Deathly Swarm, Life Transfer, and Locust Swarm all give greater rewards for the more enemies we hit with them. Vampiric, Vampiric Precision, and Vampiric Rituals do as well.

The necromancer needs better survivability against multiple foes, and this may require a rework of exactly how Death Shroud functions (probably by capping how much life force can be lost in a certain amount of time, though another solution may be found), since as it currently works, it cannot be balanced for both a single opponent and multiple foes. Right now, the necromancer is an AoE heavy class that is far better suited to taking on a single target than multiples.

Where I am coming from: 889 hours, 45 minutes on my necro, 1,075 hours, 34 minutes across all characters. 6,265 achievement points. I play primarily PvE and WvW on Dragonbrand.

What I like:
The buffs to life force generation across the board and even introducing a couple of new ones was a fantastic buff to Necromancers using their class mechanic. In addition, the decision to let Spectral Armor and Walk buffs continue to apply in Death Shroud helped tank players greatly in duels.
Tainted Shackles is a most welcome addition to the Necromancer arsenal and, as the first entirely new skill in the game, is surprisingly well balanced, giving the necro more of a presence as well as giving good utility and helped to enhance the “inescapable” idea for the Necromancer.

Spectral Wall in particular deserves a mention, since now it works fantastically as an anti-melee defense and even functions as a peeling tool for necros (something we basically lacked before). The ability to lock off a choke point as well as staff Guardians in WvW and PvE is also a huge plus.

The movement of Axe Training was a godsend for power builds, and Deathly perception renewed many people’s interest in going for a Power build rather than condition damage.

The newly increased mark sizes was very welcome, making the choice of staff as a weapon no longer locking 10 trait points just to be useable.

The attention that siphons got is welcome, but we need more! They are not good enough yet to be viable. Please don’t be timid in your internal testing when it comes to siphons. (continued)

You mean besides the fact that necros before these changes weren’t really complaining about damage, save for condition necros in PvE/WvW where their high damage could be overwritten by some Kill Shot Warrior auto-attacking? Think about your Backstab being ignored because your target had already been hit three times this second by your ally. Yeah, you see the problem. That’s condition builds in general, though. The introduction of Torment was to help alleviate this problem as well as give necros a tool to deal with the people running away at will.

Damage was never a problem on the Necro front (Power was a little weak, but still decent. Pretty good now with Deathly Perception, and Axe Training being useable with Close to Death), it was always on the defense side. Necros have been incredibly easy to focus since launch because they have no method to avoid it and don’t have the burst ability to make their short lives worth it. But here’s the thing: we never asked for burst!

BillFreist.1527:

Hi

So a few things about the latest DS changes:

1. Death Shroud incoming damage
   • You now take the correct amount of incoming damage. Before this change (and it wasn’t always like this, either) you would takes the same damage twice.
   • Your Life Force pool is still the same as it has always been. 60% of your maximum health while alive, plus an additional 0-30% of that base value for Traits, meaning you can have a maximum of 78% of your max health.
2. The change to having damage spill over to your health pool was indeed to resolve falling damage, but was also how Death Shroud was, from a Design standpoint, intended to function. Obviously making these changes simultaneously was to help decrease any sense of buff/nerf to the mechanic itself.
3. Thirdly, we are testing a new way to reflect your Life Force energy pool in the UI using real-life numbers! .

-Bill

To be honest, was anyone complaining about the death shroud parachute? In WvW, it was the only escape method for necros. It wasn’t possible to use it to take towers or keeps due to design (unless a Portal Mesmer would have been able to hide in there as well).

In PvE, it made jumping puzzles safer. Umm, okay. And?

In PvP, it let you survive outside the map on Sky Hammer where you couldn’t do anything anyway, effectively making your team down a player.

The only place where I can possibly see it being an issue are Temple of the Silent Storm and Spirit Watch where, again, it can be used as an escape mechanism or a surprise-initiate (with the knockdown disadvantage).

To be fair, Reanimator was horrible. It hasn’t been for some months, but on launch, the trait was definitely terrible. Unfortunately, people remember that a little too fondly.

Reanimator is a trait where you don’t know exactly what it will do, but outside of a few niche cases (epidemic necro, C&D thief, Subject Alpha), it is always helpful.

Umm, I had mentioned Protection of the Horde before? I was just bringing up why it was a bad minor trait and Barbed Precision wasn’t? Barbed Precision may not be doing much in a full Soldier’s gear, but it is doing something. Between wells, Locust Swarm, and dagger attacks, you should be proccing it every other second or so with the minimum crit chance. It isn’t much, but it is doing something.

Unless I am very much mistaken, that is kind of the point of this thread: discussing minor traits that really need a second look by the devs. I LIKE Reanimator. It may not be fantastic on its own, but it at least works. However, even I see that it would be better suited merged with a major trait. Likewise, Protection of the Horde needs to get merged, but that is because the minor trait does absolutely nothing (not a small effect, nothing) unless you build for it, and even then, the effect is small.

The devs have already stated that this is a bug and added it to the tooltips to warn people about it until they can get it fixed. Unfortunately, it is a very, very low priority fix and so far as we know, they aren’t even working on it.

Honestly, if you have Focused Rituals, you are garunteed to have enough crit chance to proc Barbed Precision roughly 1 out of every 20 hits. If you aren’t hitting more than 20 times in 3 minutes, then the problem is with you, not the trait.

The reason why Protection of the Horde is so terrible is because it is a Minor trait (no selection involved if you want to use any Master tier+ Death magic) that has no effect at all unless you devote your build to it (and even then, it is a very minor effect) THAT is not okay. Every other minor trait in the game works without selecting skills to make it do so.

Reanimator, as much as I do actually like the trait, really should be merged with Minion Master as an Adept Major (keep the name, though, since “Reanimator” also works for re-summoning dead minions). Protection of the Horde, if it stays, should likewise be merged with Flesh of the Master. This second one should be the higher priority as the trait is genuinely useless unless you devote most of your skill bar to it.

If you have Weakening Shroud or Focused Rituals, you have, at bare minimum, an 8% crit chance, regardless of the gear you have equipped. This means you are generally proccing Barbed Precision once every 20 hits, doing an extra 100 damage when it does proc. Barbed Precision is good design just because it takes advantage of what the trait line gives you. Whether you decide to take it further or not is your perogative.

Out of curiosity, but other than simply buffing Siphons (which should definitely be the first step, then evaluate the situation from there), what other ideas do people have for this concept?

The issue he is referring to is when you walk near swimmable water and the Flesh Golem decides to go swimming on his own, only to remember (once he’s sinking) that you didn’t put his floaties on.

You, the player, never even entered the water.

Ever seen the double-port juke? It involves placing Flesh Wurm somewhere safe. Activate Spectral Walk when it’s time to leave, running for a couple seconds, then using Necrotic Traversal. People will use their gap closers to get to your new position, leaving you free to Spectral Recall back to your initial starting point and run off in another direction with 20+ seconds of Swiftness. Pretty handy in WvW as people rarely expect the second teleport for some reason.

Also, it’s a good idea to slot Flesh Wurm when you are assaulting a keep/tower in WvW. Place it on top of the wall for either a distraction (relieving pressure from your siege team) or free damage on defenders.

No, the “Leave now” was in refrence to your spelling and grammer. Your posts are genuinely painful to read and whatever point you think you have gets lost in the “txt tlk”

Death Shroud fall got neutered in the last patch.

However, Dark Path is very strange regarding stealth. So long as you fire it off within a second or two of the thief going into stealth, it will still track down and take you to him. I have fired it off (started casting) a number of times after a thief stealthed and teleported right to him, watching the projectile’s path curve before it hit. Now, you had to have had the thief targetted before he went into stealth, but so far as I am aware, this is the only skill that does this.

Now, this may very well be because Dark path will seek a target in that general direction if you didn’t have one selected, and the skill itself doesn’t differentiate between stealthed or not.

The issue with Sigil of Energy is that to use it effectively, it precludes any other on-swap sigils, but more importantly, any on-crit sigils as well. It is often used on a staff, but all that does is give one extra dodge every 20 seconds due to weapon swap timer.

It helps, but as I said, those attacks come more frequently than once every 20 seconds, so you are in a very similar situation anyhow. Now you have three cycles instead of one (dodge-dodge-dodge, dodge-death shroud, dodge-dodge-dodge) before you are out of options (dodge-death shroud the second time will usually have significant overflow to health, especially for a condition build).

Cogbyrn.7283:

ODB.6891:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Two responses, and neither of you told me if PvE requires more dodges than are physically possible without Vigor.

And you want your profession mechanic to be a poor version of an Aegis? That’s what you want. You don’t want it to be useful, you don’t want to be given something else. You just want to use DS for avoiding spike damage in PvE.

What you don’t realize is I’m actually curious about why you can’t dodge things in PvE with dodges, and I think that with this change, your potential for receiving something along the lines of an evade/invuln/block have increased.

So please, divert your angst elsewhere.

How about answer your own question? Try playing whatever your current class without traiting for vigor or using any evasion/protection/block skills. Don’t use any weapon mobility skills either. Try that on a fight like lupi in arah or alpha in coe. Then provide your own answer on whether 2 dodges are enough with no vigor. Try not being able to heal at all while using your core class mechanic on top of that.

You could have chosen to run through scenarios on those boss fights where you gobble up two dodges and do not have a third dodge ready. I don’t care if it’s adds, inopportune AoEs you have to dodge through, edge case scenarios, whatever. You could have tried to generate a logical discussion centered around empirical evidence.

You could have, but you didn’t.

Instead, you spent a full paragraph telling me to go try it. And what then? If I come back and say “Actually that isn’t bad at all, you just manage X with Y and then you have a dodge ready for Z, since it only happens every W seconds”, what is the response? Here’s what I think it will be:

“We still need something.”

Feel free to insert your degree of flame-baiting/anger/what-have-you.

I don’t PvE. I haven’t seen any of those bosses. Maybe you need a mechanic to reasonably get through them as a Necro, whether it’s another Evade, a Block, an Invulnerability period, Vigor, whatever. Unfortunately, nothing anyone has said has even tried to begin proving that’s the case. And you just added yourself to that list of no-helps.

Well, to be perfectly honest, you aren’t listening either. Yes, by using up Death Shroud (from full), we can survive those attacks. Once. We haven’t built up enough when the attack rolls around again.

The one-hit skills that one-shot (Kudu’s Mega Blaster) aren’t the huge problem. It’s the mass AoE rapid-hard hitting attacks that are. Lupicus and Subject Alpha like to use these a lot and two dodges doesn’t cover the length of time that the attack takes place. They also use them more frequently than once every 20 seconds, so you cannot dodge twice when they use the attack next without Vigor or an evade skill (which Necros have none of).

This isn’t even counting the open world bosses like Harathi Hinterlands and the various Temple events (especially Grenth) that have AoE pulsing one-shot (if you’re not at max health) attacks. Previously, I would avoid what I could, then use death shroud to negate the damage to keep fighting. Now, I can do that once in a several minute fight.

Plexxing.2978:

Question: Can other classes pop an invulnerability skill to survive a fall?

No, thankfully. Which is why cliffs were considered the necro’s only escape mechanism.

Still are if you have an unused Spectral Walk on your bar.

Zikory.6871:

How do you go about obtaining 100% uptime on regen?

Mark of Blood. Use on cooldown.

We can give 24/7 AoE regen to melee allies and have a very strong AoE heal in Well of Blood. Well of Power for AoE condition conversion too. That’s about it on the ally-support side of things.

On the enemy side, we have lots of Weakness, Poison, and Chill with more blinds than anyone but Thief.

Out of curiosity, has anyone else noticed that Dodging doesn’t always interrupt Life Blast? I’ve had a number of times when I fire the blast off mid-dodge, or as soon as my dodge finished.

Nah, the ability to get overwhelmed is actually a good thing. It prevents you from 1vzerging as a D/D ele, for example.

The issue with Dhuumfire isn’t so much that other classes don’t like it, it’s that the necro community as a whole didn’t want burning, but now that we have it, our other condition builds are getting nerfed so the combination of them + Dhuumfire isn’t overpowered. Which, of course, is greatly upsetting everyone who doesn’t run Dhuumfire.

Jagged Horrors are fine even if you aren’t a MM. It’s not a bad trait, people just want something else.

There are, however, two changes I would like to see with it. They are NOT meant to go together, so one or the other.

1. No ICD, but a cap on the number of Horrors you can have.
2. Instead of animating when you kill a foe, you get a buff that summons a jagged horror when you next hit with an attack.

Each of these solves a different issue. Jagged Horrors are actually pretty good, as seen with Mark of Horror, but they really need numbers. Removing the ICD would make this viable. The other issue is that Jagged Horrors rarely survive long enough to land more than one attack because you had to travel between fights and they dropped really low on health during that time. If they were summoned when you hit with an attack, it would guarantee that you would be in a situation where the Horror was useful when it got summoned.

For Minor Traits that need to go, Protection of the Horde is higher on the list than Reanimator. Reanimator gets better with a MM build. PotH requires a MM build.

Running is definitely not going to help you. The Thief will catch you with ease anyway.

Unless, and this is a big one, unless you are close to water. In underwater combat, I have never ever lost to a thief. I may lose to their help that arrived before I exited combat, but I have never lost to a thief underwater. Necros are gods there.

The general idea I have regarding an aggressive playstyle would be bringing the sustain up to be sufficient against one target, but still have it apply equally against each of multiple foes. If an enemy is blocking or dodging your hits, they aren’t hitting you back during that time (save a couple of specific skills).

Necros really need the defensive changes to make this idea effective, though. I feel life force generation may be in a good spot right now, siphons and heals just need to be brought up. Of course, being aggressive does not forgo “master of conditions” or “attrition”, just means you are in the thick of things. The presence of a necromancer in the middle of your team in a teamfight should result in one of three situations.

1. Your team mostly ignores the necro, suffering heavily for it.
2. Your team focuses the necro, allowing the enemy team to bring their full force to bear while the necro takes time to bring down (unless disabled, and disabled frequently).
3. Your team separates to deny the necro as much strength as possible, but opening themselves up to dangerous situations with being outnumbered (never an issue in PvE).

Naturally, a necro should not just win a teamfight for their team, but they should be a major contributing factor. Whether they are putting out lots of damage or disables varies with build choices.

Again, these are just my views. I think ANet really needs to look into what can be done with returning the Necromancer to the aggressive gameplay (which oddly involves boosting their defense options).

This thread is going to be part lore, part mechanics. However, it is also an attempt to at least explain some of what I believe is the design philosophy that went into the Necromancer and discussion for how to take that philosophy to make the Necromancer something greater.

For any Lore fanatics of the game, the Bloodstones are nothing new. For those who aren’t, the short version of what the Bloodstones are is that the five gods (minus Abbadon) sealed all the magic available to mortals into the Bloodstones, one for each philosophy of magic (Aggression, Denial, Destruction, Preservation) and one Keystone. The six original classes for Guild Wars 1 included four spellcasters, one for each philosophy.

Necromancers represented Aggression.

The skills in the game were designed to follow this. Healing from a necromancer required that someone get hurt or killed (in the case of Well of Blood/Well of Power). Creation of minions required that something die (save Aura of the Lich, though that was much better with corpses). Buffs to allies were frequently tied to a sacrifice on the Necromancer’s part, and if not, required the ally to hit a hexed foe.

In Guild Wars 2, the Necromancer still mostly follows this trend. Most of our condition cleansing is actually transfers. Siphons and Life Force gains almost all require hitting and/or killing our enemies, and of those that don’t they require us to go headlong and want to be hit to gain the maximum (save Signet of Undeath’s passive).

How to make the Necromancer feel unique and useful, I feel, is tied to this idea. What better way to make them feel unique than rewarding them greatly for going balls to the wall in aggression, diving headlong into situations that should kill other classes?

We already have some skills that reward us for this style play. Unholy Feast, Life Transfer, Locust Swarm, and Deathly Swarm are all more effective when more enemies get hit (as is Putrid Mark, though it is unclear why this is now the case). Before the recent change to Spectral Walk and Spectral Armor, they were far more effective when getting hit tons of times than when only facing one opponent. Our Vampiric traits also reward us more for hitting multiple foes at once.

This, I feel, is what we truly need more of. Necromancers need better reward for diving into the thick of things, knowing that they cannot escape if they miscalculated. A Necromancer in the middle of your team should be something to really fear, not just drop as a free kill and move on.

The interesting thing is that while the suggestion to put more rewards on necros hitting more targets makes them more powerful with more opponents, it also is already capped by the AoE limit of five targets. The scaling already has a hard cap, so a necro can still be overwhelmed in truly suicidal situations.

My first suggestion is to remove the ICD for Spectral Armor and Walk, altering the life force gains as necessary (drop for Spectral Armor is a definite, possibly remove the stacking). This makes them weaker in 1v1s, but they should put out much more life force when the necro is playing aggressively.

My second suggestion would be to rework some skills to give greater rewards for engaging multiple foes. For example, Blood is Power could be re-worked to hit multiple enemies, giving 4 stacks of might per foe hit. Against 1 or 2 foes, it’s weaker, but when engaging more than that, it becomes much stronger. (I am aware that Blood Is Power is pretty good as-is, but this is an example of the reward for aggression that I am referring to). Tainted Shackles could grant Stability for each foe immobilized. Keep in mind at this point, I’m just throwing ideas around.

I am sure other skills could be altered as well to reinforce this idea, though it might require more effects that are neither boons, nor conditions. The changes don’t have to be limited with skills, however. Traits could get modifications too to reinforce this idea. Foot in the Grave could instead grant 3 seconds of Stability whenever the necro is CC’d (initial CC would still take place, but far more difficult to assist-train a necro with the trait)

In any case, it’s late at night for me here, so I would be interested in seeing what the rest of you think. Could this be a viable path for the Necromancer to take, greatly increasing the reward for taking high risk? I know it doesn’t solve the issue of necros not being good at boss fights in PvE, but it should help with pretty much everything else.

I’ll admit that I haven’t had a solo thief kill me in a long, long time. I’ve had some fights against good thieves (including one memorable one where I couldn’t land anything but auto-attacks on him due to the constant shadowstepping), but the net result was basically a standstill until I got a hit with one of my numerous CC options (usually a Flesh Golem charge, they almost always forget that ability), then they either fled or died.

Of course, I was running a 0/30/20/0/20 build with Reaper’s Protection, Terror, and Master of Terror in full Rabid gear, so I was not a squishy target.

For small group roaming, I would definitely swap Signet of Spite for Epidemic and Corrupt Boon for Well of Corruption. The Well has the same cooldown as Corrupt Boon, doesn’t poison yourself, and can affect more people in addition to damaging them with 1 more max boon converted per person. It also punishes people that spam a specific boon rapidly (like Regeneration or Might, hilarious vs GS Guardians with their retaliation). It’s also a lot more reliable if you are good with placements (Hint: Spectral Walk → Death Shroud → Dark Path → Tainted Shackles →exit DS → Well of Corruption. After Tainted Shackles goes off, re-activate Spectral Walk for a strong combo with a quick escape.)

Actually, I would start with just making the Regeneration boon work while in death shroud, then evaluate from there. Siphoning numbers are quite low, so they wouldn’t change anything balance-wise anyhow. Regeneration, however, is very common and comes very easily both from self (Mark of Blood, Reaper’s Touch), and allies (too many to list) as well as providing numbers that are low, but still significant.

It’s worst in WvW. Lots of bizarre places in there where LoS isn’t clear when it should be.

I think that Celestial Gear is good in only some parts.

For example, I am working out a build that reaches 50% crit chance, then uses Deathly perception. I do not want to waste any stat points in Precision to go above that 50% crit chance, but I do want to maximize crit damage. I also don’t want to be a squishy glass cannon

Solution? Use a mix of Celestial, Knights, and Valkyrie’s for a durable bruiser build with 100% DS crit chance and strong crit damage. I’m currently just working on exactly which pieces I want of each.

Well, Life Blast became a much stronger attack option with the recent changes and the addition of Deathly Perception. Of course, that doesn’t affect condition necros, but hey.

The extra poison duration on the scepter attack does mean that we’re better at making sure our damage dealt actually sticks.

Andele.1306:

Doesnt work against destruction fields, i think thats what he ment with blocked, also fails on invuls/evade moves ofc.

I’ve had it pass right through the Guardian Shield of Absorption, so it’s not all projectile stopping skills.

Bellamy.9860:

You get a movement speed reduction while in combat. If you are in combat then your movement speed + swiftness equals your out of Combat movement speed.

A little less, actually. OOC unmodified movement is 300 units/second. In combat, this drops to 210 units/second. Swiftness gives +33%, for +100u/s OOC and +70u/s IC. In combat with Swiftness is 280 u/s, which is still about 7% slower than unbuffed OOC.

This is the reason why Swiftness will never let you escape from a zerg in WvW.

Thedenofsin.7340:

It doesn’t make another trait better. It would separate the damage component of the Terror trait into a new condition called “Terror”.

So, you are separating the damage portion of the trait, which is all the trait does, and moving it to a new trait that gives access to a new condition?

And this doesn’t seem needlessly complicated….why?

Somoe.3621:

Streets.2705:

Somoe.3621:

Because Engi and Necro are the exact same class… right?

Not at all. They get medium armor, we have light.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Somoe.3621:

Because Engi and Necro are the exact same class… right?

Not at all. They have ways to avoid getting assist trained to death.

I feel sorry for you people that can only see a class’ weaknesses and conveniently never pay attention to their strengths.

Please, oh wise one, inform us of our strengths that Engineers don’t do better.

We have better CC? Clearly you’ve never fought an engie that decided to focus on that.
We have better condition pressure? You do realize that Engineers invented condition spike with the HGH build?
We have better heals? Well, I guess if you look at a pure numbers sense. Never mind that they have 2 heal skills at all times thanks to their toolbelt mechanic.
We have better mobility? Hell, you know that’s wrong. That much is completely intentional.
We have better durability? Between their constant boon spam (the perma-vigor is a very popular build), CC, and blocks (and Elixer S), bunker engineers are an absolute pain to fight.
We have better AoE? Grenadier says hi.
We have better melee? I guess this is true, since Engies don’t actually have any true melee weapons. Flamethrower sure makes that irrelevant, though.
Better stun breaks? Uhhhh, no.
Better direct damage? I don’t think so. Bomb kit hits stupid hard and grenades are no slouch either (never mind the static charge toolbelt spike)
Better condition removal? Automated Response System makes that irrelevant.
Better condition transfer? Well, this is true, but only because Necros and Mesmers are the only classes that even can transfer conditions to enemies.
Better ability to cliff dive? Situational, but yeah, we definitely beat everyone else there.

So yes, please, let us know how we are truly stronger than engineers.

Now, so my post isn’t completely negative, I am actually fine with most of the things on this list being true. Our lockdown builds are still very, very effective (and quite fun!) Our condition builds are still very constant pressure, even through cleanses (save that stupid Hide in Shadows skill). Necros don’t appear to be doing as much as they really are, and I like that. What I don’t like is the fact that we don’t even have an option for avoiding burst.

A bad thief can fail to use one of their multiple dodges to avoid a spike. A bad Guardian can fail to pop Virtue of Courage. A bad Ele can fail to hit Mist Form. The best necro in the world can’t succeed in stopping burst, because we aren’t even given the option to attempt it. That is what irks me terribly right now.

I personally use Undead runes, but for PvP, I’m probably going to swap to Nightmare on a condition build.

The worst part is that they haven’t just said “Dhuumfire was a mistake on our part. We’re working on creating a good replacement”.

Roe.3679:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

That, and if it was an unintended mechanic, why did we have developers making comments that necros were supposed to use death shroud in that method? For that matter, if it wasn’t intended, then why did it change TO having no overflow around Spetember/October? That’s right, at launch, damage overflowed from DS to normal health, then it was changed away from that. Now they have reverted that change for apparently no reason (probably using their bug fix as justification).

If the argument is that the change implies dev intention, then the change back clearly demonstrates that it is no longer intended.

No, it is saying they aren’t sure we need it anymore, since our death shroud is finally functioning at the value it is supposed to. We do, of course, still need it, but if it was “unintended”, then it never would have been the case in the first place. If it had absorbed an infinite damage hit at launch, then you may have a point, but it was specifically changed to do that. If that isn’t intent, I don’t know what is.

That, and if it was an unintended mechanic, why did we have developers making comments that necros were supposed to use death shroud in that method? For that matter, if it wasn’t intended, then why did it change TO having no overflow around Spetember/October? That’s right, at launch, damage overflowed from DS to normal health, then it was changed away from that. Now they have reverted that change for apparently no reason (probably using their bug fix as justification).

flow.6043:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Zikory.6871:

But with torment do you think it would be worthy of being a Grandmaster trait?

Depends how many stacks, really. 5 stacks, I would say yes. 2? Not so much.

There must have been at least 10 threads advocating torment as a replacement for burning.

In a full condition build torment on a moving target will do about 25% damage of burning. So if duration and proc chance are the same then either 2 or 3 stacks are appropriate.

A good chunk of the issue with Burning was that it was yet another condition to cleanse. A “condition burst” from a necro right now already includes Torment, so even keeping it at 4 stacks for approximately the same damage would still tone down the current issues with necro condi burst in the difficulty of negating it. 3 stacks is probably ideal. 2 stacks, probably too weak.

Somoe.3621:

You ARE asking for Death Shroud to be a block/evade/invuln and that’s something the class is not meant to have. Just because one class gets a mechanic that doesn’t mean all classes need it.

Just one class? Try every class. And they all get at least 3 such skills. Necros get none.

And no, even when death shroud could absorb an infinite amount of damage in a single hit, it was still not as good as a block or evade. Anything other than direct damage was still applied (conditions, CC, any on-hit effect for the attacker, etc.), so even though we absorbed the damage, we were still stuck with anything else the attack may have done.