My mage has around 2100 armor…. a heartseeker spammer was hitting me for 7k, 8k, 9k whatever….
I logged to my warrior with 3200+ armor… sucked down a 12k crit (no idea what skill it was) and I just logged off….
I have no idea what they do, or how they do, and I don’t care. As far as I’m concerned thieves are just completely broken.
Givers are still bugged.
Duration is important if you’re not in an area with lots of cleanses.
Tooltips are, all condition durations (gear and traits) do apply on the actual condition….
I didn’t mention tooltips….
anywho, after that last major patch someone noticed that runes (like krait) weren’t doing anything. So I got out my stop watch and tested it, and sure enough they were right. The agony sigil on my staff was worthless as well…. the only thing that worked was traits.
So I went pure +damage and haven’t looked back, I find it to be much better in every way, and yes, I find that most mobs die in less than 5 seconds in any large group setting, like events. So if you want to tag mobs you’d better front load your damage, and not worry about how long it will last.
Does +duration work now? I have no idea since I don’t have any, and I’m not about to spend the time to test it.
weakness.. it’s a bonus…
but non-crit damage isn’t what kills tanks
chill… it’s not bad… for the skill recharge increase.. but for kiting it’s meh. Other’s can cripple a boss just as easily. An engineer can easily keep something crippled forever, and still have roots as well, with net turret and swapping to rifle.
Most classes do some form of vulnerability, ice ele’s are good for 10ish stacks, grenade engineers are good for 20.
… but look at the difference.
An ele using his almost spammable #2 staff water skill is still healing away, and I’ve seen my #2 hit for over 5k damage.
A engineer spamming grenades is doing massive damage, and may or may not be keeping up a healing light field.
..but a necro is doing sub-par damage with axe #1, and not a whole lot else. So the damage boost they are giving is offset by the lack of healing or damage that they aren’t doing.
Blind on the other hand is awesome, plague form is about the greatest thing a necro has. The downside is a decent thief can do it far more often, and do decent damage while applying it. A necro basically stops doing everything in order to apply it.
Poison is awesome for those healing bosses floating around out there. Sadly scepter is our best weapon for keeping it up, and it’s not good for much else.
I think that might be the biggest issue for necros.
If you are applying one debuff, you’re not doing something else, and group support is about doing lots of things at the same time, but we find ourselves giving up so much in order to do what other classes were gonna do just as part of their normal gameplay anyway.
Epidemic in a dungeon is pretty meh.
Sure there is gonna be one or two pulls where there are a million spiders or what not, and it’s fun to tag everything and watch the numbers fly, but is that really enough of a reason to bring a necro along?
Lets be practical here; if you want to make a make a group you want a guardian and a warrior… or two of each.. or two guards and three warriors… or one hammer guard and four warriors.
Do we want an ele? Massive aoe, Massive healing (direct heals, passive regen and regeneration), Massive group condition removal, protection, swiftness and might….
Do we want an engineer? 24/7 healing light field that removes conditions, turret regeneration, solid or massive aoe….. and if they spec for it with healing bombs and kit refinement their aoe/healing is insane.
Do we want a ranger? If they spec for it, their pets can tank better than a lot of players. 100% burn uptime, 100% protection uptime (even for ranged classes), healing light field that removes conditions, AOE root, AOE slow
Theif? 24/7 blind with pistol, stealth rez’s, group stealth for skipping combat
…personally, I don’t skip content, and I don’t invite thieves unless I know that they like to spam black powder/smoke field
Mezmer? I’d rather see a boss swatting illusions than swatting me, but for the most part, I dunno what mesmers do. Now that portaling to out of the way spots for boss fights has been nerf’d I’m not impressed with mesmers.
..and necros. Average aoe damage (no better than what the guardian tanks are doing) with aoe regeneration for melee classes. Lousy, and I mean lousy direct damage for condition builds (this make killing ‘objects’ and roots nearly impossible for them, and although rare it does happen), AOE blind. Lots of ways to apply poison.
So there ya go.
Now if you are just facerolling TA or CoF for the umpteenth time, you can grab a guard, and a water ele, and not care what the rest of the group is. But if you are doing Arah storyline, or a high level fractal then it’s not uncommon for people to straight up say that they don’t want any necros.
On the bright side, if you want to make a high-damage ranged condition class that can provide tons of group buffs and regen, it’s easy to level a warrior or engineer.
The writing on the wall says that thieves are doomed.
Let’s just take a moment to enjoy that….
….ahhhhhh.
Alright, so a lot of people are re-rolling, and dagger-mancer is like a thief with high survivability, so I’m sure it will be very popular for a while.
Also, we were a horrible grinding class, but now that our blood-balloon minion dude is a healing machine, we can grind solo with the best of ’em.
Minion AI, though still flawed, is massively better.
Conditions are getting some love? March 26? Maybe?
…..and the number one reason why everyone is rolling a necro these days, they already have seven other level 80 characters, and thought “what the hell.”
Damage>>>>>>>duration
Does duration even work? Last time I checked, it didn’t even work if it came from gear… and just to show how unpopular condition necros are, no one even complained.
Anyway, nothing in this game lives very long, and if it does, then odds are it has condition removal. Event bosses live the longest, but have massive bleed removal, as in someone else is gonna knock off your bleeds after two ticks anyway.
Playing conditions is just like playing anything else. You want to do as much damage as possible, as fast as you can.
If you want to do dungeons, and have a mez and ele… use ’em.
Yes, necros are much better now, but they aren’t that much better, and personally, unless the dungeon is face-rolling easy, one of the last classes I’d want in my group is a necro.
Compared to the other classes, necros just don’t have much in the way of group support.
It’s not so bad.. just now my character went down in a raid, but there are five people rezzing me…… I’ll ask them what they think.
Me: “Hey guys do you SEE anything wrong with rez’ing me?”
Them: “Nope we DON’T SEE anything wrong with…..”
STOMP!
Me: “Blurrragh……”
Permanently stealthed rogue: “/laugh”
(edited by Ezeriel.9574)
Regeneration spam on the tank, and pop plague and spam blind on bosses…
DS is for jumping off cliffs, running from zergs, or maybe long range dps for Axe users….
If I see a person pop DS for any other reason, I actually take the time to whisper them, and explain just how stupid I think they are.
More useful? It depends on playstyle…
Both are viable at different things. An axe necro skirts around the edge of a zerg, lambasting anyone that strays too far. I wonder about their 1 on 1 viability, but it’s popular now, so I guess it works.
I roll conditions. Condition duration on gear does nothing right now, so skip it, and even when it does work again, who cares? WvW is about burst, even if it’s conditiony burst. You need exotic condition gear in every slot, or just forget it, your damage won’t matter if you don’t max it.
If you go conditions it’s all about your survivability, be ready to run 24/7. Plant Mark of Blood on the edge of a zerg, when it trips, spread it with epidemic. Or if you see a mesmer, spread his confusion. Scepter is for 1 on 1.
/signed
the fact thieves can exploit it 24/7 just makes it that more obnoxious
FA has had to deal with this forever.. I never stopped to think about what server we fight might be doing it…
but I’ve seen ballistas stacked in the garrison, or placed in completely worthless places all too often
Stepping away from the zerg means being killed by someone in stealth, and then being stomped by someone in stealth.
That’s the bottom line for me. If I step away from the zerg, I’m just a free kill.
I am at a total loss as to what the hell an engineer is supposed to do without kit refinement.
This horrible, broken, buggy class had only one thing going for it.. and they ruined it…
Go power… Axe is quite nice now…
Add in a little bit of +condition damage for bleeds. Ticks of 80 is plenty.
Condition builds are a lot better now, but I dunno. Maybe it’s a grass is greener thing, but axe looks more fun to me.
Corrupt Boon is borderline worthless…
Assuming his main heal is on cooldown (why would an ele ever need to use his main heal against a necro?)
..and assuming he’s on the verge of death, you can pop corrupt boon, and try to burst him down.
But in the real world (WvW), even if you did catch him totally off guard, and did happen to have the most useless skill in the game on your hotbar (corrupt boon), he’d still just Ride the Lightning to a safe distance, heal to full, and then come back for more.
D/D ele’s fight people 3-5 at a time, and win.
If you see one in pvp, and you aren’t in a group, and you don’t have a root skill that you can use to hold him down long enough for your group to kill him…. RUN!
Kite, kite, kite, kite…. get your kitten back in the tower, and don’t look back. You can’t win this fight.
Elixir gun engineers put necros to shame, as they spam their bleed attacks that are better than scepter #1 in almost every way, and do it from 1200 range.
…all while dancing in a nearly permanent healing/condition removing light field.
…and people say engineers suck.
Then there is the rifle warrior’s Rifle Shot, that has a massive damage, 6 second bleed, that comes on the same weapon that is capable of landing insane damage crits on multiple enemies…
Then there is the mesmer that will keep you busy fighting 20 clones as he attacks you with just about every condition in the game.
and yeah.. the thief…
..and the water mage that just won’t die.
…and the flame spec’d guardian
Necros are nothing special when it comes to conditions.
So I was piddling around with axes in mists, debating with myself the value of power builds, and whether or not I wanted to buy all new gear, and something strange happened…
- Deathshroud was actually worth using. -
I mean for more than a 3-second increased lifespan as I run hopelessly from a zerg, or just a single thief in WvW (grats on balancing that class Anet)
..and I started to wonder, why did they make the so called condition class’s core mechanic so freakin’ worthless?
What does DS get from out of precision-toughness-condition gear?
…or condition-toughness-healing?
For some reason, popping DS and hitting 800 damage crits with the slowest attack in the game. just doesn’t strike fear into the heart my enemy. In fact I can almost hear thieves say “I’ve got him now!”
Perfect example of just how broken this game is.
All hail thieves, the kings of culling!
Except for necros, all classes have a source of regeneration in various forms.
If you could see their self heals and regeneration, you’d understand how a necro can stack bleeds for 15 seconds, and still not do any damage.
…and that’s not even mentioning all the ways to automatically remove conditions that players have access to.
If a commander could ping a map and make a marker that everyone in the zone could see.. that would be cool.
An “attack here” ping
and a “distract here”
I’d love it
The whole culling/rendering thing.
How about shadowy looking, racial-based, placeholder models. In WvW they can be red hued shadow people , since they are hostile, and when they get up-close and personal they can render.
…and instead of the long names like “tarnish coast defender” how about color coded initials and a healthbar like " TC————————- " or " _______TC_______ "
A shadowy looking dude in the distance with a green ‘TC" over his head…. I’d support that.
And if thieves coming out of stealth rendered as shadows first, and then after say… 5 seconds… as people… I’d be cool with that.
People with better PCs could render more people, and at a faster pace, slow PC people can get used to fighting shadow people in WvW, or at major primetime event lagfests.
My comp is slower.. and I would totally prefer shadow people to no people.
Don’t buy anything ’till after the feb update. Roll an alt.
If they fix necros, gear accordingly.
If they don’t do anything, again, gear the alt.
Delete it, destroy it, squash it, and forget it...
It’s a broken mechanic that they stole from WoW, but warlocks in WoW have always been crippled by it.
You get to be really good for a few seconds, and totally sub-par for the rest of the time, and even if you have a 40% uptime, that means that for 60% of the time, you suck.
...but the classes are never designed to be played for the 40% uptime, your core class is the 60% that sucks.
The first time I hit the DS button and saw that everything, every skill, every buff, every pet, every thing that made my necro what a necro was, was gone, and right then I knew that the DS mechanic was trash.
...and it should have been trashed. It should have been put into a garbage can and forgotten. It should have never made it into the game.
So how do they fix it? they don’t.
What they should do is figure out how to make a "condition class" viable in a game where half the classes are almost immune to conditions.
...and to make matters worse the other 7 classes are fairly well balanced with each other.
Does anyone care that hunters have a healing well that heals and cures conditions? or that the engineer has the same thing with 100% uptime? or that an engineer can become immune to conditions at 25% health? or that guardians cure two conditions every 10 seconds without even doing anything? or how ’bout them elementalists?
So here we sit talking about a class that uses bleeds to do most of it’s damage, and bleeds are capped at 25?!? My warrior can stack 20 bleeds by accident every 10 seconds, and even ungeared I think those bleeds will last for 12 seconds ...and necros have to juggle 5 cooldowns, and a weapon swap just to stack 12.
..and lets not even talk about how much +bleed duration a necro needs to stack to make their bleeds even worth using.
....and yes I know that every necromancer thinks warriors are overpowered, but no one else does. I mean honestly, warriors are nothing special.
They should drop DS. They should FIX PET AI, because at this point it’s an embarrasment for the company. Are they even capable of fixing core parts of their game? They should boost necro damage dramatically, and they should treat conditions for necros like they do for all other classes. Treat it like accidental damage.
...and then they should announce that there is no "condition class," because people just aren’t gonna believe it ’till they hear it from the horse’s mouth.
I haven’t rolled thief or mesmer to 80 yet, but out of the other 6 classes, the engineer is the best one for pvp imo.
I guess it’s all about what you want in a class, and the engineer does everything I want a class to do, and does it well.
We get some of the best healing skills, auto elixer s, the best range aoe damage for wvw via nades, turrets, tank builds, dps builds, healer builds, burst builds, condition builds, CC builds….
honestly wtf more do people want? all this nit-picking…
Have any of you complainers ever played a necro? ,,,now there’s something to complain about.
Easily… /snicker /snicker
Assuming the OP is dagger/wells use an earth signet for the extra bleeds, and hide in your wells.
If you are conditions.. you picked the worst spec in the game, don’t blame warriors.
Most people think of banners more like turrets…
…but having a banner that worked like a kit would be pretty awesome, and could offer some much needed utility to a class that feels rather one dimensional (warriors)
Axe/warhorn lets you get some movement speed for moving around in WvW.
Axe/axe is fine for pve-event farming in Orr, but don’t try it in pvp...
Sword/warhorn is great for any pvp, but bleeds aren’t the greatest thing, so don’t build for them, anything more than 75 per tick is wasting stats imo.
Longbows have great AOE, but even with a 70% crit rate I find that the direct damage is kinda dismal.
Rifle, very usable in pvp, just not very warrior’ish
Longsword are very pvp friendly, just don’t be thinking 100 blades is your only button.
Hammer.. mace.. never tried them much, I use them on my guardian, and they seemed too similar to interest me.
All in all, everything a warrior does is viable in pve, but other people will want you to tank in dungeons, so I would get yellow knights gear, slotted with vitality, green trinkets, and rapidly upgrade to exotic.
gear first, then trinkets, then weapons
While in dungeons build the tankiest you can, don’t forget healing skills like shouts, dodge a lot, and spec for groups in mind.
You should be able to figure out how you want to build your toon in a few days... about the time you are ready to get your first exotic weapon.
The knights gear should work ok with any build... and you can tweak from there.
But get your feet wet in pvp, before making your final decisions.
..and if you don’t like what you are, you can always put on the knights gear and do some more dungeons.
Do you plan on going conditions? or dagger/wells?
Dagger/wells is a mystery to me, but people claim it’s viable, and I can’t comment…
…but people also claim conditions is a viable build, and those people have lost their grip on reality.
Condition builds have pathetic direct damage, and actually have a harder time stacking bleeds than other classes, like.. warrior. engineer.. ranger…
Necro condition builds are squishy, a lot of our heals are based on getting crits/hits and our main attack with the staff is likely the slowest in the game.. I think it’s even slower than the warrior/guardian’s hammer.
Necros also don’t have passive regen, which all other bleed build classes have access to. We’re supposed to use our pets for that passive healing… it fails horribly.
but I’m getting way off track with all of this. The bottom line is, in WvW people make glass cannon builds that will kill a condition necro in seconds, or they make bunker builds that remove conditions with ease, and will basically be immune to everything you can throw at them.
I would guess nothing….
I don’t think the devs play, or care, about necros at all.
When they infracted Ruufio for asking a question about shroudstomping, when they asked for people to ask questions, I gave up on caring.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Developer-Livestream-Questions/first#post1228926
I encountered a Guardian in sPvP who was doing fear on me for easily 3-4 seconds…. Because Guardians are so scarier looking i guess :/
Trust me, I’ve looked across the battlefield and seen a necro plenty of times, and seeing a guardian IS far more frightening!
I don’t know if you play tPvP but if you are en experienced player you should know that no one can stand the damage of 5 people in one point for long without using invlunerables and doges. Once they are used, you will be dead. I play bunker guardian or antibunker necro with my guild mates in tPvP and yes, you can tank a lot of damage and I mean A LOT from 5 people but there is no way you can survive on the point without the help of your team. 1v5 will result in death in about… 15 seconds if I have all my skills ready..
I mostly do wpvp… I chased Nisha, with a D/D ele and a GS warrior, for 10 minutes one day before I realized who it was… When he finally turned and started to fight, I ported out, before getting schooled on the gap between the two most “underpowered” classes in the game.
The only reason people think engineers are as underpowered as we are, is because they can’t believe how bad we really are.
(edited by Ezeriel.9574)
make it an out of combat skill, with an on-the-move 3-5 second cast time
then it would take just as long as opening your inventory does now, but it would be a huge quality of life improvement
how ’bout instead of badges for individual kills, you get badges for events, like storming the castle is 5, the supply depot is 1?
Necros don’t have the burst damage needed to kill a bunker of any sort…
But mages, guardians, and engineers are capable of building bunkers that 5-10 people wouldn’t be a match for, so don’t feel too bad about it.
The healing you can get from food, puts the healing you can get from necro skills to shame…
Get some berry pie, and any crit/life-leech build you want to make becomes viable.
Yup, it was “fixed”
…but heaven forbid they do something to stop thieves from stomping you while stealth.
I’m right, you don’t do enough damage, and the fact that there has been a thread about this on the front page, in one form or another, since the game launched proves there is a problem.
If watch oreowolf’s video, you’ll see that the necro gets 5-7 badges… that’s crap…
How often does a zerg wipe? that video shows zerg after zerg wiping likely 80-100 players killed in total. It likely took hours of gameplay to make that recap video, and even in the best case scenario, he only got a handful of badges.
prothorin, you can google “WvWvW jumping puzzle” and see lots of videos, each pvp map has one, and if you want to get badges fighting against zergs, build a well placed arrow cart.
Necros, for the most part, don’t do enough damage to earn a loot bag.
I dunno how it works exactly, but I think it’s something like this.
From the moment a person enters combat the computer tracks how much healing and damage they take. So if they have 20k life, and they take 5k damage, and then heal to full, their total is 25k, and everyone that meets a certain thresh-hold, for damage done to that person when they die, gets a loot bag.
So if you are a necro and you drop mark of blood on the wall and it hits someone, lets assume you get off ten tics before they cleanse the condition and run. 10×150=1500
…and now lets assume they run away from you and into some warriors fire from his longbow, which ticks for 600, and then they get hit with a #3 longbow bomb for another 2500 damage before they run away for a total of 6000 damage.
While they stood on the wall getting hit by the warrior a mesmer used confusion on them and they did 3k damage to themselves…
A grenader got in a hit for 1k, and they are bleeding for another 600.
..and they got away from the edge just in time to take a 8k ballista hit with another 1k bleeding attached to it, and a catapult hit for 6k.
Downed!
As they lie on the ground trying to heal, a mage drops an earth staff #2 bleed explosion, the warrior drops another fire field and #3 bomb, you drop another mark of blood, but it doesn’t do anything since no one ran in to rez, and the catapult hits him for another 5k to finish him off.
Dead!
So based on the total damage done to the guy, the computer then gives the catapult, ballista, and warrior a loot bag.
Necro fields are almost always a bad thing, so people tend to run like hell from them. Fire fields can be good, and half the time people run into them to shoot flaming arrows ’n such.. so for warriors and mages, a little confusion goes a long way.
Fire and poison tick slowly and often go unnoticed. Necro bleeds tic like a machine gun, and anyone that sees a necro attacking them, knows to cleanse the bleeds once they have some stacked.
So what I’m getting at is, people die from the damage they don’t see coming. Fire fields, confusion, burst damage.. that’s what kills.
Necro damage is obvious to anyone receiving it, and it’s low damage too, so even when you do get to see your bleeds ticking away, odds are something else killed them.
It fits into the recycling bin quite well…
…as do any bookmarks to axe based builds you may have.
I’d be happy if the golem didn’t unsummon every time i fall in a puddle
Worst class in the game.
I’ve leveled the warrior, ranger, engineer, guardian, and necromancer to 80, and the necro is just can’t compete with the other classes.
People keep trying to say that engineers are the worst in the game, but I don’t understand that at all.
As an engineer, you can spec for your kits to cast a spell when equipped, doing so allows you to keep a constant light field on the ground, while in your light field you can drop bombs that heal people, and those bombs do aoe damage that would make most necros cry if they could see it.
Or give up on the melee range healing bombs and use grenades, which are still one of the best aoe skills in the game.
Or if you find those skills too clunky, and they are clunky, you can use your pistol and once again do aoe that would make most necros cry.
Or make a warrior and use a rifle to stack higher damage, longer lasting, bleeds that would make any scepter using necro wonder why anet hates us so much.
Any mesmer spec’d for conditions puts us to shame. I love how they say that they can’t remove conditions.. and then you see that they remove a condition every time they heal, and that they have a phantasm that removes conditions, casts regen, and strips boons..and on and on… they deal with conditions a thousand times better than we do.
And our bleeds just aren’t that good.
You take a warrior with a sword. Every 10 second or so they can charge a mob, root it for 4 seconds and whack it over and over with their sword.
Now if they have life stealing, and the earth sigil, they are healing themselves and stacking 15ish bleeds…
Now their 15ish bleeds might only do half the damage of our bleeds, but they can stack twice as many as we usually can, with ease, and while using a crit/tank build that is built for direct damage.
So in other words… if we spec for condition damage, we can do as much condition damage as a warrior that doesn’t !!!
Bottom line…
Necros have tricks, that can be of use when the moons align in just the right way, but largely go unused. The other classes have skills that they make use of without even noticing.
…and their skills are way better than our tricks.
(edited by Ezeriel.9574)
I’d also like to suggest an ability that removes conditions; although we are capable of transferring conditions to our enemies the skills that do this have very long cooldowns and one often finds oneself after an encounter having killed everything but still getting downed because you have poison/bleed and no enemies to pass it on to.
Seriously your going to post that and expect me take you seriously, have you actually ever played a necro?
I sense troll
That signet should be renamed “deathwish”
…I have no idea why anyone would ever use it
Since they buffed run speed, and kinda took a lot of the fun out of guardian self heal builds, I wondering if this is viable too.
Can dagger necros pour on the damage/crit/toughness traits and tank like guardians?
it wasn’t a bad patch, but it ignored the things that we desperately wanted fixed
all that underwater combat stuff.. why are they wasting time on underwater anything…
the very least they could have done was fix the permanent stealth thieves
they aren’t bad with the exploding minion trait… I think they are fine now
I haven’t noticed them keeping me in combat, and that was always my biggest issue
1 leaning toward 2
without a doubt the other classes offer so much more in terms of buffs, damage, and utility, but this is the only class I really enjoy.
The problem is, A-net has no intention of buffing necros, and it seems, every intention of dragging the other classes down to our level.
My grenade engineer went from throwing three 500 damage grenades to throwing three 290 damage grenades… and they called that a 15% damage nerf!
..and they say you can make up that damage loss with two sigils…
Honestly jaw dropping nerfs like that, to classes that weren’t fun to play in the first place, are just baffling to me.
I don’t mind niche classes, but they are nerfing the niches, and now the classes that have become niche classes, like engineers, are completely unplayable.
Guardians are a niche class. Their niche is self healing, and a-net just nerfed the holy hell out of it. So the only real viable option left for guardians is going to be the greatsword.. and I’m sure when all guardians are GS guardians, they will nerf that too.
I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. What the hell are they thinking.
(edited by Ezeriel.9574)
the OP should just roll a thief and exploit the downed state for all it’s worth
yeah… maybe I’m just feeling a little too down on the whole necro thing.. but maybe not…
My grenade engineer (that people complain is weak) is very similar to a staff necro, except he does about 1000-1500 direct damage with his #1 skill, while his #2 is basically the same as mark of blood
and he has constant minor regeneration, turret healing, the potion gun heal, blah blah blah, and if anything ever comes close to killing him, he just shrinks and runs away.
and after loving my engineer… or guardian.. or whatever… i get back on my necro, and I get facerolled by an elementalist, that is already half dead from fighting a miniboss, and just end up feeling completely worthless.
I honestly don’t even know where to begin to fix this class
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