Guild Wars 2

striker.3704:

Fynd.4890:

Regarding the October 1st game update of:
“Haunt: This Shadow Fiend skill now triggers instantly.”

I just tested this, and Haunt still takes the Shadow Fiend 3 seconds to cast. New Bug to be filed under Slot Skills/Utility.

No this is intended. Originally your character had a channel time, and then the shadow fiend itself had a cast time. so you’d spend upwards of 4 seconds for a 4 second PBAOE blind that did a little over the shadow fiend’s auto attack damage.

In earlier betas, the pet cast time was instant, and it hit upwards of 4k with max power gear. Damage was nerfed and cast time was added. I’d hoped they were going to revert to no pet cast time, but alas…

I don’t quite see the point of having a blind that isn’t instant. If you see a major attack coming your way, it would be skillful to instantly blind the foe. With the way it is now, you blind the foe 3 seconds after you want to. Arbitrary blinding leads to mindless play and facerolling abilities, it’s just a bit disheartening.

Regarding NB0092 (Spiteful Talisman): The October 1st Update does not list this as being fixed, but all aspects of the bug are fixed(the cooldown, the range, the in-combat anomaly).

However, there is a new bug regarding the 4-skill on focus – Reaper’s Touch. Although the range is listed as either 900 or 1200 (traited with Spiteful Talisman), the bounces only activate if an eligible target is within 600 range.

Regarding needing a 2nd confirmation on: “Curses trait Weakening Shroud does not activate when entering DS underwater.”

All ground-targeted Utility skills do not work underwater, so this is working as intended taking into consideration that while enfeebling blood may not be a utility skill, it is still ground-targeted on land.

Regarding the October 1st game update of:
“Haunt: This Shadow Fiend skill now triggers instantly.”

I just tested this, and Haunt still takes the Shadow Fiend 3 seconds to cast. New Bug to be filed under Slot Skills/Utility.

Jae.5138:

roll an elementalist and tell me how to get out of pwhip plz

Lightning Flash

Now here’s a project for you: roll a necro and tell me how to get out of devourer venom/pistol whip spam w/ haste; even better, devourer venom/pistol whip + panic strike trait.

I think we can all agree that devourer venom and pistol whip makes it extremely free, then haste on top of that just makes it donations to the blood god.

Weapon Bug
Trident 4 ability
“Sinking Tomb”

• Many of you will hate me for reporting this bug, but the ability has infinite range rather than the listed 1200, and does not require LoS and can hit targets on land. Thus making it hilarious to use on Capricorn to hit anyone on the map as long as you have their target in water.

Sjach Darasv.3729:

I know it doesn’t take away the points you have already earned, but you lose out on points occasionally. There have been times i have been in the stomp animation with the enemy having no more escapes left and get team swapped before it finishes, not to mention tags on all the other players getting ready to die. Thats 15+ points right there gone and the people saying we should be upset about it are really saying you just lost out on 15+ earned points + the match victory bonus, but it’s perfectly ok. Once, one time and I’m pretty sure it was a bug, i got team swapped and got points for a player on the team i got swapped to dying that i was in the fight with I got points for. One player, out of the pack of 3-4 that were getting killed, that is still a 45 point loss plus the 30-60 win bonus loss depending on booster.

Okay, so there are two problems here:

1. You lose out on 15 points
2. The game needs to be balanced because one team has more members than the other

My apologies, but I’d rather see #2 fixed and a balanced game commence than #1 remedied. That’s the selfless compromise, life isn’t always fair.

I guess you’ve actually never done sPVP, because if you did, you’d know that when you get teamswapped, you retain your points, and being swapped to the losing team is actually beneficial to gaining MORE points, because usually your team is now 3-capped and you can go on a neutralization spree (10 points each for 3 seconds of neut. time).

You only gain glory at the end of a match, so quitting early already hurts the quitter by dumping their current earned points into the nether.

TL;DR: there’s already a nice leaver penalty, a time-out penalty would be excessive

This post and the above 2 from me are all one post, please read in that order if you have patience

If you ask any thief/warrior/guardian which class they prefer to use their blowup on, it’s necro, because most necro’s have to run divinity/berserker’s amulet to squeeze out every last bit of damage out of these crap weapons that we can, and it leaves us with ~1200 toughness, meaning hundred blades will crit for 16-19k, kill shots for 15-16k, backstabs will crit for 12-13k, steals and heartseekers for 6k, pistol whips for 10k. All very cool stuff when necro power builds can hit no harder than 4k with any single attack, and that’s the lich form spammable 1 attack. Lich form sucks because you lose your utility and the ability to heal, so most people that bring it just toss two auto attacks for 4k crits and die. Lich form 1 skill cannot possibly be buffed, either due to quickness making this game a balancing nightmare. If a mesmer brings timewarp and pairs with a necro in lich form, people are getting gunned down by 4k 1-spam that splashes. That’s a problem with the synergy between NO OR LOW COOLDOWN MOVES + QUICKNESS <- fix this above all else. Rangers were the only class in gw1 with quickness if i recall correctly, now thieves, warriors, and mesmers get it. All classes which are top tier, due to it.

Perhaps a fix for this would be that life blast applies a damaging condition on application, i.e. a 3-stack of bleed or a 2-second poison to make Death Shroud a more consistent experience to both power/crit and condition necro’s. There is a trait called “Terror” that gives fear damage ( a DoT, to be more precise), which scales with condition damage. The coefficient seems high, but perhaps the designers failed to realize that necro fears lasts 1 second, at most 1.5 seconds traited in a different tree. How about you increase the coefficient significantly for condition damage so that people know when they’ve been feared by a condition necro. This will sway the two necro specs more towards parity, because power/crit specs will want to use life transfer and maybe a few life blasts looking for 2500 crits, whereas condition necro’s will want to death shroud to take advantage of the conditions on life blast and the extra damage boost from a fear. Both specs will use the fear as twitchy CC, but condition specs will get more out of Doom and less out of Life Transfer, and both specs will get the same out of Life Blast and Dark Path.

Lastly, necromancers have 3 stun breaks and they all suck. If a skilled thief jumps you with devourer venom(2+2sec of immobilize) and quickness up, prepare your anus because there’s nothing you can do as a necromancer.

1. Spectral Armor: 90 second cooldown and you get one boon (Protection) and stun break. If above situation happens to you, stun break gets you out of first stun, then second, third (if needed) pistol whip re-applies stun and immobilize. If spec’ed deep into Deadly Arts, you also get Panic Strike – so you’ll apply a whopping 8 seconds of immobilize to said necro. Okay, so the necro breaks the stun with spectral armor, but is immobilized for 2+2+4 seconds. Cool)))))))))))))))))) When I play my mesmer and I get jumped by a lame quickness/pistol whip FotM thief, I simply Blink away. Blink is a stun break that gets me away. Sure, I take my immobilize with me(not cleared), but the disorientation time(for the thief to visually reacquire their moved target) and distance of the blink allows me to recover and reset the fight so that it’s not ALWAYS in the thief’s favor. Same goes for ele’s that take Lightning Flash, it’s virtually the same move as Blink. Guardians can just use Contemplation of Purity to convert all conditions to boons and break stun, which is on a 60 secoond cooldown. Superior in every single way to Spectral Armor, and on a shorter cooldown. Plate > Light armor.
2. Spectral Walk: Facepalming here
3. Plague Signet: Same problem as above, no positional manipulation(mesmer and ele with blinks, shadowstep on thieves, rocket boots on engy) OR persistent immunity to CC/incoming dmg (rangers have signet of stone on a LOOOONG 2 min cooldown to counter pistol whip thieves AND you have to really build your char around it because it’s a 30-point marksman trait, warriors have endure pain for 5sec of immunity(6 traited), engineers have elixir S for 3sec of invuln), so you just die where you are due to repetition of stuns.

Now I have painted a horrible picture for necromancer here when it comes to getting jumped by thieves or bull’s charge/hundred blades because said moves are on shorter cooldowns than necro counters, BUT to their merit, necro’s CAN death shroud during stuns even though it’s not a stun break, then once the stun is over, they can fear, which is instant and can be used during channels like a mantra(very thankful for this), but unless, by chance, you have a full death shroud bar – you can simply fear once and then get immediately dumped out of death shroud when the next pistol whip or heartseeker eats your full life force bar. If you have no life force, then you’re dirt – no simple way around this. Necro stun breaks are the absolute worst in the game, despite being some of the most plentiful – some classes only get 1 or 2 stun break utilities.

There are much more nuances to the class that I haven’t touched on, like staff auto attack being slow trash and the only life force builder on staff, forcing necro’s to take a deep soul reaping trait to get 3% life force off marks since staff will otherwise build no life force, thus leaving the necro as food. Dagger life force builder being on 130 range auto attack, whereas axe has a nice builder on a fast channel move and 600 range. TL:DR; necro weapons suck and don’t have enough damaging conditions(bleeding and poison), after all we did lose disease and deep wounds from GW1.

JonPeters.5630:

Keep in mind that some professions are harder to master than others. I believe Necro is the hardest, opinions may vary, but just keep this in mind. No we arent ignoring Necro, but once people start mastering DS, I’m afraid of how strong Necro will be. Give it some time for the average player to learn these things. For example early on in LOL master yi was dominant until people learned how to counter him.

I’ve played necro for a long time, since CBT3 back in Feb and I’m rank 24 in sPVP now at release, I also play other classes, like mesmer(e.g. when i want to win sPVP on autopilot), but my necro is the one class that intrigues me the most of all my characters. Let me just run down why death shroud won’t have any effect on necro’s “mastering” it anymore than they do so now.

1. Death Shroud interface does not show what conditions you have on your character(extremely important now that stability got nerfed to 3 seconds as a final tier trait in a trash tree [soul reaping]). Newly applied conditions to yourself are unknown, and if it’s a really bad stack and you should leave shroud and Consume Conditions or dump them off on someone with Plague Signet – it’s all a mystery. There’s no amount of player skill that can change playing blindly.
2. With full divinity/berserker’s amulet and 30 points in Soul Reaping for 30% extra critical damage, Life Blast crits for 2.5k.
3. Same-geared Engineers crit for 2300 with hip shot 1-spam (faster fire rate)
4. Warriors crit for 1500 with rifle 1-spam (faster fire rate), don’t even get me started on volley ticks hitting for over 2k and it’s a faster channel/less risky ability than rangers’ rapid fire, which allows it to be exponentially stronger when coupled with quickness
5. Rangers also more than 2k w/ longbow 1-spam, etc. (faster fire rate)
   Death Shroud is a temporary form which should give bonuses beyond your normal form. The projectile on life blast is slow, short-ranged (900 compared to 1200 or 1500 range attacks listed above), and just not even in the same tier as the aforementioned normal-form attacks for engy/war/rng, all of whom have better armor than necro’s. The bonus for wearing light armor ? Apparently it’s less damage. At least necro’s have the same beefy HP pool as warriors, that’s one positive.
6. Dark Path is serviceable – crap damage, but the chill and bleedstack is welcome, and well as the repositioning that it offers.
7. Doom is our bread and butter DS skill with Life Transfer and is one of the main reasons for dancing in and out of DS. However, there’s some unfortunate occurrences with our fear. Despite necro’s being so fearsome:
8. Warriors get a 4sec fear and it’s AE – on 60 second cooldown. However, it takes up a utility slot for them. Doom CD is 20 seconds, but single target and 4x less duration.
9. Thieves’ steal ability on a necro gives them a skull with a 4sec fear from necro’s and we don’t even possess the ability to fear someone that long, where the hell did they steal it from ? I’d like to know so I can actually use the ability that they’re smoking me with. In PVE this might be cool, but it has no business in sPVP. Same goes for the whirling axe skill that they steal from warriors. Thief version is superior in every single way than the warrior skill.
10. Life Transfer is a shining example of a risky, channeled ability with balanced damage that doesn’t floor anyone’s health bar (can’t say the same for 13k backstabs or 10k pistol whips). It has significant risk vs. reward. Being channeled, you’re susceptible to getting all damage cut off via knockdown/push/pull/stun/daze/fear (since necro has no quickness like war/thief/rng), but the reward is a welcome life force refill. Losing stability in DS severely affected this ability’s usefulness.

Finally, to sum up my problems with death shroud and not leave this hanging as just a complaint post. I will attempt to leave a solution to the problem. But first, I have to explain how Death Shroud is worth so much less in any condition spec that takes condition damage gear over power/crit.

Reproduceable bug for necromancer, game-breaking in sPVP:
Necromancer 1 and Necromancer 2 both have the Death Magic 20-point Major trait, Reaper’s Protection – VIII When disabled (by stun, daze, knockback, knockdown, sink, float, fear, or launch), nearby foes fear you. This effect can only trigger once every 90 seconds..

1. Necromancer 1 uses an ability to proc(I used daze from 4-skill on Warhorn to test) Reaper’s Protection on Necromancer 2.
2. Necromancer 1 becomes feared for 20 seconds rather than intended 1 second ! / Necromancer 2 becomes feared for 1 second, then rooted in place permanently with no conditions on them; loss of movement (can be cleared by a knockdown/push/pull only).