Guild Wars 2

Sea of Sorrow is the unofficial Oceanic server.

I’m in a huge guild made of Aussies and Kiwis [AUNZ] – and given we are all in the same timezone guild chat flows non-stop.

Or just use minons as your utility skills and use whatever weapons and talents you like. With the latest buff to minion HP you can faceroll all open-world PvE.

Enjoy slowly rolling your face across the keyboard as you rake in the loot and XP!

^ That’s actually a really good point.

Our class mechanic for defending is to pop DS – however when we do that, anyone else who wants to help us out actually cant.

No healing in DS not only doesn’t work with our own healing skills and talents, but everyone else’s too.

What weapons do you really like?

Staff

An amazing support weapon. I honestly couldn’t ever imagine not taking it as my second weapon as it provides a long range auto attack, aoe, healing, condi transfer, slow and fear.
Given it can do all that I don’t expect it to do high single target damage.
Just perfect in my opinion – even the animations are awesome.

What weapons do you almost like, or like conceptually, but feel they have issues performing as well as they should?

Axe

Conceptually this is awesome.

I should say first that I’m a huge Necromancer fan, and play them in any game in which it’s available. When I created my Necro in GW2 I had no idea what they would play like, and when I loaded the first zone and started using an axe I was overjoyed at how awesome it was. Especially the animations for Axe 1 and Axe 2 – green energy and necrotic claws slashing everywhere!

I also love the 600 range which works really well with DS.

However Axe has some issues:
Axe 1 – Really low damage. Feel like this should at least cleave. Or just up the damage!

Axe 2 – Pure awesome! Please don’t touch this (unless you make it do the same damage aoe! – still wouldn’t be as good as 100blades!)

Axe 3 – Super random! The aoe slow seems like it would be good for kiting, but then it has retaliation. This is totally nonsensical. When would you want to slow a group, but then stay in melee range to get hit. I could see the Axe3 aoe slow working really well with Axe 2 if that was aoe as well – that would make sense.

Good weapon in idea, but falls short a bit.

Dagger

The dps is out of this world, but whenever I use it I don’t feel like a necromancer, I feel like a rogue.
There’s honestly nothing Necromancer-like about standing there auto-attacking with Dagger 1.
Especially considering Dagger 2 and 3 are not useful for PvE and hurt your dps.
I cannot believe Anet ever meant for the Necromancer PvE meta to be autoattacking with a dagger.
If dagger 2 was instant cast and gave 10 seconds of life siphon on hit that healed the whole group – or anything like that – then I think the dagger would be more Necro-ish. At the moment it’s just really bad for the whole concept of a Necro in Gw2. Especially since it’s the PvE meta.

They do less healing than a warrior signet, only heal you when they are attacking, and can be CC’d/Killed.

Nice thread!

We should keep this thread running and post any other screenshots of Necro discrimination.

Interesting! Although I suspect it’s another case of our core mechanic rendering most of our talents useless while transformed.

Grim Jr.8946:

Look at all the accountants and businessmen here you guys must make millions if your’re that smart, oh my god I wonder why Anet didn’t think about this!

Grim Jr.8946:

you still need proof and by proof I mean computations, expectations, annual income and stuff you don’t create a business plan and just say put this and that. didn’t they teach this?? god.

You might be surprised what some of us do for a living.

Any business without any capacity in external sensing is doomed to fail in 5 years. Didn’t they teach this?? Seriously, this is business 101 – the 5 forces model and PESTLE are taught on the first day.

Also, accountants have nothing to do with business analysis.

Sure Anet would need a strat plan and some decent analysis, however from simply looking at the number of people asking for this it would appear to have a decent business case.

And that’s all anyone here is asking for. A lot of people are saying ‘hey Anet, if skins were reusable I would buy some’. This is a clear business opportunity.

Sure they could rework the whole system and refund gems to customers who have bought duplicate skins (losing no money but has an opportunity cost until these customers use all their gems).

Or they could simply keep the “one time” skins and add new “reusable” skins that cost double.

Especially since some things work in DS.

Might is absolutely fine, yet regen is not?

I would really rather not have increased range for axe. The current 600 synergises perfectly with DS (given DS only full damage at 600 range).

The axe just needs more damage due to balance out being so close (like dagger damage minus 10% or something like that).

My point was that they would make more money off me if they were re-usable. I’m trying to help them make more money!

And if it’s true for me, I wonder how many others this would be true for?

Oh I found it – it’s a 5 month old thread but it suggests Axe + Axe Training edges out the Staff and scales even higher with boons.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Reasons-DS-power-got-buffed-out-of-its-mind
Not sure if there have been any changes since then!

The chance of getting a precursor is 0.2-0.5%

i.e. on average you are likely to get 1 precursor if you try it 500 times.

Gele.2048:

thac why im not buying skins cuz they are not like this

Yup me too!

In fact I would have originally bought skins when I was leveling, but I changed gear so fast I figured it wasn’t worth it due to the limited use.

Even now I’m still upgrading gear and don’t want skins until I’ve got my ‘final’ gear (whenever that is).

Unlocking skins for use whenever would be amazing. I would go buy a ton of skins right now if that was the case.

I’ve also seen RNG stands for “Random Number Game” or “Random Number God” – i.e. running something over and over hoping to win the Random Number Game while praying to the Random Number Gods.

I’m shocked! A thread about forming alliances and no Scarlet jokes??

For the record is Axe+Axe Training or Dagger better (i.e. the highest dps) for Life Blast?

I vaguely recall seeing that Axe + Axe Training is better but can’t find the source anywhere.

Pretty sure that’s a bug! But in the same way that stomp+ds at the same time is a bug, both have a lot of real world test data that proves it isn’t OP at all.

JestersMadness.7528:

If we could heal ourselves while in Death Shroud, the only thing I would be missing, to have my dream-specc would be the ability to heal allies with our Siphoning abilities…

Imagine a power/crit DS build focused around siphoning health and healing yourself and allies with it… It would be like giving yourself and allies a second Regen – Amazing for any group if you ask me.

This would be my dream Necro too. We could finally provide group support and stop being an entirely selfish profession.

One potential solution Anet could test would be allowing healing in DS but still hiding our utility bar.
That way, the only way we could heal ourselves would be from the blood tree skills. Sure, group healing would work too – but that would just be an advantage of playing with groups.

1. Make conditions viable in PvE (cap)

2. Allow healing in Death Shroud for Necromancers

3. An end to the Scarlet living story

digiowl.9620:

And i am wary about using axe 3, as the range is great enough (even after the reduction since launch) that it may aggro some nearby yellows when i least need it.

Happens all the time >_<

Axe 3!!! Shakes Fist

Overkillengine.6084:

alternate alternate suggestion: do away with the clunky transform mechanic altogether, and give us the DS skills as Function button skills:

f1: Life Blast (unchanged)
f2: Dark Path (unchanged)
f3:Doom (unchanged)
f4: Life Transfer: Damage nearby foes and steal their health.
f5: Tainted Shackles: (unchanged)

Would love this as an alternate solution too.

Nagato no Kami.4980:

Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with DS mode. To me, it’s not clunky at all. Actually, I kind of like it. It makes the class play differently than the others and variety of game play counts for something.

Yeah I quite like DS too – I just think it would work even better with some sort of life on hit type mechanic.

That way while in normal mode we lose health in combat but earn lifeforce from many of our skills… and then in DS we lose/spend our lifeforce in combat, but earn actual life from skills. Effectively, normal mode and DS mode charge each other.

Think of the beautiful symmetry!

Anet have said they want Necromancers to be a sustain class. However, our core defensive skill – DS doesn’t really fit that description.

i.e. If we are on 100hp and pop DS, sure we live for another 20 seconds in DS, but as soon as it’s over we are back on 100hp.

I suggest we need a trait to allow for some form of healing in DS.

Maybe not all healing, but perhaps allow Blood tree siphons to work during DS?

That would be a fun mechanic – popping DS and trying to do as much damage as possible to siphon back a bit of health.

I was wondering if they had always planned for Scarlet to do something with the leylines now (with the DO NOT TOUCH machines), and with the new fractal they took the opportunity to pop Scarlet in at the end to give a line about leylines – because it fit well to do so.

Angel first mentioned leylines 3 months ago in that interview (actually Konig I think you pointed out at the time that this was a first mention of leylines in the lore) so it could have been in the works since then.

Norjena.5172:

…necromancers should tank and guardians should do the backline stuff.

I’m not saying anyone should “tank” – it’s not a holy trinity game.

I was just pointing out that the whole design of the Necro profession points to us working best at medium range (darting in to drop a well, kiting and using our medium range slows etc). i.e. out of all of our skills – dagger 1 is the only melee one.

Sure you can go melee – it’s our highest dps spec right now and a lot of fun. But I get the sense that it was an accident on Anet’s part.

Our skills aren’t really designed around staying in melee range (think about all our fears – they send the enemy AWAY from melee range). That’s why I’m advocating for a better mid-range weapon that fits well with our profession design.

The logic here is that medium and heavy armour = more armor. Which means more damage mitigation.

Furthermore, being in melee means taking more damage from cleaves and other melee aoe skills.

Therefore, people wearing light armour are less well equipped to take the extra damage that is dealt fighting in melee range.

The fact that a caster in cloth running up and auto-attacking with a dagger is the highest dps we can do is pretty silly tbh.

Phy.2913:

Mesket.5728:

Phy.2913:

Mesket.5728:

Phy.2913:

Mesket.5728:

the only good/viable idea to repopulate the world would be roll back the game to sept 2012.

What would that accomplish?

re populate the world…

Ô.ô

How? I want to hear the logic behind this.

Ok, get a calculator. Lots of paper, pencils, sharpeners,.. get ready to do heavy math here….

think about the game release date…. ok we are done.

Which is why it doesn’t make any sense.

Keep trying Mesket!! I think Phy is almost there!

I guess the problem is with conditions not being viable for PvE, Necros have a choice between Axe, Dagger and Staff.

- Staff does ok damage, but is a great AoE support weapon.

- Dagger does high dps, but Necros just aren’t designed to be in melee.

- This leaves Axe as our best option for PvE in general – however Axe 1 dps is terrible.

Scarlet doing something with the leylines?

Toad.8043:

A few times tonight in sPvP, putrid mark has not transferred any conditions at all, only remove from myself.

Sounds like they need to fix the tooltip again :P

Anet deserve all the money they can get from the gemstore.

They don’t charge a monthly sub, yet pay for all the server and maintenance costs, and provide updates and new stuff every 2 weeks (by keeping a large full time development team).

As long as they never put stuff that gives you an actual advantage in combat there then I’m totally happy.

I would love to know if any devs are reading this.

It’s a pretty good summary of the state of conditions in PvE at the moment, and a huge range of idea to throw around for addressing the issue.

^ Yeah Andele is right. The game art for Guild Wars 1 had Grenth looking like this years before wow introduced it.

I can’t completely blame blizzard though – the guild wars art is just amazing.

Arikyali.5804:

Oh! I know what Anet is doing! They’re making Scarlet so detestable, so when the time for the grand finale comes along, everyone will be jumping at the chance to annihilate her!

Brilliant Anet! Sheer brilliance!

This will actually be 100% true. If the end of Scarlett is announced there will be celebrations in every city. For all the wrong reasons.

Next thing we’ll find out that Scarlett woke the dragons.

I like the idea of a CDI sub-forum.

It would probably be a lot easier for you guys too – being able to get an instant overview of all active topics on one screen.

Will ‘Conditions in PvE’ ever be a topic? Would love to chat about that one.

I can’t see why ANY of our utility skills don’t work in DS.

It limits what we can to do to the 5 basic DS skills for the whole time we are in DS.

MercenaryK.4180:

I’m pretty sure Burn stacks in duration, so your 900 Burn isn’t overridden by a 400 Burn from another source.

Sure, but if you have a Necro with Dhuumfire and another profession or two with burning (Ele and Eng have burn-on-crit) if it takes 1 min of people applying burning to a boss to get to the point where it goes for the whole fight, then every application of burning after that 1 min is completely pointless and a loss in dps vs dps when soloing.

Nike.2631:

I use the retaliation on Axe 3 to survive darting in and dropping multiple wells.

But retaliation doesn’t help you survive at all?

Sandra Martino.3870:

3) Axe 3 is good yes, but why the retalliation? are we suppoost to walk in the melee train so we can reflect all that damage back? It makes no sense whatsoever. I rather give it fury instead.

Yeah retaliation is a pretty weird choice for a ranged weapon and a ranged skill.

I would prefer something to help our sustain.

I don’t know if it’s entirely moot. Jon Peters mentioned they want Condition builds to have a place in high-end PvE – which suggests they have at least some ideas and are open to doing something.

Unless they just give up on fixing it and incentivise taking a condi build in groups…

NEW: 10 x the gold and loot if you invite a poor condi necro into your group!

Bawi.9541:

Now looking at damaging conditions… as soon as there is another player present you are dramatically losing damage. Complete design failure.

Yeah and it’s a fairly critical one too – especially for the Necromancer class who has a significant number of skills, talents and weapons designed around dealing out, improving and manipulating conditions.

I don’t really understand why the engine would choke with more than 25 conditions on one target.

In world boss events you can have hundreds of people spamming all sorts of fast direct damage attacks – many with multiple hits.

You would think that tracking conditions, which do slow and predictable damage over time, would be much easier than the randomness and rapid pace of instant direct damage hits.

Has this happened to anyone else?

My group killed the Hybrid and noone died at all through the whole instance. However, I didn’t get the achieve for killing the Hybrid or Killing him without dying.

If the condition cap was removed for dps conditions I would be totally happy for epidemic to only apply to self-applied conditions.

(to be honest, if you are specced for +condition damage this would be better than spreading other people’s incidental ones anyway)

Epidemic could even be capped to spread only 25 conditions.

Norjena.5172:

raubvogel.5071:

From my pve perspective:

I’d recommend an increase of at least 25% – 50% in physical damage on every skill on every weapon. Or lower the recast of the two wells that do damage.

Too much.

Haha was just thinking that – but taking the top dps spot might give people a reason to bring us along to PvE group content!

I can why vulnerability should max out at 25. It would be pretty ridiculous if vun stacked infinitely – the new meta for PvE would just be 5 people autoattacking with weapons that apply vun until everyone is doing 99,999 per hit.

However the damage-based conditions really need to stack so everyone can at the very least do 100% of the damage they can do when soloing.

Given Anet’s awesome policy of ‘you can’t pay to win’ – and the fact there’s no monthly fee and yet their servers are good and there’s new content every 2 weeks – I’m totally happy with them advertising the heroic/deluxe edition.

I’ll be buying gems shortly just to give them money for being awesome. The fact I can use them to buy cosmetic stuff is just a bonus.

Axe is by far my favorite Necro weapon.

The 600 range is great – Necro as a medium range caster is apparently what Anet want since DS only does full damage within 600.

This gives Axe great synergy with DS. Basically if your axe was hitting, you know your DS will do max damage.

However, it definitely needs some tweaks in the damage department.

What I think is a fairly reasonable wishlist:

Axe 1 – either add a cleave or up the single-target damage to be the same as Dagger minus 10%

Axe 2 – is amazing. No changes.

Axe 3 – Like ‘vicious’ in the post above said, remove retaliation. It really doesn’t make sense. Regen would be nice. Right now there’s no point in casting this as the damage is low and cast-time is high. Some pvp’ers have noted they only take axe to use Axe3 retaliation. It sounds like it would be better to add retaliation somewhere else and make Axe 3 useful.