Guild Wars 2

Sannhet.8745:

Rennoko.5731:

Don’t hate on the haters, our AOE Buffing is quite frankly horrible. Well of power would be much more useful in team fights if it had a longer duration or a shorter cooldown. Seeing as how that would de-stabilize PVP, it won’t happen.

Any good player is fine on any class as long as they are not a condition hero fighting structures, in a party with multiple condition classes, fighting a boss that gets bonus damage with a condition hero (who won’t).

Or just take a warrior, who doesn’t have to worry about those limitations, and you can be sure he will be good in your group. That is why people want warriors guardians and mesmers, because they are never bad, while Necro CAN be bad or at best equivalent.

As I have said before, and will say many times over. Until they make condition removal more important, harder for the other classes, and debuffing conditions (like chill and cripple) more important in fights, there is no really compelling reason to take a necro over anything else. We completely lack reflect or block or aegis, either group or self buff, and in very rare cases have stability.

I only have one group in twenty that actually makes a gripe about me being a necro, and maybe 1 in 50 that out-right kicks me without asking, but it does happen, and while very rude, it is not unjustified, based on the above. Good necros are good, but if that good necro put his abilties to one of the better PVE classes that good necro would be an amazing mesmer, or a superb guardian, or a spectacular warrior.

Nothing will change in the short or long term unless they decide to divorce SPVP/WVW and PVE though, because necro is already well thought of in SPVP, and they will not imbalance that part of the game for the sake of better PVE synergy.

You know what hypothetical dungeon would love a necro though? One with a boss that used AOE corruption boon every 10 seconds. Who wants aoe buffs when they are going to get turned into debuffs. But of course, no such boss exists, as it would be too hard for a guardian to shout clear all of those debuffs.

It’s a good thing there’s hardcore pve progression in this game where things like group makeup are strictly locked in and one MUST bring incredibly specific class and trait combinations in order to succeed. Also a good thing that doing so is rewarded by the game mechanics with better loot and higher tiers of gear.

Oh wait.

I’ve been doing hardcore progression in MMOs since the dawn of time, and not once did I have half of the die hard mentality you mouth breathers do about the “requirements” to succeed. And yet somehow I was the proud recipient of multiple server/region firsts and two world firsts.

The only area of this game where a logical argument could be made for having a strict group composition would be Fractals, and only then above 20. Anything else can and has been beaten by five Longbow Rangers with little to no difficulty. Now if you feel the need to min/max your AC explorable groups, my derision aside, feel free. But quit pushing your opinion, because that is literally all it is, on people outside your meticulously organized cadre of like minded individuals.

To quote an adage I’m sure quite a few of you have heard before, bring the player, not the class.

Would you like any more pointing out on how you failed to say anything meaningful besides waving some imaginary badge of “accomplishment” in a video game… Your past “exploits” have nothing to do gw2 in any way, shape or form.
Keep your name calling to yourself and let people play how they want to play.

Bhawb.7408:

Corruption is a straight substitute for Death Nova, those are the only 2 traits a minion build will ever be putting in the 30 Death Magic slot (the damage is in spite, and is never affected). Death Nova’s only true advantage is the weakness from blast finishers, whereas Corruption will take out boons. If you are going to be against boon stacking builds, use Corruption (they coincide with the builds that have condition removal on heals, thus poison is ineffective, and the weakness won’t be around long), if not, use Death Nova.

As in dropping damage and going for both nova and cb. Anyhoo like I said its niche. And in my experience too wonky to be reliable. Me and my ele bud had a few run ins… one time it will do its job well eough I guess… another time…. It made 0 difference. I hate luck based crap so I avoid it.

And I had server first starting from vanilla wow till I quit. My opinion yours. gtfo please.

/sarcasm

Point is you have to ditch either damage or death nova to get it. Damage out weights it by a landslide and nova is a lot more versatile.

Doesn’t work in practice against those who stack boons. People that just have a boon here and a boon there sure… But what kind of minion spec will you run by dropping 1 minion… and cb will have a pretty bad cd. Anyway they don’t exactly mix together well while maintaining highest possible change for NC to proc.

Snake in most cultures symbolizing rebirth… doesn’t exactly fit gw2 necro >_> It’s debatable topic at least. Anyway… there really is no necro gear past a few random chunks here and there . Too much carebear rainbow vomit.

Classes that stack boons can stack them a lot faster then you could ever strip even a third of them with that. Even if they stood still and did nothing. Its awkward trait that will either be too much or it doesn’t justify points. It has no reasonable middle ground in games current state.

Yeah… exactly… build for this dungeon build for that one. To hell with that. Next we going to have a build for crafting too. I’m not here to respec when I need to wipe my kitten

Bas.7406:

HiSaZuL.2843:

Daze to Doom to Staff 5 = incredible control

No daze + daze runes to fear + fear spec = “get that tear jar ready”.

I am going to have to try this out. Do you run Terror power build or terror condition damage? dagger with a terror build sounds interesting.[/quote]

Long ago I ran something akin to not fear damage spec but more of a condition support. Ran increased daze + fear duration + full condition durations on everything else. Result was mixed feelings. Daze is amazing… only thing fear has on with cc is that DS fear is usable while you are cced but thats it. But the problem arise in the fact that its a bit repetitive and it lacks consistency. If you could incorporate chill stacking in it would be spectacular but alas you need staff for support that leaves focus out of the window and I really like having focus if I try running chill build. It lacks damage severely however.
You could technically go with:
30/20/0/0/20
Having both dmg on fear and 50% fear duration + chilling darkness. 30 points in spite lets you get all the hammering traits you need for dagger auto. But you will not have greater marks or ground based well targeting.
If you go 0/30/10/0/30
You can can the fear duration/fear damage/greater marks/ds recharge and chilling darkness all in 1 package. Problem is making full use of all that. Anyway I remeber I was too torn between things and ended up just going to what I’ve been running since a regular standard condition spec granted it changes from time to time but it stays true to a corruption condition spec through and through.

Bas.7406:

HiSaZuL.2843:

Sannhet.8745:

HiSaZuL.2843:

If you plan on mh dagger then warhorn outstrips everything else for pvp bar nothing. Focus only in case of hybrid/support builds and even then there are very specific requirements to make good use of it.

I agree with everything else in your post minus these two items. Focus works very well in a power build that isn’t using staff as the swap weapon, and there are quite a few tpvp power Necros much higher ranked than you or I that swear by OH dagger (Khalifa being the most visible of these).

Someone else and me already said it can be used just fine for specific purposes. Extra condition removal and weakness and all that. Just like focus can still be best offhand for specific builds in pvp while utterly useless for anything else. But id still prefer warhorn for melee especially if wells are involved. Not to mention you can significantly beef up duration of daze making it far superior to fears for cc purposes.

Daze to Doom to Staff 5 = incredible control

No daze + daze runes to fear + fear spec = “get that tear jar ready”.

Sannhet.8745:

HiSaZuL.2843:

If you plan on mh dagger then warhorn outstrips everything else for pvp bar nothing. Focus only in case of hybrid/support builds and even then there are very specific requirements to make good use of it.

I agree with everything else in your post minus these two items. Focus works very well in a power build that isn’t using staff as the swap weapon, and there are quite a few tpvp power Necros much higher ranked than you or I that swear by OH dagger (Khalifa being the most visible of these).

Someone else and me already said it can be used just fine for specific purposes. Extra condition removal and weakness and all that. Just like focus can still be best offhand for specific builds in pvp while utterly useless for anything else. But id still prefer warhorn for melee especially if wells are involved. Not to mention you can significantly beef up duration of daze making it far superior to fears for cc purposes.

Sannhet.8745:

You can get it again. Make a 2nd necro, buy a white helm with an upgrade slot, then transmute the facepaint to the generic helm using a Basic Transmutation Stone. Then use a Fine Transmutation Stone to transmute it onto your current helm.

Yep this. All it takes is making a necro and finishing tutorial then transmuting look to a lvl10 hat changing it from soulbound to account bound. Also highly recommend having a backup in bank just in case anet nerfs this.

Bas.7406:

HiSaZuL.2843:

No actually if you go minion you go full berzerker. I can do fractals below 20 w/o agony resist in full zerker just fine. Minions as long as they are alive can keep you alive better then any healing skills/specs or other classes.

HiSAZul,

How do your minions handle the Agony at that level? Do you find yourself summoning them more than normal dungeons? I have yet to try FoTM with Minions yet.

Thing about agony is that most of abilities that apply agony are aoes to begin with so the agony is not even what kills them half the time its aoe attack itself. Yes you will run out of minions faster but some specific fractals actually benefit from extra targets. In some cases I found little difference <20… like the umm charr ascalon scenario. There really is hardly any difference agony or not. There are not a lot of bosses that just simply apply agony at that level w/o using a skill that would kill your noodles anyway. Also I never went past 20 and I got no agony so I have no idea how it changes after that. What I do know that even w/o defensive gear I can negate most agony with DS.
And to add some things… on some fights you really can’t use minions w/o making things really really bad like dredge in icy cave boss… Yeah blood fiend is fine and bone minions are pretty much used as they always are but the rest… not so much. And in some cases youd think minions would die a lot more then they do, example being ember boss at the end of grawl cave… despite embers usually aoeing you into a sad state… for what ever reason minions tend to live absurdly long on that fight. I don’t know why. I honestly by this day do not understand why considering you can’t even stand w/o getting burn. >_> ontop of small worms exploding fire shields etc. Yeah if you put minion in one of the puddles they will die but well… u know… only melee minion you should be using is golem and u can charge him out of impending aoe.

It doesn’t happen all that often point is don’t blow you DS while you are getting stunned use it after. That makes certain you do get your shield out and not just a simple fear. Which you can still manage to cast even if you get knocked out of DS. It also applies to some other transformations.
Like I said due to how DS is there is little point in using it during cc itself either before or after said fact so if you use it as a shield you will run less risk of it bugging out on you. OR simply spam the skill that you need, everything except LT will work regardless of whether you will get DS normally or get knocked out of it. You get skills before they visually appear on UI its about instant from the moment DS script runs, I suspect access to skills becomes available far sooner then all animation and ui changes take effect.
Actually did see lt channel when I was flat on my face on the floor… so even that is possible but I only saw that happen like once or twice so I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.

Bone minions work fine on almost all power builds with exception of hybrid/support. Flesh wurm is best stun break in the game(yep it actually is). A lot condition builds use golem as elite if they just want damage and interupt instead of 3 min cd for a bit of blind spam and loosing their entire purpose meanwhile.

Taril.8619:

The ones you find funnest to use.

Leveling up isn’t too difficult, but it is time consuming, so it’s generally best to use what you personally find fun to play with to level up with.

I used various things such as Dagger/Focus for single target damage and Staff with Well utilities to do some AoE damage while focusing on Power/Precision items.

Other people find it funner to use Sceptre/Dagger and Staff and focus more on Condition Damage.

People also like using Axe/Focus and Staff and focus more on sustaining Minion utility skills and having them focus more on Toughness/Vitality stuff to stay alive while the minions kill everything.

In the end, it’s better to find the weapons you like using and combine them with the utility skills you like using and then figure out what stats you need on gear to support them.

No actually if you go minion you go full berzerker. I can do fractals below 20 w/o agony resist in full zerker just fine. Minions as long as they are alive can keep you alive better then any healing skills/specs or other classes.

It’s also possible to fail if you get stun/dazed/cced in general at around the same time as you hit f1. But that is very very rare because timing has to be almost exact.

Its fine if you simply like concept and not interested in the flavor of the month class. If not then don’t bother. It’s as simple as that. There are a lot of things that are broken and creaky but well… its anet like bethesda but with mmos as end product.

People really like to comment w/o reading someones response. Like I said its fine for defense… but lacks synergy with full power build. If you want you can run scepter with power gear nobody stops you nor is it any less usable then next thing to it. Synergy however is a different topic.
If you plan on mh dagger then warhorn outstrips everything else for pvp bar nothing. Focus only in case of hybrid/support builds and even then there are very specific requirements to make good use of it. There are plenty of ways to remove conditions w/o using up oh slot for it.
Vulnerability being useless in pve is the most bizzare thing I heard here in a while. I think I’ll take killing something 16% faster over dagger which does little to speed things up with power build or warhorn which also won’t speed up the fight.

Frostfang is the only one that is remotely appealing to begin with… Rest are like a flock of butterflies vomiting rainbows in every direction. As far as wvw goes I kill people with annoying legendaries just so my eyes don’t hurt as much.

Mhm why not wraith paint? Or skull paint… or demon paint. Granted I personally never found skull paint all that good looking.

Bhawb.7408:

They read the forums, they just don’t post, so him posting here is getting his ideas (even if you don’t like them).

Lies.
My personal opinion is that it should not be blockable nor have a los. Dodge and invul are fine but blocks and aegises etc no.
So pretty much it should be as it was. 1 sec cast time so people that pay attention can dodge but can’t just sit behind a floating leaf with impunity.

Bhawb.7408:

Dredlord.8076:

a couple of good ele’s can make you feel this way too though

Ele’s don’t have CC, they can just heal a lot. They actually have counters, there is no counter to permanent, constantly reapplied, hard CC like this.

Even d/d has some cc. Don’t confuse carrots with cabbage. <3
Also if you get creative with use of combos even more so. Just because you hardly ever see people use something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Frankly something like staff ele and d/d ele doing a tag team would just be rage inducing. Unless you bring 1 shot thigs and they manage to simply instant burst you.
On the subject though… even though I think class needs a full rehaul. That is a terrible idea in so SO SOOOO many ways. As someone stated already any kind of spammable cc doesn’t matter form/duration would create an infite amount of abuse. Alternating wall of necros would be an effective impossible to get withing 1200 radius. Also imagine abuse on doing dungeons… 5 necros simply staff stamming their way though everything? That would just make everyone and their grandmother run 5 necros with haste sigils and maaaaaaaaaybe 4 necros + mesmer(again MAYBE probably not). With every example I gave I thought of another 10 ways to abuse it. Ah the wonderful mind of a guy who always plays mages -_-

Your playing a single class that is completely defined by utilities from damage to everything else with weapons being 1/3 to 1/4 of your spec… and you want longer cooldown? Guess having tipple times of every other classes stun breaks no stability and half a day long cooldowns wasn’t enough. Lol.
And why are you all wasting time posting here? Anet never been either honest about necro or caring. They don’t even bother talking to this side of the fence. So what purpose does all this serve? I guess if one is miserable at least its not as bad in a company but that’s about as far as I would take it.

Off hand dagger is somewhat …. err… not all that great offset for mh dagger. Simply because first relies exclusively on power while other is pretty much condition related almost exclusively. First is melee second is far from melee. Etc. Then again oh dagger can be used simply as defensive alternative to focus/warhorn. Tho either focus of wh provide a lot more for melee. Wh being a more of a roaming necessity while focus just being awesome.

Yes they did. Among other absurd statements that were as absurd or outwards incorrect. After beta they said necros were most in need of love. That simply resulted in scepter nerf. No love attached. Some other things were thrown out seemingly by people who never even saw a necro in their entire life gw2 or otherwise.

Bhawb.7408:

ColdMetalz.9865:

Lol, I mean at the very least make Jagged Horror considered a “minion”.

Uh… it is? It is affected by all minion traits, to my knowledge, and has the same AI.

And a tinsy bleed. :P

On other note… kev and cold he already pretty much stated his math> every other variable imaginable and he helped everyone and their sick gramma so his opinion is superior. You two are just arguing with a wall. I won’t blindly side with a forum superstar because he helped someone.
On side note nobody ever said profession was horrendous. Point was it was not as fun as it should and fundamentally lacking in more areas then not and everyone who defends it does so with bizzare 1 sided scenarios and high numbers like they mean something past being a number. Or the all too common youtube links of ganking underleveled people… The occasional claims of someone being “vet”, “pro” etc and going as far as acception a proposal to duel a thief etc with their super mega unkillable necro were proven how very wrong they were.

You forgot thiefs bleed/caltrops dodge spec that lets you dodge every … hmm 4 seconds?
Hmm that leaves only… Oh my…

Kravick.4906:

HiSaZuL.2843:

Good job presenting perfect situation where everything is one sided. That’s the best way to make a compelling argument. Good job. You sir convinced me of your superior thought process. Like your claims that you > everyone else in wvw. Yep. I’m totally convinced.

more stuff

Whoa there buddy, no need to get so hostile. I want to keep this discussion civil. I agree that hes using one sided scenarios, but you don’t need to insult the guy.

I dont feel this is how necro is. but it made me lmao XD

My favorite part is where the kid crashes into that truck and explodes. Sometimes I feel like that.

There really wasn’t a need I agree with that… Perhaps my opinion isn’t shared even by minority but I’m just simply fed up with people tossing some random number out and defining every last thing by that number. But as soon as I see someone tossing out a blasted claim how amazing their perceived “skills” in pvp are, my roof just goes flying out of the window. I’d rather play with a bunch of people that haven’t figured out what skills do yet then some someone like that. Worst part the more people brag the least they usually have to show. Maybe he really is “amazing” tho i really have a hard time accepting some sort of criteria for that in activity that suppose to simply be fun.
I can always easily toss out situations and scenarios where a condition necro brings an absolute 0 to the table. As in any scenario with weak fragile mobs in large hordes while you are protecting something. By the time you land 1 bleed things are dead and gone.
Its like jungle wyrm… exactly what does a condition necro bring for that fight? If he simply said that despite all claims of opposite he found necro to be simply fun. I’d quietly accept that. Even when I can’t agree that necro is even remotely well off I still play full MM… Because I like the concept and in some situation it does ocasionaly shine. But he didn’t.

Nemesis.8593:

It was me that compared the warrior with the necromancer over 10 seconds. The point was that the necromancer took 12 seconds to do it, but he also adds up to 25 stacks of vulnerability. So even though the necromancer’s damage is 20-25% lower then the warrior’s, he gives the warrior + the entire team 25% more damage overall.

My point was that necromancer power damage = 75%‘s of warrior damage + 25% increased warrior damage (because you increase the warrior’s damage) + more damage for the party… It’s… balanced in a way…

You also compared a single target build vs a warrior’s cleave, over a period of time which can not be accurate, yes… as bursting out 3 single normal mobs, the warrior would win. How about we calculate DPS vs 5 veteran mobs over… how ever much time it takes for them to die… 30 seconds.

I’ll do the math for the necromancer since i know it by heart… full condition build has 1800 condition damage (even more with the new ascended gear) and 133% bleeding duration + blood is power = 2150 condition damage and 25 stacks of bleeding on the target… which equals a DPS of exactly 3750 just from bleeding + the small scepter auto -attacks. Let’s call it 4k dps… omg so small… a warrior does so much more omg. Ok… let’s take our 4k DPS x 5 epidemic every 12 seconds, in a radious of 600 at a range of 1200.

Spikes of 20k DPS (minimum + DS 4 + bleeding AOEs normal damage + external buffs… you can get up to 25k DPS) every 12 seconds, while being extremely tanky, while having the ability to heal and support the party, while being at range.

So back to my original benchmark… 5 veteran mobs spread around a room… warrior vs necromancer.

Good job presenting perfect situation where everything is one sided. That’s the best way to make a compelling argument. Good job. You sir convinced me of your superior thought process. Like your claims that you > everyone else in wvw. Yep. I’m totally convinced.
A party that consists of 2 people? Why exactly you assume all mobs with stay close enough for your trashy epidemic? Why do you assume nobody else on gods green earth will use bleeds(the most common and given to everybody condition)? It’s like theoretical quantum physics debate…. so much assuming it makes my head hurt.
Stop assuming you are better then everyone else. Stop assuming perfect scenario in controlled environment makes any kind of point in real practice.
I’m so bloody tired of people and their videos of ganking underleveld and undergreated people throwing big numbers around in their own self imposed scenarios and claiming everything is amazing and everyone else is a scrub who needs to l2p.
Your “skill” is only as good as environment allows it to be. You are nothing against a zerg. You are completely and utterly unimportant. Without others you make no difference of any kind past being there and talking smack like its your job.
I held back from being a kitten about your posts for a while simply because you tried to be helpful but you know what… you are not helpful. You just think your opinion is for some obscure reason better then next guys opinion.
DPS is an arbitrary number. If you are not useful in the given scenario then unless your dps allows to simply instantly bypass that scenario it serves no purpose past being a forums badge.
If you speak of solo pve then thats one thing. But you insist on using group scenarios where you are not the one and only atraction where everyone else has to bend over to support your way of playing. 1 thief that simply likes to play condtions and now your usefulnes halved right there. What else do your bring besides that? Hmm? Ah yes thats right you dumped everything in conditions in hopes nobody else dares to use them while you are there and every last enemy conviniently stays packed stacked awaiting your epidemics.
What use are your conditions when fighting a tower? Your epidemic will never hit anyone ontop who isn’t purposely leaning off to accommodate epidemics newest nerf. Maybe eles now should have direct los for firestorm let them have some fun with invisible projectiles that hit invisible walls too. And rangers too while we are at it. Let everyone have some fun with that. Lets turn all aoe into invisible projectiles and turn this into a contest of whos got better luck.
Pulling lots of numbers and scenarios from your kitten doesn’t make them a fact. Even if I appreciated effort given into explaining mechanics to newer players it all gets overshadowed by onesided argument where your pov overshadows every conceivable variable.

Panikos but you are answering your own question there. They already found a way… found a sweat spot then they just threw it away and settled for an arbitrary kitten friendly approach that carries no depth to it. Then flushed all the uniqueness down the toilet and made it into a chopped up shadow of what it once was.
It’s like saying: Oh well Diablos 2 necromancers were pretty sub-par on release and attempting to use that as excuse. They were… but they were made to shine. If you just take that and throw it away that invalidates any kind of counterargument. Its like talking about elder scrolls of the decades past and remembering what it is that captivated you so much about them. For me it was spellmaking and enchanting and alchemy the neverending road to creativity. It was tossed away and discarded. Any attempts to justify it fall flat at one single mention that once the defining unique feature of the game is extinct now replaced by some non-existant variety of spells from which only 3-4 are really even worth casting once you reach the end of the road.
You can’t throw a card like it didn’t work at first so its fine if it doesn’t work now. They got it to work. They had it made. They chose to throw it away. So there is no excuse for bland mechanics now.
Fact remains DS is just not fun. Unlike other class defining mechanics it doesn’t even always apply to all aspects. Sure adrenaline is boring. I can’t really argue there. But there isn’t a single spec where warrior flat out doesn’t benefit in any way/shape/form from adrenaline. Same can’t be said for DS. Still… I’m craving a fun mechanic over a useful one. Id take some bizzare lifeforce empowerment abilities. Say… use lifeforce to increase effects of skills. Or extend duration of effects. Or well… use it as hp shield. Sounds a lot more useful then DS to me. In that scenario I at least have a choice of what to use lifeforce for and the choice isn’t arbitrary made for me as if im too kittening kitten to be able to think for myself.

Removing something like corpse need due to plain lack of corpses in certain situations and making things more readily available isn’t the same as just throwing things in toilet and flushing it because its too much work.
It’s all so mediocre and bland that past initial amusement it feels no different then any other forgetable title you have ever played. Unimaginative, uninspiring, unintuitive, and most importantly isn’t fun. That is what this class is once the initial haze is over. You can’t mask an unwated child with great level design.
Removed reduntant skills you say? Pfft what bloody purpose do half the skills have anyway past some extremely institutional spec specific function? Epidemic is sooooo amazing… I keep hearing and it keeps making me laugh. 5 nerfs ago it was truly one of a kind ability now… For when I play full condition I couldn’t care less for that garbage ability. Its as useful as taking spectral grasp as condition and expecting it to actually do something productive. Pfft last time I ran some spvp I got 6/10 fail ratio. Who the bloody hell wants ability that fails for no other reason then the wonky invisible projectile los problems? Masochists maybe but not me. I don’t find fighting mechancs to be fun. I did that with wow when I started from day 1 with warlock. I lived thought the unfinished class and every last person telling me I should reroll because class was garbage, I stuck with it even when nobody wanted to dungeons with warlock. I was there when warlocks were as OP and godly as it ever got. I was there when for 2 years every single patch note had a warlock nerf and not a single change for the better while other classes got mechanics they never even had. No I have no interest in doing that again. Its forgivable when its done by a company you knew for decades. Its not something I’m willing to bet on some company that can’t be bothered to fix bugs that they had for 7 years in their game much less a child company of a much bigger one. We all know how that works. Look at EA and Activision and tell me how well that pyramid scheme works for the end user.

Enferian.2705:

HiSaZuL.2843:

Give me 1 tree and I’ll block 80% of their damage.

Thats great too!
Especially since u can aplly conditions to their pet and use epidemic to tranfer them to the ranger even if there is no LoS

Yeah thats how epidemic used to work. Now… meh you would take more damage sticking your head out to pop epidemic then it would do damage. Thats assuming it doesn’t fail for some osbscure reason like all other los dependent invisible projectiles. Anyway point of keeping los is to use multitude of weapon skills that hit in aoe.
If you fight on stairs and such you can apply aoe from below/sides etc. While unless ranger decides to go melee that doesn’t apply to them. If they wanna play sit in a well and cure conditions… let them. Once its done go and kill them.
And again their elite roots are the most useless ability when it comes to necro. Even your DS allows you to just leave it behind and not care. Use their pet/them to dark path out of it. Or like I said anything to remove the condition for a moment so you can dodge out.
Its too bad most pvp is on bloody grassy plains with not a kitten box in sigh. So while you can’t hid your corrupt boon, epidemic now… and a whole list of other targeted stuff will always find a way to hit some imaginary wall. Last time I did pvp daily I did not get a single succesful epidemic or corrupt boon in 3 games.
Also on subject of tank rangers… thats why kids you should love barbed precision instead of stacking condition damage and nothing else. Those barbed ticks is what gets anything as soon as little spring is out of the picture signet or not.

Remove root and then dodge… yes it blows condition removal but its better then sitting in the blasted roots. Anyway roots are never an issue for me as necro. And tbh ranger dependence on los is their #1 fall. Give me 1 tree and I’ll block 80% of their damage.

If you left with karkas… then nothing changed. A few more nerfs but that’s about it.
Namely epidemic suffered its 5th or 6th nerf now. Namely it needs los now so its useless more often then not and even more random then cb.
A few “fixes”… nothing major. Mostly things that don’t make any difference.
We can finally see debuffs in DS… thats one and only thing worth mentioning. I’d mention axe “buff” but unless you did some heavy math you would never notice the difference.

Well so I was strolling in Frostgore today… saw an ice drake… went at him with 1 blood fiend, 2 bone minions, 1 bone fiend, 1 shadow fiend, 1 golem, 1 jagged gorror, 1 griffon and 1 ember and a skele mini… I could have probably dropped a seed mortar too but forgot. Then ice drage did his breath… and my entire entourage died… in 1 breath attack. What suprised me the most wasn’t the fact that as full mm they all just borked over from 1 attack it was the fact how unsuprised I was. As if I already gave up on the whole idea somewhere deep inside.
The end.
Going to play some new bioshock now lol.

Yep… the fun part is dead on. So is the fact that a lot of things gw2 necro has are not necromantic in any way shape or form. Mainly weapons but a good chunk of abilities too…
This is like going from morrowind with complete freedom to do anything you bloody want. Make a spell that blows up a town… or makes anything it hits a powerless(statless) bag of meat on a floor, enchant pants to shoot fireballs… enchant rings to summon constant summons, spend weeks making an absurdly powerful potion that lasts for 6000 hours… and then get hit with skyrim… sure it looks fancy but all the creativity was flushed down the toilet and you are left with beautiful but hollow world that never makes a lasting impression. At the end of the day you are simply left with that feeling of “Yeah I was there…” not the feeling that makes your eyes sparkle and you spewing a torrent of things that makes you look like a kid at a toy store.
Bland… that’s the name of the game.

As advice for dealing with condition damage as 20/0/30/20 is to pop retaliation then swap to DS. If you are seriosly getting burned by condition damage… some really annoying champions is to stop blowing up minions and using extra siphon to mitigate it out. Its much simplier under water due to different DS skill set but on land in general use DS to simply soak it up and while you are at it use aoe. Don’t forget that retaliation too.

I can’t honestly agree with those choices for more reasons then I’ll ever list. Wells have gigantic cooldowns even if you spend 20 traits to reduce it. Also dagger will never benefit you enough as you level due to not having any precision and crit damage.
Minimum requirements and management are minions but it also will take a lot of traits to make them shine… But it will also provide least effort/gear to manage. Another option is condition it will start off horribly until you can get some duration for conditions and if you are unwilling to dish out on food it will be sloppy at best. But the only skill you will need is epidemic… granted in it… 5th? nerf now its even less reliable then corrupt boon(never thought i’d see the day when there is something even more random then cb but w/e).
Any power build is heavily dependent on gear or you will be sitting and wasting time watching yourself poke things with a butterknife that is not fun that is as far away from fun as it gets. Minions do not scale with anything except traits that is a curse and a blessing at the same time. Regardless of how horrible your gear is they will do same dps and have same survivability as for someone with full mega uber exotics/ascended etc gear.
As for weapons… id say axe/focus if you do go with anything minion/power related. Retaliation a lone is enough to make certain maps feel a lot different. Example – Firehearth Rise… a lot of aoe… horrible for MM etc… But also a fact that I can pop axe 3… and have a flame legion walking flamethrower kill itself in a single burst w/o me actually doing anything. Same applies to embers and their costant aoe spammage just as much as it hurts it all comes back to them with retaliation. Also provides cripple for when you don’t feel like fighting and just want to keep moving. Focus is a bit more iffy subject focus provides a single shot of anywhere from 4 to 16 stacks of vulnerability depending on how bounces go thats 4% to 16% damage buff… there is only 1 trait that that gives as much damage buff and that is a 30 point trait which also requires target to be half dead anyway. Dagger does none of those. It provides a root… as amazing as it is it serves no purpose while leveling a heal on channel is… well… yeah again its not leveling material. Autoattack is still superior to everything else but you are both faceplanted=taking more damage so it always has to be offset by something. And its single melee weapon that doesn’t cleave… while I could care less for melee since I dislike it… it means you will be focusing things pretty much most of the time.
edit: If you can afford gear/food etc condition will be fastest and almost entirely aoe smacking… If you can’t then either go with minions or get creative.

1. Close to death doesn’t do jack for condition damage. Same as any other things that increase damage by . Only condition damage period.
2. For instance if you wanted to run spvp and aim for 100 bleed duration for barbed then yeah.
I run 30 spite 30 curses and rest in greater marks… simply to have my 2 ticks from barbed.
Tbh theres nothing else I really want as full condition in spvp… mark of evasion is nice… But I’m too squishy and if I end up using it… I’ts probably close to me getting rolled so its pointless. Dagger cd would have been nice but not exactly a game changer either same for staff cd…
Aside from spvp however… there is little need to bother with spite just to get 30% condition duration. Get food… it offers longer duration w/o needing trait points.

Started as necro with ega.. never bothered with anything else. Oh yeah I do have a lvl3 ele that I use for spvp sometimes… Mostly just to force people to rage explode. Can’t really thing of anything more aggravating then a squishy clothie with least health/armor/toughness that is pretty much unkillable 1v1… and depending on situation/oposition I’ve had times where I held entire 8 man party at their spawn point just causing an entire train to burst into verbal flame war on me when the regular methods fail.
If i had to say I probably enjoy ele pvp… but its so generic and the fact you are forced into a singular one true way to do anything doesn’t exactly help. I would only play spell casters/ranged because melee with big bad clubs bores me into submission but mesmer on other hands is definitely not my cup of tea… too annoying and too limited into being a 1 trick pony.
Necro offers variety. Granted most of it is creaky and at times just broken and only usable in one situation and no other… but I appreciate the variety more then anything else. When you can adjust things by putting a little thought in and using other means to your advantage… is more fun for me then endlessly swinging some kitten giant trunk and screaming loudly “ME SMASH!1!”.
Anyhoo… Started with necro…never left it really… and probably will quit before I ever bother to change.

DarkniteJ.8053:

Heya Bas,

I’ve been tryin to catch you online. Been wanting to run an all necro fractal run. I’m on level 6 currently because fractals aren’t really my thing until recently where I decided to give it a try. I also want to give minions a try and want to see them in-game.

They work fine in fractals. Full mm works fine on lvl10… past that… Meh I don’t know but I also have no desire to deal with calculator difficulties to even see it. Even running in full berserker you still remain more durable then most classes… up until aoe pokes its ugly head in.

Talentless.5708:

HiSaZuL.2843:

Talentless.5708:

Alkaline.2809:

Talentless.5708:

Instead of a boycott, I would suggest you play your necro more so that one day you might L2P

Always responding negative on the forums do not help.

Agreed, but I gave up hope on an OP that says he wants to boycott a class. There are plenty of positive posts, suggestion threads and even podcasts on the necro to help people who have trouble. I’m sorry if I have no sympathy for people who dont want to make any effort and just go out in WvW, press a single button and kill everyone.

And I have no interest in l2p comments nor seeing “proof” in form in wvw ganking of underleveled and undergeared players getting “melted”. Granted boycotting sounds like a pretty boring and unproductive way to get attention. And cashshop is one of few things that works well. You aren’t forced into it like with 99.9% of so called “free2play” where free mostly stands for free to install.
People keep saying we have the most variety… oh joy… mediocre semblance to being on par in very specific situation. Every single of one of the so called builds is pidgenholed into a very specific situation and nothing else, outside of that situation you are immediately hit will walls and the fact that you aren’t doing jack that could ever be called productive. Yeah… the rest of classes are also pidgenholed into 2-3 viable specs with few small variation but frankly I’d take 2-3 specs that work on par with everyone else over an infinite amount of worthless garbage that can’t compete on any reasonably equal ground.
I was going to make a l2… jab… but frankly people who refuse to see anything past their own opinion are not really worth trying to have a conversation with.

enjoy your boycott. I hope you find what you are looking for. Fortunately the devs are smarter and wont make this class OP to suit kiddies.

Good job not even managing to read second sentence. That is why I said talking to people like you is a waste of time.

Tommyknocker.6089:

Bhawb.7408:

And yet there are people like Symbolic and Khalifa, and Nemesis. I’d say a win/lose record of 2000-400 speaks a lot for itself.

Playing the devil’s advocate here, you do realize that there are some players that are much better at these games and their class, to the point of intuition reflexes, right? Although their track record is that high means nothing to what the average player can do when in the same situation, or build.

edit: also see above ^

Having said that, they need to address the condi cap because as it is dps is king and seeing as our class isn’t as well suited to dps as others we feel like the forgotten class. Most weapons need an overhaul as do our utilities. But OP, I’m not going to boycott I’m just going to deck out my warrior and play him off and on till I see something done to the necro that makes us stand out from the crowd.

This pretty much sums up the whole… <x> has mad skills so you all need to l2p arguments. Your win to lose ratio means absolutely nothing. Also it has no bearing on anything outside that… a meaningless score. Does that score make a game better? Does it make EVERYONES experience more enjoyable? Does it make community a better place?
This is just my opinion but I just can’t see how that kitten score could affect anything past being a random forum badge.
What I want isn’t what everyone else wants… but I still would rather have a community that cares for each other. Where people simply have fun playing a game. A game is there to be enjoyed not frustrated because the path you like happens to plainly not be considered by devs as fun/good/balanced/productive/blah blah blah.
Would this ever happen? No. Pretty kitten sure that could never happen. There’s always that 1 guy who needs to prove to someone that he is better then everyone else. I can’t honestly see how it matters in general… even less so in a game where sole purpose is to have fun.
But on topic I still agree that boycotting is silly lol.

Talentless.5708:

Alkaline.2809:

Talentless.5708:

Instead of a boycott, I would suggest you play your necro more so that one day you might L2P

Always responding negative on the forums do not help.

Agreed, but I gave up hope on an OP that says he wants to boycott a class. There are plenty of positive posts, suggestion threads and even podcasts on the necro to help people who have trouble. I’m sorry if I have no sympathy for people who dont want to make any effort and just go out in WvW, press a single button and kill everyone.

And I have no interest in l2p comments nor seeing “proof” in form in wvw ganking of underleveled and undergeared players getting “melted”. Granted boycotting sounds like a pretty boring and unproductive way to get attention. And cashshop is one of few things that works well. You aren’t forced into it like with 99.9% of so called “free2play” where free mostly stands for free to install.
People keep saying we have the most variety… oh joy… mediocre semblance to being on par in very specific situation. Every single of one of the so called builds is pidgenholed into a very specific situation and nothing else, outside of that situation you are immediately hit will walls and the fact that you aren’t doing jack that could ever be called productive. Yeah… the rest of classes are also pidgenholed into 2-3 viable specs with few small variation but frankly I’d take 2-3 specs that work on par with everyone else over an infinite amount of worthless garbage that can’t compete on any reasonably equal ground.
I was going to make a l2… jab… but frankly people who refuse to see anything past their own opinion are not really worth trying to have a conversation with.

Give general idea of other members. If you stick with mostly melee you can go condition heavy build to supplement lack of range and stopping. If its a mix then something akin to blind/frost power specs would be more beneficial. Frost reducing skill usage and speed severly helps holding points stopping orb carriers. If entire team is ranged… well… that scenario gets wonky… ds isn’t going to stop bursers. It can ripped off in matter of seconds by 1 enemy forget a team. In that scenario going for a full team of runners is the only choice I can see. Using spectral walk/spectral grasp and using as much cc as possible cripple/frost/snares/fear and running away leading people away from nodes. Spectral grasp is wonky… if it really worked it would be great to pull carriers the heck away from where they are heading to … in practice it fails miserably. If you intent to hold points go for clerics gear with well centric build. It really boils down more to the rest of your team imo.

Its less about build and more about team. The idea unlike with spvp is to actually win not farm the most glory. In that effect its a matter of team fitting together or working together. If entire team of ranged faces entire team of warriors you are going to get slaughtered.
Mobility is important in tpvp for being there to save your teamates/cap points or defend points much more so then leave a tank to guard 1 point when other team can just grab orb and drag it back and forth and end up winning only holding 1 point but being much more mobile.
If you join it at random its completely luck dependent.

seraphenslaved.6235:

Besides a few broken skills/traits, I don’t see anything wrong with us. I run a full rabid condimancer in WvW and have a blast. survivability, damage, lootbags, and spread ALL the conditions!

So you took 1 single spec in its best enviroment and said class is fine. /facepalm

To answer first question just open sticky with bug list. Most of them were here since beta.
Look at the amount of red posts here. Start necro and try >DIFFERENT< things in different situations. Then look at the other classes. That should give you the best answer you could ever get, not someones opinion but your own. Maybe you will think they are fine and maybe you wont. Maybe you will be happy with just pve farming or wvw and you simply won’t need to care about the few things you will find broken. Who knows… try.

Navani.5281:

Thanks for taking the time to reply guys!

I was thinking of going minion master with an emphasis on survival. Does that sound viable? I’ve always been a fan of having a pet, I guess because my first MMO character was a Warlock in WoW =p

I’m most recently coming from SWTOR which I really really enjoy, but the emphasis on buying things is turning me off so I purchased this instead (Because they wanted me to buy things, I bought something else .. go figure)

Necro will not be anything even remotely similar to warlock in wow. Pets here are disposable if I think back on vanilla/most of bc… I could tank dungeons with voidwalker because I had some unique trinkets and gear that buffed them even further(they all got either removed or nerfed into oblivion but w/e) here… 1. they don’t regenerate at all… so if all of them are almost dead at the end of a fight they will die in first attack from the next enemy and they will be put on a FULL cooldown after that. Golem regenerates outside combat… assuming jagged horror doesn’t glitch and keep you in combat indefinitely.
Also this class is not mobile at all… draining effects don’t scale with anything. Vampiric traits that give life on hit and the like…. well… for example minions doing life steal for you heals for something like 30 hp per hit… a bit higher if you spend another trait on it. Most people will just laugh it off… but its not as bad as it sounds. Tho not really all that amazing either.
Also you lack cc… sure fear was nerfed in every patch since vanilla… god forbit warlocks wen’t from unfinished class free kill into whoops you actually need to try to kill them. Here fear last 1 second… 3 times less then thief and warrior. >3< times less.
The only other cc you have is root on dagger… and root on bone fiend. A knockdown on golem and ~daze on warhorn…. but honestly compare to flat out stuns/daze/confusion all this cc is arbitrary. warhorn is probably best one simply because unlike dagger its fast and cone. Minion cc is too bloody unreliable at best.
And your damage is sub-par at best. In short this is nothing like warlock in any of the specs. Swtor had much better combat mechanics imo to even bother comparing two.
There are too many road blocks in gw2… like bleed caps, certain stats not affecting certain things. Laughable that crit/crit damage/haste all that is just wasted on minions/condition… etc.

Resilience is not an answer… its a bandaid. What you basically said its a broken mechanic to start with. Instead of putting bandaids it should be fixed at its core. Why is there mitigation when I can never mitigate damage on the same scale as damage increase? It makes no sense past the “wanting to keep fights short”.
And you yourself said its not about how a is compared to b. Its the fact that in a fast paced game where fights are not meant to last long we have most abilities with 1min+ cd… which goes completely against the very idea of fast paced. So again its not about some balance idea its a simple matter of being bottlenecked. Aslo the fact that we are defined by utilities and not weapons… while most other classes use utilities as…well… utilities they enhance and supplement weapon. Ours define it entirely.
Resilience killed wow in more ways then it ever helped. Back when blizzard was still blizzard they even admited that arenas had no place in wow. Wow was never ment to be an e-sport it was a mistake they regreted because it simply did not fit in… and after they put in it was too late and they had to quickly adjust everything to fit it instead of the other way around. It promoted laziness on top of everything else. Dying 3 times a week to get gear on par with someone who spent 4+ hours every day to raid is a insulting to the person who worked to get his gear.
Honestly if resilience made its ugly way in back in vanilla I would have quit right there and then… I wouldn’t take having the work I put in strolling in full t3 and having barely 4 hours to sleep every weekday just simply flushed down the toilet. Keep it either casual vending machine like gw2 is right now… or keep the gear that requires work superior to anything else.

Zenith.7301:

Empiren.6401:

Zenith.7301:

If a thief doesn’t want to die, he won’t die.

All he needs to do is get you to blow your ver long cd stun breakers, and reset the fight and come back at you once your stun breaker is gone.

Hell, a sword/dagger stunlock thief in wvw is a nightmare. He can pretty much spam daze and you’ll need to try to deny him your back so he can’t, but many thieves have increased movement speed in stealth to help with that.

The problem with attrition thieves is that they can reset fights at will.

What necro actually carries stun breakers though/?? The cooldowns are way too long for any reliable use.
————————-
WvW, and i’ll repeat myself for the 100th time : Classes are not going to be balanced.

The crit damage and burst capabilities are simply too high at this moment in the game.
————————

The necro that doesn’t want to die to a competent opponent? Wasting your death shroud on a basilisk venom when you could break it and dodge is such a foolish decision.

Also, golem charge won’t affect any properly traited thief. Most wvw thieves carry the traits that when they’re cc’d they shadow step away and when hitting low health apply blinding powder, in addition to the stunbreak utility they bring.

The best tool against thieves is a root, but Dark Pact has such an obvious cast time most thieves will dodge it.

Well… I wouldn’t go as far as saying most… the facerolling/catering classes have huge appeal to people who can’t even read tooltips…
I’ve had amusing necros thinking that rooting another necro in a well is going to actually accomplish something, well as long as I bother to pay any attention(which seems to happend less and less often since I’m simply tired of this moldy lame excuse for pvp)… any teleportish ability while doesn’t remove the root also doesn’t get affected by it. Even if you rooted someone doesn’t mean they can’t “move”. I find it comical that while rangers elite is abysmally abusive. A simple DS>2 pretty much nullifies any usefulness of that elite right then and there. In short even managing to root someone doesn’t mean you won anything.

And a bit off-topic I still fail to see how people even see this as some kind of competition? Balance? What?…. only semblance of balance can be achieved if both parties are under identical circumstances with identical option etc etc. As soon as 1 person has a difference of any kind any talk of balance is comical. You want balance? Go play checkers. The only deciding factor there is human related. Mmos aren’t about balance its about having fun and not being restricted to what someone in a monkey suit thinks is the right way to spec. Gw2 fails horribly at both. You lose fun factor with the fact that half necromancers mechanics are broken. You lose your freedom when you realize you are stuck with no options or so few you may as well not have options, depending on what your doing… conditions/mm in dungeons is masochism and not helpful(doable… in some instances but still not helpful considering options even from other necro specs). And same goes for all whooping general 3 specs with power spec at least having some semblance of variation such as more ds centric or well centric or spectral… some of which are utterly worthless in specific situations. Why in gods green earth would anyone run spectral in pve O_O.
Original question was about advice now this entire discussion to me seems ridiculous and absurd once I stop to think on actual topic thats been discussed in past 2 pages. Why in gods name people compare two different things? Thats like comparing apple and orange… WHICH IS BETTER OMIGAWD. Sounds absurd? Well all I did is replaced necro and thief with apple and orange.