I leveled with early access never swapped from MM aside from spvp. But if you plan on pugging dungeons early on… its fairly broken way to approach it. True I did 1-76? Never bothering to leave queens dale but it was ega… and anet didn’t have a chance to kitten on everything yet. So I could farm CM ~20mins a run for a lvl… now you can’t. One your xp gets chopped horribly with each next run to the point where I don’t even consider it useful to do more then 2. 3rd run xp will be about the same as 1 event.
If you stick strictly to pve for leveling minions or conditions would be best choice. Power builds require 80 level gear and full traiting to be viable otherwise wells do laughable damage and you use them less then anything else.
Condition is fairly good for aoe kills but much slower if you think in terms of 1v1… also don’t expect to be even remotely useful on any events. Theres a 25 bleed cap and all other classes can stack bleeds faster so pretty much you will be useless.
Minions… its easy but will be wonky until you get 50% health buff and cd reduction so 20 traits in death.
As far as gear for pve goes… zerker stats(power,precision,crit) for anything that isn’t condition spec. For condition toughness,precision,condition… try to keep bleed duration/condition duration high otherwise they fall off too fast.
If you aim to power level… meh… crafting I guess.
1 thing to note… if you deside on which maps to do as MM… skip anything with flame legion and water. In water you can’t use golem… flame legion=all ur noodles are dead 90% of the time. Pretty much skip most of ascalonian maps. 1 bush… BUSH… from blazeridge at 80… with full MM… is about half dead minions and they don’t regen so its pretty pathetic mm or not.
I would love a less super-adorable backpack from the gem shop. Quaggan is far too adorable for me to be taken seriously as a master of death and corruption with him flopping around on my back.
That pretty much.
Depends on what you are aiming for. Bleed duration is for damage it may look like you lost some damage on each single tick but if you can get 100% duration that would make you barbed precision hit twice. So keeping a huge stack of bleeds is possible w/o doing idioticly long combos where your precious 25 bleeds last for a whooping 2 seconds and then for the next minute you struggle to maintain 10.
But for faster damage and something that isn’t entirely condition or more beffy condition other options are just as valid.
If you aren’t MM they are worthless… if they did bleeds on hit… They would get a bit more respect but not until bleed cap is gone, dots are affected by haste and can crit like all other sources of damage. But that will never happen… even bleed cap getting removed. They will never get bleed long enough to matter anyway. Same goes for bone minions unless you use their active they are worthless even if your full MM. Still don’t understand why all minions don’t have some sort of on hit effect. I’m still not sure if cripple is all that great on elite. It works for condition spec but for everyone else that cripple is a sad joke… w/o duration it might as well not be there anyway. Anyway none of it will change since its anet. So wishful thinking.
Just go into water…. thats what I do… the sheer horror people experience once they are in water and have no idea what their skills even do. Most people are utterly unprepared for any kind of in the pool fun.
Chased by a thief jump into water… 1. he got no movement boots in water. 2. I got the most spamable swiftness out there. Spear #2. Anyway… for the most part people are terribly unprepared as soon as water is involved especially thieves. They have some great underwater skills but most people have no idea what does what.
Also if its wvw… AHEM… cliffs are your best friends. Denying entire zerg the “fun” of mashing a silly little me by simply leaping off a cliff while they all stand on top running back and forth kitten … its priceless. And you don’t need anything except for enough lf to activate DS on the landing.
Some of the thief specs are just impossible to beat as power necro as long as the thief has a clue. Example is condition/dodge spammer. With that build he can dodge about in a well with minimal danger. It won’t even hit him most of the time. But if you get a jump on him… things could easily turn the other way around.
Point is thief is a horrible class to use as example. Ive been hit for 20k… in just 1 measly twack… Doesn’t really mean much considering if you are caught with your pants down even a crappy 100b warrior can pull that off. A good one doesn’t even need to catch you in combat with 0lf and no stamina and no heal.
But I also seen enough thieves that I walked over and didn’t really even pay attention to. It happens.
I’ve also had a pleasure of fighting a thief on my ele… that managed to stay stealthed/not rendered for about 2 minutes. In that entire duration all I say was him closing in so I prepared for opener and didn’t die the other 2 minutes I was assaulted by a guy who did not have a decency to even render once. So go figure. At some point I got fed up and just left because the sheer absurdity of that situation. Not being able to fight back except for few aoes and lucky cleave/cone attacks… yeah anet can take it and shove it.
It all tumbles down to situation. I’ve fought godly rangers that would make pin cushion out of my spvp cond necro… but because I had enough clue to not go on open field, once I knew what I was getting myself into, so what once was hopeless turned completely one sided in my favor. Yeah unlike ranger los isn’t a huge issue for me so I could run about stairs hit him from around from below all the while all he could do is swap pet. I got staff and most of my good abilities are aoes anyway.
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Lol kitten moderators can’t take criticism god forbid someone says that mechanics are shallow and the whole trinity isn’t here is a laughable denial. Posts removed… infractions given… yet i didn’t even bother to point a finger at anet. Then again its amazing how pitiful you have to be to even visit these forums when rest of anet doesn’t seem to even know they exist. Communication with fanbase at its best. The love and rainbows are practically oozing out lol.
Anyway that says more about state of affairs then anything else(must be how it feels to live in china where you don’t have a right to have an opinion lol). Incoming another ban for a month… oh nooes. What shall I do… Oh wait…
Size of greater marks should be default. Making them unblockable on the other hand could be left as a trait. Frankly I do agree that original mark size is just pathetic. I was going to add but I rambled enough for today and its almost 9am and I didn’t sleep so to hell with that.
I will name that one waff… kitten #8230; cracked before I could even finish.
Lol ok point taken you just picked random elite because everyone knows which one you should have for support heh.
And yeah andele got a good point I sort of forgot about weakening shroud. Granted its use will be sort of hampered on support build due to lack of both condition duration and ds traits. Hmm… I guess with food it should be pretty solid. Its really good on DS power builds though. Especially if you go for piercing blasts so you get harassed a lot on large pulls.
Naked blue guy… lol.
On subject of lich boon strip… i’d just use focus… god knows its cooldown is infinitely more manageable. And if you are support you just don’t have stats to get anything meaningful out of lich form.
lol at jq hating on bg… that just made me laugh. the endless zerg server.
I was looking at something similar, but went 0/20/20/30/0 and did Cleric/Sapphire gear with axe/focus.
Damage overall is low of course, but you have 1552 Healing Power with food buffs and plenty of support still.
Silly you… taking chilling darkness and taking lich form over plague. Why? Now the vulnerability mark is nice and all that with its 10sec cd… which if im not wrong from the top of my head lasts also for 10sec base… but on single target due to how focus works you can get 5-15 stacks with single focus use. So that can’t be it. And the boon/condtion strip massive super awesome aoe its cd combined with lich forms cd… a bit counter productive if you ask me.
Plague simply lets you face tank a boss/group of annoying npcs and with chilling darkness you can even reduce their use of obnoxious abilities that aren’t affected by blind so win/win.
Oh yeah… if you speak strictly pve, greater marks isn’t all that useful tbh. Now one could argue that reduced cd on staff isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference either but… meh… you can toss condition removal and interrupt more often. regen + chill/weakness combo isn’t something sneeze at either. Highly debated tho… extra range is still nice but meh I can’t really decide lol.
Still I wanna hear why lich and not plague.
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It is hard to comment on this since your necro is only level 17. Your experience is not complete. I will say you should level the necro to at least 40 before getting an opinion on it.
Anyways if you find Necro minion AI frustrating, do not play ranger neither. It is the same thing over there.
On top of having even less variety of builds. lol
Mesmer and guardian are the… “beloved child” of anet. So they will always be catered to to the xtremes. Like a bug that appeared after a patch was fixed in 2 days. Bugs that necros had since beta… more then half a year ago… are ignored. These forums are not visited. We are nerfed after told we need “most love”. When something is too annoying… such as 2 out of 3 of our elites destroying all our minions… well… they just slap working as intended into tooltip(i try to pretend i do not realise it would hurt mesmers elite that makes you a punchingbag…i try).
Or go with warrior/thief the “ kitten #8221; friendly classes that require you to simply press keys in any given order, no need for any kind of brain activity, are also well taken care of since masses of children with attention span of flying brick would cause more noise then even monkeys in a suit are willing to deal with… as long as their moms keep forking over cash they will cater to it.
But I do agree with people who said you haven’t exactly mentioned what you feel is broken. Synergy is lacking… yes necro and ranger and engineer are guity as charged. Also necros have mile long list of bugs that nobody cares about, minion AI issues that would make a statue cringe, and the fact that they don’t regenerate after a fight….so next fight they all die gloriously. Heck under water you can’t even heal them… no way no how. Granted there are so few choices to do so… and main one requires enemies next to minions close by… and has a cap of 5. But thats all irrelevant. You spent 2 days on a game… you haven’t seen anything to make even remotely justified analysis. This game revolves heavily around pvp. Yet you have not seen either sPVP which is complete separate from everything(regardless of anything you are lvl 80 there and you can only use spvp gear) nor did you see wvw. Heck lvl17… that means you haven’t seen most of abilities or traits or content.
I hit 80 w/o bothering to leave starting human area… I admit it was early game access before anet atively put diminishing returns on everything and simply ran dungeon 20mins run -> 100k xp… yeah.
This game got one of the best and most detailed maps i’ve seen in 20 years. The level designers deserve praise… sometimes I think ncsoft just had someone else do it… but hey… its asian corporation that stamps “free”-to-install mmos like peanuts so who knows.
Once you see it all… try other classes. When you can make a coherent observation on this as whole… then i’ll be glad to join in your rant. Until then… its silly.
Never changed from MM since early game access…
And I would actually agree that 10% chance is garbage. In pve there aren’t enough boons to remove… if you do find oddballs with boons use focus, which you should be using as proper MM and remove them with that if they bother you.
Death nova is the best grandmaster trait there is for MM. Transferring conditions to minions is worthless in pve and its far too slow for pvp. On the other hand poison no matter how little damage you think it does still provides constant damage and in pvp poison, like example that was give if u heal under poison for 10k… that chunk poison ate is pretty kitten significant. Poison does wonders for harassing tankish builds. And back to pve poison nova isn’t just about poison… fact most people seem to just walk right over. Poison field = weakness…. a CONSTANT stackable source of weakness. It may not be as amazing as it sounds on paper but it does mitigate damage fairly well considering how easy it is to stack for MM. Constantly dying jagged followed by bone minions dying and triggering it followed by staff…
Also I do agree that having points in spite does wonders… 20% condition duration isn’t 30% but heck for MM that stacks vulnerability that duration isn’t meaningless. I can always put from 5 to15 vulnerability stacks on 1 target with focus alone(the kittening kitten jew kitten censor can go eat a kitten… I had to edit that line 5 kittening times)… then followed by a channel.
I honestly can’t see myself loosing any traits in blood… 20 is bare minimum for vampiric stuff… combined with hp and cd from death and death nova…. that’s another 30 that I can’t see myself moving under any circumstances. And damage from spite plus duration for my vulnerability+weakness+poison again does wonders. Id love to have 30% but well… wearing full berserker set and being able to face tank champs in pve that aren’t in the “abusive 1 shot abilities” category is pretty kitten impressive. Putting things together would require full revamp to our traits… which is needed… but will NEVER happen. Just give up on idea of getting any kind of revamps done. Anet doesn’t care enough to fix pressing issues for half a year and you think they would bother with that? Wake up children…
Granted I do still by this day think that MM is wonky and clunky. But its not as all over the pace as DS for instance. DS traits are so spread out its impossible to get them all… not even close. Forget combining spectral + DS…And its not THAT bad… I wouldn’t bother pvp with it… and wvw with MM is… well… but as far as pve goes its okay not great but its not bad either.
And I refuse to play a melee “spellcaster” that is ridiculous and I didn’t take a spellcaster to sit there with a butterknife poking things. “Me BIG strong me SMASH puny with BIG stick” classes are lost on me. Over decades of gaming every time I tried I would get bored in less then 5 hours(in the best cases where it is actually well made melee).
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1. Staff is the only weapon necromancer has that brings utility. While all our specs are purely defined by utility skills we choose, unlike every other class…. kitten but fact.
2. It works fine with any power based build because most of them rely on melee(dagger) or just about melee(axe) but lack cleave while all other classes have cleave on melee. Staff brings range and pierce(semi-cleave, delectably better). Also works great with condition spec… guess why.
3. It is the only source of finisher outside idiotically unreliable crap like bone minions explosion… gl trying to get your rats into someones field and flesh wurm(wasting wurm for combo field sounds like the most horrifyingly bad thing to do). Underwater spear provides a ton of finishers but that has very limited use due to lack of underwater content compared to land based.
4. All staff marks have multiple effects packed into 1. Bleed+regen, chill+poison+poison field(combine with #4 for aoe weakness finisher), condition removal+transfer+very good damage, interupt+go screw urself mr. thief with broken rendering mechanics(which anet ADMITED finally and supposedly going to fix… bet it will remain broken specifically for necros but I’m just being a troll on that one)
5. There is rarely a point in having mixed weapons like axe+dagger, due to power specs either going for more general damage increase at %hp or axe cd. In most cases people just want to swap from focus to warhorn. Well users prefer dagger with its immobilize and higher damage while more spectral or debuffing specs tend to benefit from axe more due to vul stacking and retaliation for defense(never underestimate a well placed retaliation+ds…*cough*100noobs button*cough* yeah… just let that warrior kill himself with that moronic skill).
6. Like someone said its great for running away. Tunnel vision and dropping mines as you run? Sold.
7. It looks awesome for once.
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I stopped reading at “using ds when you are low on health”. If thats what you do… you have no right to complain. NONE. I’m sorry but in this case the famous “l2deathshroud” – by mr. John Peters actually does apply even if it makes me cringe at the thought.
Mesmer clones don’t have same AI… its blatantly obvious in more ways then one.
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You make John Peters smile. Well… if he ever read this he would… probably.
Referring to the “proper” use of death shroud :P
I’m full mm… I simply don’t feel like treating others the way I wouldn’t want to be treated. So dungeons are no go. WvW … if you are a masochist sure. SPvP well… meh… its luck game get good people you will get rolled like you weren’t even there get bad people… you can stomp them w/o spending any trait points or picking utility skills so its just flavor.
PvE farming is fine… compared to others not as facerolling but PvE is kitten friendly here so you should be ok.
Glad you’re enjoying it.
Meanwhile, I’m deathhammering my way through sPvP, WvW, FotM and Explorable mode.
41kehp with 3.5k attack is enough to deal with most issues. First in, last to die, and I hurt everyone around me the whole time I’m there.
Every time I saw ds necro they were by far the squishiest and least problematic enemies even compare to really bad glass cannon eles that drop like flies but then again I’m necro… I know where to put a stick so it hurts. Also ds necro is about as interesting as a giant hulking half nude guy swinging a club.. and swinging and then swinging some more followed by angry roars and more swinging. Mashing 1 button is so exciting to me I simply can’t help but be a kitten about it.
Mods on these forums are rabid kittens from china its been proved numerous times since these forums went live. Getting banned because you dared to criticize anet? easy you don’t even need to curse or flame them… just plainly in civilized manner state that their approach to something is faulty and list reasons. Next thing you know… topic gone and you got yourself a ban for a week. Trolling youtube level.
Then again… you could post anything on necromancer forums NOBODY visits that. You can troll/curse/bash/flame etc nobody cares lol.
Topic …. its been a more then a week by now kitten
Kamas – make more sense on necromancer then axe ever could.
Scythe – well… for lack of better explanation a much larger kama used with 2 hands.
Kryss – makes more sense then a dagger on a necromancer.
Spelltome while sounds fitting… anets idea of how weapons work would not be applicable here. I have a hard time imagining attack with a book… Twack someone and cause severe nosebleed and daze? And rip the cover off and scatter pages creating a cover for a speedy escape?But its anet… with their asian necromancer. So you are more likely to get a blowgun that shoots insects ala d3 style epileptic witch doctor from the swamps.
the book would be spells your character has to read out for the attack to work . after all they do have focus and warhorn
Both warhorn attacks you blow into it… to either daze your oponents with your terrible music or conjure up mosquitos that make you run fast by chasing after you. Only guardians read books >_>
I honestly can’t see myself using MM w/o minion cd reduction, hp and dmg and siphon traits. Its just not viable. W/o 20 spite they don’t do any damage… 50% less hp and they die before they can do anything even with it they still die and due to how cd on summoning works not having cd reduction increases downtime exponentially. Healing… well… personal choice I guess if I go mm I go full MM and w/o it healing is a bit lacking.
- Bone fiend or bone minions? That’s always a tough one, but I’ve found that if you actually hit the bone fiend’s skill outside of it’s attack range (or this seems to work for me anyway) he will root himself and stay back from the fight some and avoid getting too much agro. Now you do lose the immobile on the target because it was out of range, but you get a minion that survives longer. He does hit freaking hard, and since you use vampiric master you can benefit a lot from his double hits. That being said, when it comes down to me trying to decide, I look at the finishers each minion has and consider which I would prefer in the given situation. Bone minions are blast finishers, bone fiend has a chance of projectile finisher (even though the tooltip doesn’t state it, I’ve seen it do proj finishers many times through my wells). That’s usually how I decide.
I felt the deep urge to quote this specific paragraph. The immobilize trick is actually something I used but not once even realized I did it.
And as Bhawb said bone minions is either the highest damage dealing minion or utterly useless. Depending on if you blow them up or not.
I always use bone minions and bone fiend and swap between shadow fiend and flesh wurm depending on situation. WvW your little worm friend is one the most abusive skills past epidemic and spectral walk jumping off a very high cliff lol. Even with horrible gear and lacking any insensitive in participating in WvW due to me generally not really having as much fun as I would like with MM I can tell you wurm provides most of the fun. Throw it on the side… doesn’t matter where. Rush past the zerg you with axe and your golem towards catapults/treb get to it use #2 and golem charge then use ur wurm teleport and ds to like like a little girl through the woods at night. The ensuring enraged zerg determined to chase you down will go to extremes chasing you. I jumped off a cliff just to… well.. not give the satisfaction… I counted ~14-17 people who splattered next to me.
And for Dread.
Your stats do not affect minions/pets/clones/etc in any way. Only traits think I did say that but I’m too lazy to read my own walls of text. Reason why everyone says power is pretty much required is the fact that its your 1 and only source of damage. You can’t really go conditions with full MM because you will never reach any kind of meaningful level of damage due to traits and utility slots not being available. Most condition specs rely on having 100% bleed duration increase to take full advantage of barbed precision.. bleeds on crit and so forth. So power = your own damage. Minions damage isn’t horrible but its not really all that amazing either if you do not suppliment it you will be struggling with issues like your minions dying more often due to losing golem to prolonged fights and so forth.
After power general idea is to make sure you are alive to both resummon your noodles and dps. So either toughness or vitality or both for extra durable approach. Precision increases your critical chance so it increases your own damage by a lot and rather easily however true benefit from criticals are only seen once you beef up critical strike damage. So just play around with power+tough/vit+prec with power+prec+critdmg and power+tough+vit. See which one makes you happier.
Anyway again I feel obligated to say it rats do the most damage if use their utility it also provides combo finisher so lets say you have death nova. You blow up your rat it does a lot of damage and leaves a poison cloud now your bone fiend will use cloud for some projectile poison stacking your next rat blow up will provide aoe weakness and leave another poison pool which you can once again combo with staff for instance for even more weakness and longer poison stack on enemy.
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Kamas – make more sense on necromancer then axe ever could.
Scythe – well… for lack of better explanation a much larger kama used with 2 hands.
Kryss – makes more sense then a dagger on a necromancer.
Spelltome while sounds fitting… anets idea of how weapons work would not be applicable here. I have a hard time imagining attack with a book… Twack someone and cause severe nosebleed and daze? And rip the cover off and scatter pages creating a cover for a speedy escape?
But its anet… with their asian necromancer. So you are more likely to get a blowgun that shoots insects ala d3 style epileptic witch doctor from the swamps.
See what I did there?
You proved his points about humility correct, making the thread more cringe-inducing than it already was?
I think we’re working on different definitions of accessible, but thank you for clarifying.
What you guys are calling ‘accessibility’ I just look at as as mechanical or technical skill – the need to press more buttons at a faster rate than another class.
As was said by another person already his self proclaimed importance is just that self proclaimed. You and him talking about humility is pot calling kettle black. And since he provided nothing relevant to the topic… again you are trying to make a point but contradict yourself with it. Good job.
Not to be condescending, but as someone who was top 5 in World of Warcraft arenas, it always makes me cringe when low-rated players try to argue with high-rated players. It’s fallacious to submit to what an authority figure says, but everything Symbolic said is objectively true to anyone who plays Guild Wars 2 and has experience in high-rated PvP in any MMO.
The rest of the conversation was interesting, particularly how most low-rated or new players tend to underestimate necromancers and overestimate how imbalanced the game really is. The latter in particular happens in every MMO I’ve ever played.
Congratulations. I safely dismissed the rest of, what ever it is that you said, due to being awestruck by your amazingness. Just let me get my carebear pants and tinfoil hat out of the closet so I don’t get swept off my feet by the sheer force of your astounding kitten.
Your opinion that your opinion supersedes someone else’s opinion is still just your opinion.
I had full t3 when you sat in MC asking if you could skin some corehounds. It must make me the god of pve and my opinion being a law to feeble minded sheep that is the rest of the world. If that is so, I declare that your opinion is false and you are a heretic.
See what I did there?
The learning curve is high, really high,
I admit we got some serious issues, our trait tree is a example,
Anyway the necro is in a good place right now,
The play stile is reactive, that means you are always acting acording your oponent,
This play stile is always, in any game and any place the hardest to master, because you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a combo, you don’t have the iniciative, you need to think fast and react even faster,
Plus this play stile, in any game is the less popular, because you need to use your brain instead hitting like a maniac your keyboard, (some people even say there’s a class you can play with a mouse and one key, the number “2”),
Those would be greatsword using warriors, and d/d thieves spamming their ’2’s like it’s going out of style. Those players are also extreme bads. =)
Bads by whose definition? Yours? And what exactly makes you the authority on the subject? Maybe they like it that way… maybe they physically are not capable of doing more then that due to what ever reason. The kitten is really strong in this topic.
“A bad player behind most classes is a bad player” and “A bad player behind a necro is useless”,
“A good player behind most classes is a good player” and “A good player behind a necro is mediocre”,
“A great player behind most classes is a great player” and “A great player behind a necro… is godlike”,
And a fat kid in a basement bragging is still a fat kid in a basement and necro has nothing to with it. <3
Spectral armor is incredibly strong, when you are traited for it. It completely negates what happens in most fights against thief, you pop it the second they come in and stun you, and you have protection to reduce the damage, and spectral armor will give you pretty huge amounts of life force.
Not to say that it could really use some seconds shaved off its CD, but it still has some uses in bunker necro builds.
As long as you didn’t have full lf to begin with… then what? Pop your failshroud and have it melted off?… You didn’t save yourself from anything, you were forced to use one thing instead of another simply because they are mutually exclusive or if you did pop it anyway… you broke stun… great… you gained 0 lf because u were maxed and you got a short prot which is not ment to save you from a burst spec its ment to mitigate a portion while you try to do the same. And that’s the problem with this class half the blasted mechanics/skills are mutually exclusive you can only do it this way and no other way.
You can’t do it like most other classes and roll any weapons/traits you want together and rely simply on your ability to read and comprehend what you red and then apply new found enlightenment in practice.. The day you can take any 2 aspects and have them fully working at the same time… I’ll tip mah tiny hat to anet. Until then… meh.. broken with “working as intended” tag.
The very fact that this is the only class that can never have a dev response or support or anything past some clown with l2deathshroud is a testament to how abandoned this class is.
And spectral armor is subpar in comparison with its equivalents on other classes. Both in terms of utility and application and time frames. Its worthless in some situation and in other situations its cooldown simply makes it not worth bothering with. In spvp you need defenses that can be used more then once per match. A stun break that you will use 2 times per match? Might as well not take it.
Afraid? Thinking? More like nobody could be bothered to even spend time to think about it. That’s purely my theory though.
I’m not sure why you ever felt that minions could stay up forever but for anything thats not a regular trash world npcs minions are extremely fragile. Any dungeon aoe will wipe them all in single hit. That goes for all dungeons. There are some aoes that don’t do direct damage but apply dots but end result is the same.
Unlike wow they do not have any protection against aoe, no chance to resist or avoid. They also don’t even regenerate during combat or even out of combat, with the exception of golem that does renerate OC. Underwater…. you have 0 ability in any shape/way/form to heal anything. Also their stats do not scale with yours at all. Only things that affect their damage, survivability are traits. Same as condition damage not benefiting from a bunch of damage stats… this game is terribly biased towards popularity. Simply put… they are horrible for dungeons… can you run dungeons with them yes. But success in explore mode will be 50% luck and 50% group composition.
On your question about minion types bone fiends charm is that its ranged in group scenario they live a lot longer then anything else, while shadow fiend will be dead more often then not due to the fact that everyone and their crippled grandmother cleaves… well except for necromancer but we are more like brain dead monkey in coma.
Flesh wyrm can survive in a lot of situation where rest of your minions would be able to stay alive for 1-2 seconds at best. You can stick him on top of a pillar… or a wall. Same for bone fiend because he is at least ranged he does’t get cleaved. Bone minions charm is that as soon as theres danger of them dying you can blow them up and never loose on damage or blow them if your stats are high enough that your damage from explotion is higher then damage they can dish out in the duration of 1 cooldown.
As far as gear goes its mostly a matter of prioritizing: if you are soloing hard stuff power,tougness,vitality. If you are farming then power,precision,toughness(most rounded set of stats). If you are in a tanky group power,precision,critical damage. If you are dead you can’t dps nor can you summon anything so thats the basic idea. You aren’t a burst class nor are you support class.
Staff does misrable damage its not very good for dungeons but its the most versatile weapon with highest utility in the entire game. It provides aoe healing with dots, chill with poison field that can be comboed for aoe weakness, condition removal and transfer to enemies and interupt in form of fear.
Axe provides vulnerability which both improves your own damage and your minions damage. Focus provides further vulnerabity and ability to stip boons + chill.
Chill is a very good condition due to the fact that it both slows enemy and increases cooldown for abilities by 66% which is nothing to sneeze at as long as there is a cooldown.
Unfortunetly heal on focus is…. wonky like the rest of the class. It may apply regen to 1 minion and ignore rest it may not apply regen to anyone.
Don’t forget to use death shrouds life transfer to heal your noodle squad since you picked that trait. It’s also a high damage aoe.
(edited by HiSaZuL.2843)
Lol at math argument. Be happy it got beefed up. But still in pvp… its consume or don’t bother. Conditions is the name of the game. And MM spec is horrid when it comes to dealing with conditions. Yeah there’s that transfer nonsense… but your noodle army is fragile enough as it is. So in most cases there’s more benefit to remove conditions from minions rather then add more. Anyway… if you go for a proper full MM… you have very few condition removal tools. Staff and offhand dagger… and staffs 4 while amazing and all that… like all marks it requires target to trigger and you being there.
But anyway I’m still going to say that in all pve content its 1 fight then your minions are half dead for the next one. And no… im not going to sit there switch kittening skills to dismiss summons then sit with a thumb up my kitten waiting for cd… just because anet got a stick up their kitten
Golem doesn’t even warrant being an elite. It has less damage then some clones… and on par hp with thiefs elite… which summons 3. Point is they are lacking in survivability. Mostly due to aoe killing them instantly and partually due to the fact they don’t regen so you never start combat with your minions being fully healed…If MM could provide even the slightest in combat passive healing from damage or passive it would solve it partualy or at least let them all heal ooc. And if they just plainly gave summons aoe resistance… it would solve half the problem on the spot. If they all regenerated ooc and had some resistance to aoe my gripe would be solely with underwater lack of golem and being stuck with elite that punishes MM.
Well you can’t really compare the Golem to a skill that only has 30" duration and 4 times the recharge. TBH I’m happy with its damage and survivability, I only have a problem with its AI.
As far as ordinary minions go, hbowever, I completely agree, they should give them ooc regen. Or at the very least allow us to dismiss and resummon! Having them clinging on by a sliver of health makes me feel like the opposite of a GW1 minionmaster, who started out pathetically weak until he got his first few minions up and then became an unstoppable juggernaut. GW2 MMs get weaker as the fight progresse, which is psychologically rather dispiriting. If I run to the next point with 2 minions almost dead and 1 on the recharge I might as well lie down and let them kill me.
Yep. Every second fight is you engage every minion dies and you have 4 skills on cd with maybe golem out… Useless that is. You either run away and come back when things off cd or just tough it up and do it yourself which is utterly moronic in its base concept. And again minions are still made out of wet paper golem included.
Soon as he can survive some dungeon aoe… you can tell me hes alright. Besides its not like he regens in combat any fights that last more then 30 seconds incur a useless elite that provides nothing to the table. Past maybe 20k damage. Thats a few auto attacks from warrior/thief whoopdy doo… some elite that is.
Can you play MM… sure… is it enjoyable… I think sticking a hedgehog up your own kitten would be equally gratifying .
Still does nothing to fix the fact that minions are made out of wet paper.
Overexaggeration – they are fine, and routinely tank everything short of champion mobs for me.
And you don’t have a single way to heal them under water… nor can you use a golem under water.
You have a quicker summoning time underwater, but other than that I agree, though I never really noticed the not healing before. It bothers me alot that I can’t use anything except Plague underwater.
Don’t get me wrong… as far as pve goes I refuse to touch anything other then full MM… it works… but cmon. Golem doesn’t even warrant being an elite. It has less damage then some clones… and on par hp with thiefs elite… which summons 3. Point is they are lacking in survivability. Mostly due to aoe killing them instantly and partually due to the fact they don’t regen so you never start combat with your minions being fully healed…If MM could provide even the slightest in combat passive healing from damage or passive it would solve it partualy or at least let them all heal ooc. And if they just plainly gave summons aoe resistance… it would solve half the problem on the spot. If they all regenerated ooc and had some resistance to aoe my gripe would be solely with underwater lack of golem and being stuck with elite that punishes MM.
(edited by HiSaZuL.2843)
Still does nothing to fix the fact that minions are made out of wet paper. And you don’t have a single way to heal them under water… nor can you use a golem under water.
And again 25 bleed cap is simply stereotypical hatred from children who can’t deal with dots… Put a cap on melee hits… its also damage source… same as dots… Too bad infinite amount of basement dwelling children will drown the world in tears if that was to happen.
Don’t get me wrong… some of those fixes are fairly good. Too bad it doesn’t change the half a year of utter neglect and nerfs.
Now, I am just speaking purely from a pve perspective and dungeon, to a lesser extent wvw.
Flesh golem is useful in situations where it is safe to dps. In those situations, ie trash-clearing, there’s nothing your team can’t already do by auto-attacking, and you’d probably not notice any difference in dps by the flesh golem (if any) since by the time it actually reaches the mob it’d have already died. In wvw roaming, flesh golem is actually a really good companion for its charge, but if you’re roaming as a necro there must be something really suicidal about you, but that’s another story.
In situations where you actually need bursts, or where targets are significantly harder than normal mobs (situations where elites are mostly needed), flesh golems are sub-par. Either a bunch of random aoes will take it down, or it’ll end up taking a shot (or two if traited) from the boss and it goes down. You can argue that you have 2 more uses in the one cd of LF, but if the two other subsequent uses of it consist only of 2 charges (assuming it hits and even then bosses are usually kept at defiant stacks so cc is null) before it goes down again.
Flesh golem has its uses. I love it when solo running some pve where there is no real need of an elite (which begs the question why it finds itself in the elite slot to begin with, but that’s another story too). Even more than one young karka will pose a big problem for our elite friend, so let’s not go discuss about its survivability.
bottomline, flesh golem, whilst it has its uses, does not warrant the elite slot it currently occupies (possibly because of the flawed system of pets in this game). If you are comparing two elites, for situations where elites are needed, I will take LF.
In situations where no elites are needed, well..
This… is how you start theorycrafting properly. You consider if it is even reasonable to compare two to begin with. Not throw numbers around while dismissing every variable imaginable.
Calling me immature are you? while you went off and started calling people names when they proved you are wrong? Pfft you reap what you saw bud.
I clearly stated the same things you listen as pros and cons to using either one. Kind of pointless to state same things I already mentioned. And what I quoted again states it fairly well why two aren’t really comparable. They are used in different situations under different conditions. As I stated before lich form SCALES, if you are condition spec…. lich form is useless and plague form is debatable as far as pve is concerned(its a good defense but… its pve). If you are mm spec… its again useless and so is the other elite for obvious reasons.
You mentioned loosing utilities… okay lets touch up on that one. Only time you would use lich is if you aren’t condition/mm… that leaves power spec… so wells since other stuff isn’t really useful in pve so burst spec. Mkay… wells… 40 sec cd. You pop them and you are DONE. Then what? You can’t deal with not seeing you utility slots on cd? Last I checked DS did the same thing. Granted its a poorly designed mechanic in itself but thats another topic. Point is your utilities are already on cd what exactly are you losing here?
And to further explain why this isn’t theorycrafting and some lame attempt to have others strike your ego and give you reasons why your way is right way…
You dismiss every single condition that makes pve…well pve.
Pve isn’t about standing and hitting a dummy which does nothing in response. This game lacks threat mechanic that can gurantee 100% dps upkeep. Which isn’t possible in most cases even with such mechanic present.
You are comparing skills that are nothing a like in any reasonable dimension. 1 offers a skill that provides a melee minion that can get 1 shotted and put back on 60 sec cooldown. Other is a fully ranged partially defensive skill with both stability and hp buffer that can extend the upkeep of this skill. What good is comparing a skill that can be instantly put on its full cooldown in a dungeon against a skill that can’t?
In your “theoricrafting” this is perfect situation of you having no gear, no party and your opponent being a practice dummy. What about haste? What about crit?What about golem not scaling with anythign at all? What about aoe? What about water? What about louzy terrain? What about the team?
Is lich form all that grand? hell no… you can’t revive people in it. And pve in dungeons has a lot of that. And dismissing parts of skill further leads me to believe that you are nothing but a child in need of attention and self gratification in form of others agreeing with you.
Have a wonderful evening.
Flesh Golem will put out more DPS than Lich Form if the Golem is going to have a 100% uptime (which as any necromancer can tell you, will not be the case). I also feel like this thread hasn’t brought up the fact that popping Lich in a Time Warp is the equivalent of dropping a nuke.
Flesh Golem is a great elite, and I personally enjoy using it on my Conditionmancer in instances where I won’t need Plague, but with the proper build I feel like the Golem will almost always fall short of Lich.
It will… there are more instances then I can count where golem gets 1 shoted and its a 60 sec cd worthless skill. Why argue elites on trash mobs… if your group is competent by the time your golem decides to do something productive things will be dead. Its all about boss fights. And how many of those don’t have aoe damage? Pfft 1 shoted golem that did 1 charge and died isn’t damage its a sad joke. Lich form got its own drawbacks but as far as pve dungeon dps goes this isn’t even debatable.
towards op…The fact that you dismiss everything but autoattack speaks volumes on your ability to grasp the situation and make use of something other then ramming your face over keyboard. Switch to warrior… I hear facerolling is amazing on them.
you failed to theorycraft at base level.
That is one BAD… thief or DD ele if he sits there hammering your ds. I just stand there laughing at necros that pop it. So you did… good job… now what? You let thief just sit there fill up his initiative or let ele stack up boons while all ur lf ticked away. Pfft pointless defense argument is still pointless.
ArenaNet Drone detected.
Amen to that.
Holycrapwalloftextl2formatman
Anyway, while this was hard to understand (at least for me), there are a few things I can say.
1) Yes, necromancer needs a few fixes, we could use a few tweaks here and there, but its really not that big of a deal.
2) We are perfectly capable of outlasting opponents right now.We have tons of soft CC. Axe 3, Dagger 3, Staff 3 and 5 (and 4 depending on what conditions you transfer), Scepter 2, Focus 5, Warhorn 4 and 5, and to a degree Dagger 5 (applies weakness to slow the amount of dodges they can do). It is literally impossible to have a weapon set without 1 form of soft CC, and impossible to have your 2 sets have less than 3. That doesn’t include any traits (like the chill on blind), utility skills, or the fact that every one of our elites has soft CC as well. Nor can you tell me that ANY class in the game, including necromancers, can cleanse or dodge all that soft CC without using all their endurance and cleanses, leaving them completely open to far more damaging conditions or leaving themselves with no way to dodge bigger abilities.
Our life steals aren’t that strong in PvP, I agree, but they would only need very minor tweaking to be completely in line. They also require almost no thought to do, other classes actually need to trait for HP gain, we just get it in the process of doing something else, in most cases. In PvE our life stealing is very powerful.
DS should always be used proactively, even as a defensive tool. It shouldn’t be an “oh crap I’m low HP better stall button” so much as “hey look that thief is about to burst me, time to completely negate it”. Also, the only time people should be dodging your DS is if you are full power/crit build, otherwise they are wasting it on nothing. DS needs some UI updates, and they could tweak it to synergize with every build better, but otherwise it is pretty solid.
“Caster” classes have melee range weapons, “melee” classes have caster weapons, get with the program. You are perfectly able to go in close range against a warrior, the only true difference that our class has to more “heavily” armored ones is a bit of armor, and it really doesn’t mean much.
The class isn’t broken. The class doesn’t have gaping holes in its design. It requires a few bug fixes, and a few tweaks to make some of our more useless utilities better. That is it. We aren’t underpowered, we aren’t overpowered, we are completely competitive, and in fact can easily counter the “OP” classes (which are also more or less balanced).
Holycrapwallofdisinformation.
“You are perfectly able to go in close range against a warrior, the only true difference that our class has to more “heavily” armored ones is a bit of armor, and it really doesn’t mean much." You have no idea what is required to be considered melee class do you?
The class doesn’t have gaping holes in its design. Bob you are definitely confusing this with mesmer forums.
Trait lines that are a mess? Check.
6 months later no fixes for 1/3 of traits that are either broken or garbage? Check.
Mechanics that simply don’t work? Check.
Minion AI makes egyptian statues cringe? Check.
I could go on forever but ignorance is a bliss. I bet you will dismiss everything and continue to sing praises to anet for their shi… Err I mean “wonderful” job. 1 dude fixing bugs and nobody told him that there’s necro class, yep everything is working as intended.
Just like lich form/plague and minions disappearing , oh that’s right they disappear from any polymorph… unlike for other classes. Or they simply didn’t give a monkey and just changed tooltip. We shall never know.
Even if one would dismiss common sense and go bout saying anets way is the right way. Brush off all minion issues… god forbid dots are treated same way as any other damage source and not get capped and replaced by something that does 1/10 damage, trait lines making no sense, the fact that minions are wet noodles and there’s not even a single measly way to heal them under water. Forget about golem drowning… etc etc. When was the last time you checked actual bug list? Mhm? Approaching a 100? There were about 5 or so things that got “fixed”. I’m not counting slapping a new tooltip and saying working as intended as “fix”. Rest were nerfs and things just working even worse then they did before. Plague signet etc. But yeah… go ahead live in denial see if it makes it more fun.
(edited by HiSaZuL.2843)
It was the same way since beta… you are a bit late to the party.
And why the bloody hell you place . with 2 spaces… Pardon me . . .
Well actually that does look pretty cool :P
I kind of covered heals and combos on staff already lol.
And nothing is more pathetic then signet of plague. It was once better then CB simply because of stun break. Now… I’d rather take a spectral wall then that absurdity. Stun break that requires target to use? Massive cooldown? No target you just put it on cooldown and stick a thumb up your kitten #8230; Oh also… has the same horrible los issues as CB… so 1/3 of the time its thumb up your kitten instead of stun break.
And it NEVER removed anything from anyone. Tooltips are changed when anet hears too much whining to state it works as intended(minions and polymorphing) despite what ever tooltip says it never removed anything from allies, it simply copies conditions at random from allies to you. More often then not they are lousy material to spend 60 second cooldown on.
And yep totally agree chilling darkness is very abusively delicious.
But yeah… condition spec doesn’t mesh too well with wells simply because it requires different stats and approach to make them valuable. And in pve they are meh and situational at best due to long cooldowns.
knockown leap… meh… how about having 3 heartseeker kitten running around and suddenly getting it up in the kitten with plague form by a one lonely necro. while i just walk away like a boss under a verbal assault that i suck,fail,plaguen00b etc. Then BooM killed by a surprise siege setup prepared for tower take over. Now thats poetry. No amount of handholding and catering from anet can cure stupidity and gullibility.
Actually… it is true.
Speaks volumes on the state of this sad excuse for a class.
Well of blood is fairly good. But yes other wells just have way too high cooldown imo. Considering most necro damage is based on utility slots unlike every single other class it doesn’t exactly mesh as well as it should.
Still they aren’t entirely worthless there are fights where well of power is fairly nice to have because entire group gets spammed by conditions.
Anyway as far as condition spec goes 0/30/20/20/0 is fully viable versatile condition build. 20 in death for greater marks and staff cd for utility,heals,cleanse and 20 in blood for dagger and mark of evasion for more bleeds and faster dagger bleed. And you can still swap out mark of evasion for wells cd on demand. Or greater marks for well protection(useless tbh).
Main focus however with conditions is to get 100% bleed duration because barbed precision will be one of the highest dmg output traits. W/o bleed duration its pretty worthless and its hard to maintain enough stacks to see any kind of reasonable damage.
But all that requires very specific runes and being 80. On top of that consumables. Sadly for what ever obscure reason all conditions only do damage for as many full seconds as it has any left overs are just pointless. so 1.9 second bleed does the same damage as 1 second bleed. But thats strictly number based. It requires sacrificing a lot to simply be viable. And carrying around consumables.
Why in gods name spite tree has 30% condition duration is beyond me. That tree is absolutely worthless when it comes to condition since it doesn’t have a single trait to benefit condtion damage. Since its so hated most traits that change damage don’t affect condition damage. If close to death actually affected conditions… it would be great… otherwise half the time you are tempted to dump 30 points and get not a single even remotely useful trait for it. -_-
Anyway… my main beef with this game is that this necromancer isn’t a necromancer no matter what everyone says. It has no necromancy in it… past the stale smell of neglect from anet and decaying corpses of abandoned chars…
(edited by HiSaZuL.2843)
http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcV9ixGG0MkqMVzR
This will provide all the condtion traits that you need.
Also you get greater marks and staff cd + well cd and dagger cd
take well of blood,epidemic,well of power,well of suffering and plague.
This ensures that you have all traits relevant to conditions and you can swap in and out well traits. Since you are condition you lack power to make damage wells reliable.
If you want to be more of a support mix healing and condition damage so BOTH. your well of blood and staffs mark of blood heal for more. Well of blood scales properly with healing.
Plague form will ensure you have a “OH kitten, CALL A WAMBULANCE” button, granting 20 seconds of blind spam. Well of power lets you quickly nullify all conditions on your party. So does staff #4.
Well of suffering will stack vulnerability to beef up party’s damage output.
Epidemic makes certain you can spread conditions on trash. Swap it to well of corruption for more damage or well of darkness for more blinds when you get to the boss.
Staff #3 followed by #4 provides blast finisher with aoe weakness – nothing to sneeze at as far as pve goes.
If well of blood isn’t providing enough healing swap to staff and use #2 to give additional healing. If you want even more healing switch blood magic 10 point trait from dagger cd to transfusion. So it will let you heal allies with death shrouds life transfer.
But to be honest with you if you plan on being support you must sacrifice 1 stat for healing. And staff is godly for support it proves healing+condition removal for allies, weakness+bleed+chilled on enemies. And fear too… however useless it is. So you won’t be spending much time with scepter and your bleeds will be very useless. While if you had power at least staffs auto attack would still provide some damage.
In truth id personally recommend going for healing/survavability stat/power and just going with dagger/axe.
This will make full use of damage wells and will let you get rid of curses tree and spend points elsewhere.
Also targeted wells are WAAAAYY over rated.
dagger #3 + wells is how it should be done.
Also if you do decide to drop the condition idea get curses 10 chilling darkness. You have a lot of sources of blind as wells+support and each blind will translate into chilled which would help immensely.
Anyway… just my few cents since you asked for advice.
(edited by HiSaZuL.2843)
….. Yeah…. The day 15 points in reaping stops someone… will be the day. Please do show how it stops something. Go on… educate this ignorant person. Show me what those mighty 6 seconds of protection going to do for you. You can’t even swap to ds because you loose that trash on 60 sec cd. What kind of “glass cannon” would wait 60 seconds, assuming first opener failed… What are you fighting? Dummies in mists?
And you can swap utilities OH MY!
Oh wait… you asked for thoughts on your spec, the one you posted… perhaps post your spec next time?
Since you can’t take criticism. Your spec is horrid. It lacks damage, it lacks survivability, it lacks utility, your runes are completely out of place, your traits are garbage, and even your sigils are bad. Happy now?
And second paragraph wasn’t even engrish. Perhaps you said something smart… and I just simply couldn’t comprehend it. Could happen… but somehow I doubt it.