Guild Wars 2

Is there any ETA on when we will see new legendary weapon skins?
Because I don’t want to waste my items on crafting the axe or horn (for a necro, since staff skin sucks really hard) and discover that 2-3 months later they will implement new skins.

+1 Downed state needs a bit of rework

I agree too. I miss too much that aspect of the old days Necromancer. I thought they can do orders really easy in this game: give us some more spells for party buffs (ie. might party wide) and with a trait on blood magic like this (when you apply might to you or your allies, their attacks steal life).

This way we would be again a nice party supporters without implementing new Boons for example.

Doopslayer.2304:

yay! BillFeist Ftaghn Tyria ph’nghlui wagh’naghlmgwl’ftah

there, forgot an apostrophe, now necromancers downed hp is fixed, and yes this is the programming language that necro is done in.

So Cthulhu is involved in the making of Necromancer? That explains a lot of things XDD

Iceflame.5024:

Well I get the feeling that people underestimate it by a lot. Then suddenly 50%+ of your marks start getting blocked lol.

Totally agree. People usually don’t realize that with Great Marks trait every single mark you land hits on the enemies in range, that’s really important.

In conclussion, I’d suggest making greater marks baseline and move the unblockable effect to Staff Mastery. This way, we will have a useful weapon without investing traits on it, a better trait for it (Staff Mastery: 20% CDR and marks are unblockable) and a new place for a new trait on Death Magic line.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Good guy Bill is a hero to all Necromancers!

Quoted for truth

Totally agree with OP.
Staff’s marks need to be larger by default and combine unblockable effect with 20% CDR into one trait, give us another trait on Death Magic with attrition tematic to fill the placeholder left by the combination.

Anyone has the same problem? I’ve just checked Dev tracker like every day and only appears dev’s posts with 11+ hours to me and I’ve seen some posts that are more recent.
Don’t know if it’s a problem of myself or it’s general O.o

BillFreist.1527:

Guess what? This is fixed. I’m not sure what release it’ll make it into since I just fixed it today. Its a pretty risky change, but I’ll do what I can to get it out asap.

A couple notes about the bug:

• It can affect ANY Necromancer (doesn’t matter when they were created)
• It can happen in ANY game type, PvE and WvW were just waaaaay more common because of certain circumstances
• This particular bug ONLY affects Necromancers. I noticed there was some speculation that it could affect a couple other professions

Thanks for all of the info and sorry that I didn’t look into this sooner. Also thanks for keeping on top of this issue in the forums, it keeps us in check

-Bill

Thank you so much for fixing it, I think you just made happy every necromancer out there

Let’s hope that this fix is going to hit live servers on 26th with all those skills/traits changes ^^

First of all: I love this forum, seriously. This is the only forum where people are necroing topics without any problems

On topic: I think they said the next patch will be rolled out on 25th June and 20th will be the announcement of content.

leman.7682:

I have another question relating to the downed state.

I’ve been recently running fractals (lvl 50+) and my parties noticed that there’s sometimes a big problem ressing the necro. What I mean is, sometimes, even 3 or 4 players have a hard time ressing me from the downed state. I think it can’t be poison since the difference is just insane. Sometimes we also see 53 hp ticks (what?) when ressing a defeated necro. Something is definitely WRONG.

I wasn’t able to replicate the issue yet, as I’m not even sure what causes it, but I’ll keep trying. One idea I had is maybe they were trying to fix the downed state and something was broken during the process.

Can someone confirm that such abnormal situations occur?

It happened that to me the other day, just once in 10 months… so it’s really strange. I can’t replicate it since it only happened once but there were 4 buddies trying to res me and the heal was the exact amount you describe: 53 hp per tick.

For God’ sake ArenaNet give us an option to report Akitten people! Just like it was in Guild Wars 1. This is getting ridiculous 10 months after release and people just farm the title of participating in matches being akitten…..

PS.: OMG, I just can’t write A-F-!K on this forum? GG ANet

Oh yes! I just needed my monthly fix of tooltips fixes. I can’t live anymore without them

Lopez.7369:

Iceflame.5024:

Lopez.7369:

Necromancers have the best counter to stability in the game by far, so the comic makes no sense.

I think people are going to be surprised how much more life force generation, access to burning and the Death Shroud rework will help.

So thief boon stealing spam doesn’t count I guess and other class boon removals too?
The comic is saying that if we get good access to burning in addition to what we already have, then there’s a high chance we’re going to become OP.

Corrupt boon on a 40 second CD, well of corruption on a 45 second CD as well as spinal shivers with a century of a cast time can’t even compare to thief boon stealing spam you know.

It can and does because of range.

Saying that is simply have a closed mind, or you never played a Necro, or you prefer Thief, or all of that together because it has no sense at all.

Ok, I’ll explain my original post a bit so you won’t get confused about it.

I meant I want necro legendary weapons specifically, yes. But that doesn’t mean that they should only make those, they need to make more choices in general. Currently, we don’t have option to choose which legendary skin we like more, if you want staff, you get the Bifrost or go away. That’s what sucks.

I hope it’s more clear now: more legendary weapon choices for everyone in general

Hey guys.

I’ve been playing since beta and I main necromancer most of the time. My question is if there are an ETA of new legendary weapons or not.

I know they are starting to work on the Scavenger Hunt of precursors but we really need new legendary skins. At this moment, I’ve discovered how funny is WvW but if I hadn’t like it, I would have left the game some time ago because I don’t have a legendary to play for. The only legendary weapon with more necro style is the Axe and since it sucks hard (is the worst weapon we have), I don’t have any interest on getting a legendary.

Arianna.7642:

This just in:

Patch Notes for June 11th, 2013

Necromancer
-Reworked the 25 point Death Magic minor trait. Jagged Horrors now have a 75% chance to cause Burning for 2 seconds on a critical hit.
-Added Death Shroud Skill 5: Summon Jagged Horror. Summons a Jagged Horror that applies the Disease condition. This is the equivalent to Bleed, but stacks in duration instead of intensity. This Jagged Horror degenerates 50% faster than normal. 60 second Cooldown.

Edited in: Hot fix for June 16th, 2013
-Addressed a bug that disabled the use of the active abilities on the Blood Fiend, Bone Fiend, Bone Minions, Flesh Wurm, Flesh Golem, and Shadow Fiend.
-Death Shroud 5’s Jagged Horror now degenerates at a 75% increased rate and does not apply trait effects.

Edited in: SotG for June 30th, 2013
~
Necromancer
We believe that the addition of not one, but two new conditions into the Necromancer’s arsenal will put them on an even footing with the rest of the Professions in Tournament-level gameplay. They are now the masters of condition application, and with the newest Death Shroud ability, all builds will have a reason to use it both offensively and defensively. We will hold off on any more large changes to see where the balance rests when the new Meta-game develops.
~

Taking bets? Anyone? Anyone?

I bet a zillion dollars on your prediction!

Hahahaha hillarious! Keep doing this Iceflame, at least you put a smile in our necro faces

KarlaGrey.5903:

Andele.1306:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_historical_traits#Necromancer_traits; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_UzwdXK5CU and for lich http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE_Xu9H1Bw at 11ish minutes – just from beta 1 to 2, on the old press demo/alpha lich dropped a orb/urn that had around 50k hp (but low armor) and made lich immortal till destroyed (2 was a 3 second 1 minion spawn, 3 the vuln, 4 aura of chill, 5 aura of fear), DS let you absorb life force while in in and upon exiting worked like spectral walks second activation (you ported to where you entered DS).
Also we had pretty much permanent stability, perma retaliation, DS was a stun break and in addition to corruptions there were sacrifices that gave condition like effect for user hp, also like every 4th ability siphoned hp (as seeon on warhorn and staff in TBs video).

Also sweet old 50% damage reduction for 11 seconds on a 60 second cooldown from Sarmor…

We were really OP, that’s a fact. But I don’t get why they had to nerf us so hard when they are talking 24/7 about taking little steps of balance….
I mean DS nerfed, life steal nerfed, Lich nerfed…. why so much? That’s the thing I hate about ArenaNet, they say one thing and they do a totally different thing and don’t fix their mistakes 9 months ahead, so dissapointing.

Iceflame.5024:

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

It reinforces the Light v. Dark feeling.

Light v. Dark. Cannot…. resist to post….. attachment……. anymore….
Attachment explains the problem of stability blocking terror damage.

Quoted for truth and funny. Nice job

Hey folks.
I want to suggest a little change to the current account medal of WvW. Currently it’s based on WvW kills title and that was a nice way to track your progress back in last months, but now we have World Rank… wouldn’t be more logical to attach the account medal to these ranks instead of kills?

What do you think about this guys?

Login.5102:

Make spectral grasp a f2 skill. Muhahahahah

It’s not a bad idea. I mean change F2 to pull instead of teleport and make the utility teleport instead of grab. Maintain the other things the same: F2 has AoE bleed and chill on impact and utility have chill and LF on impact.

This way we can be more attrition fighters than we are atm.

I think this will be the first step of getting a new weapon in the first expansion: torch.
Give us green fire like the Wildfire of A Song of Ice and Fire now, and later give us torches so we have another condition OH weapon to choose from

The problem about this is what Colin Johanson said once (can’t remember which post was, but it was on this official forums): they have technical reasons to cap bleeds on 25. Every bleed a player put into an enemy (being another player or a mob) have information that the server need to keep like duration and damage, so they can’t rise up the limit there.

They were, however, looking for new ways of getting rid or, at least, rising up the cap but we don’t still have a word about that.

If anyone can remember where did he say this, link the topic to us

BobJoeXXI.2493:

Absolutely agree here, but given the upcoming changes to weakness it would be best to hold off any any tweaking. CPC, however, definitely needs to be improved.

^This. Let’s see first how the weakness buff improves our beloved Copoclo as a side effect and then, we’ll ask for a look there if needed.

Well, improving our attrition conditions is a first step, if we can spam more cripples, chills and weakness we can start to talk about attrition at least. After that, we still have a problem: condition cleanse is the meta right now, so we still won’t have place in teams.

I hope some devs can take a look on your testing work Iceflame and Myrmidian Eudoros. It’s awesome

Zenith.7301:

I just don’t understand why those “On opponent death” traits still exist after all the beta feedback explaining the nature of those traits means their uptime is minimal.

This is another example of why we NEED separated balance for sPvP/PvE+WvW.
In PvE and WvW those kind of traits are good enough but in sPvP are almost useless.

Yeah, sure! Ridicusly OP! That’s why current meta is focused on conditions and everybody runs a necro on their team… oh wait… it is not like this.

I don’t know why people try to judge a profession without having played with it before -.-’’

Kiriakulos.1690:

I don’t suppose most of you have yet become aware of this :

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/New-Patch-Bugged-Staff-Mastery/first#post2108165

This is getting seriously ridiculous. What’s the point of making a very light patch of bug fixes (which most of them are just tooltips corrections -.-‘’) and bug even more things?
I’ve played tons of MMOs (Guild Wars 1, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, World of Warcraft, Aion, Tera and Neverwinter) and only one thing exceeds this: Age of Conan initial release, plagued with bugs everywhere.

FFS, we are 9 months after release and they are still fixing tooltips. Are you freaking serious? I’ve totally lost my faith on ArenaNet, one of favourites game companies since Guild Wars 1 that now is in the bottom of my favourite’s list.

Copenhagen.7015:

Yesterday during the tournament the Devs in chat were getting bombarded with Necromancer and Warrior questions. They said they’re both being seriously looked at for the next balance pass, and that we can expect some changes next month. ANet unfortunately moves rather slow, but i believe them when they say they’re on it. There were also 2 Necromancer developers in HotM yesterday, probably testing some things. They want Necro to be as viable as we do.

You are putting this like we should be full of grattitude for them because of that. It’s 9 months down the road since release, one thing is being slow and this is a totally different beast.

I’ll bet my money that necromancer forums have been the more active of all profession related since day 1… and still is.
So yeah! Better start to do something for god’ sake!

Lighter.5631:

still better then warrior

In sPvP environment, you are right maybe. But in general, warrior is much better than necro, just look at PvE, they are the gods there.

1- More game modes variety (this game needs this ASAP, keep only conquest for e-sport if wanted and the new modes only for FUN, take a look on Dominion or ARAM in League of Legends)

2- More viable builds (make some more risky movements on balancing/adding/reworking skills or you will never have more than 2 viable builds per profession)

3- Add better rewards and epic to the game (I still remember how cool was winning a Hall of Heroes match in GW1 and your team automatically broadcasted to everyone in the game)

cuge.5398:

Everything Myrmidian Eudoros.4671 said, yes please, just fix that stuff that way.
Not much else to say on this topic.

While I agree with that those posts are a perfect analysis of our trait lines and have some good ideas, I think if they implement all those changes we will become OP.
Anyway, they can implement some of them at least and look how it works.

In conclussion, another user to take in account for improve Necromancer: ArenaNet’s devs should totally read Myrmidian Eudoros, Iceflame and Kravick posts to get some ideas about what isn’t working and what can be done to fix that.

Roe.3679:

I don’t see a need to quote them on everything, but I’m in full support of Iceflame and Kravick in this thread.

^ This. I also support them and ANet should totally read their posts, they are right and they explain so well our problems and its reasons.

Oblivion.8307:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Attack_of_Opportunity – Crit Line
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Burning_Rage – Power Line
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bountiful_Power – Healing/Vit Line (boon related but w/e)
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Radiant_Power – Crit Line
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Virtuous – Boon Duration line
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Target_the_Maimed – Crit Line
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Energy_Conversion_Matrix Vit/Boon Duration line

Stop acting like you’re the victim, each class has their own boon/condition % damage increase except mesmer/ranger.

I think you are evidencing even more here that we are right:

1 – Warrior trait increase its damage on 10% only with having bleed on target, which almost always proc if you have invested 25 points on that trait line.

2 – Elementalist trait increase its damage on 5% only with having burning on target, which its perfect because you have invested 25 points on the Fire trait line.

3 – The second elementalist trait is even more good, because you go deep on a trait line for being a harder guy and you still get damage.

4 – The guardian one of radiant, the Jewel of the Crown, 10% flat increase damage on any condition…. I think I don’t need to explain why this is really good.

5 – The second guardian’s one (virtues line) is, again, like the water elementalist’s one: it increases your damage for having boons, which on guardian is really easy to have at least 2+ boons all the time and guess what, that trait is placed on virtues CDR and BDI… nuff said.

6 – Engineer’s firearm trait: again a flat damage increase for only having one condition: +5% on enemies with bleed (if devs wanted to change our trait and make something like this, I would sign it really fast).

7 – Engineer’s alchemy trait: the same as above, it gives you damage when you are going into tanking line, and evenmore, minor traits on this line gives you Elixir B on 75% HP and a chance (very little but still counts) of converting incoming conditions into boons, with the result of having more damage for each one.

I think this highlights that we need a serious look on our traits, maybe Target the weak is not that bad if they take a look on our other traits and reorganise them, but we still need a look.

PS.: I think almost every necromancer out there thinks that Siphoned Power, Reanimator and Dark Armor sucks

I think that the new condition can help us but, at the same time, it won’t do it so much since it won’t be necromancer specific U.U

So, to sum it up:
1- Let’s see how things changes after the new condition comes out.

2-Then, take a serious look at our trait lines (you will need to do this anyway because of the new condition) and clean that mess a bit PLEASE.

3- If after doing those things we are still subpar, we can start to figure out how to improve DS to become more than a low damage sponge.

I’m perfectly fine if they don’t want to give us vigor. It’s just like Engies, they don’t have signets. But if they won’t give us that, then we need to get a huge improve on DS.
Because if the attrition profession is missing vigor, stability and absolute damage ignoring something is wrong, which is the case: we only have a low damage sponge to overcome the damage we receive.

Iceflame.5024:

I would like to point out that Necro’s way of damage mitigation is facetanking and it’s kind of a really difficult tanking mechanic to balance since it is “relative” as in its effectiveness is relative to the number of damage sources that are attacking you:

Some examples of what I mean:
If the facetanking capability is enough for 1v1 then it begins to drastically suffer the more sources are attacking you so it becomes unreliable and ineffective in these situations. If the facetanking capability is effective enough to be reliable in a situation against multiple attackers(let’s say for example 4), then it becomes OP in the situation with less attackers. So as a result the facetanking capability(LF pool, LF generation as well as DS CD) ideally needs to be a dynamic variable that changes depending on the number of attackers if you want it to be equally effective in all situations. We are in a situation where our facetanking capability is not OP in 1v1 and so it’s in the state where its efficiency drastically drops with 2 or more sources attacking you. Facetanking does not prevent you form being CCed in our case either.

As another example I would like to put attention to the soul marks trait. I suggested making it baseline along with greater marks and a person disagreed bringing up an example of it being OP in WWW zergs where 1 or 2 marks give you a full life force bar. Actually this might be the mechanic that takes care of the relativeness of the LF generation but at the same time it’s not quite enough. We still are limited by the LF pool and a 10 second CD(5 second CD if traited which is actually freaking awesome and I personally see it being better than the stability trait), these things ideally need to be dynamic too. I still think the soul marks trait should be made baseline for staff in addition to greater marks.

So you can see that facetanking efficiency is a relative thing. If we talk about blocks, invulnerabilities, evades and other stuff, they are absolute. They ignore all the damage and effects that are flying towards you in a short time and they do not care about the number of damage sources. And we have a game where a lot of classes have these mechanics that are absolute at mitigating damage.

All in all I think that if you want Necro to be in a somewhat ideal spot, the only way to achieve it would be a huge freaking redesign.

P.S. It would be nice to make the stability trait go back into being immune to CC while in DS since we have limited abilities that we can use and our utilities aren’t available to us while inside DS.

^^^
Quoted for great justice, I agree with every point you explained Iceflame, I hope devs agree as well with this explanation

On the other hand, I just checked out Soul Marks trait in-game and it’s a FLAT amount LF (3%), no matter how many enemies you hit with the marks. If there is someone who doubts this, he can check it out on the official wiki: Soul Marks Wiki

Bhawb.7408:

He was talking about Closed Beta. Look at footage (there is a bit), and you’ll see what he means. We had the best of everything.

I’ll say it again, I agree with that we were totally OP on beta. But, to be honest, devs were not fair at all with us…. I mean, they always say that they don’t want to do balance dancing the wack-a-mole style and that is the only thing they did to us before release. They overnerfed us so hard, that now, 9 months later, we are still complaining and the necromancer forum is still the most active of all professions forums and it’s full of topics about new bugs (like Downed HP bar), about analysis of our trait lines, about our skills, suggestions about everything….

If they don’t want to jump the gun again balancing us there is no problem but, at least, we deserve a more focused balance patches to bring us up again to a playable status.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

It won’t end in a dungeon. We have however included an instance that will open up that has a single player version, and a more difficult multiplayer version.

The ending is different

So that multiplayer version is a mini-dungeon than and not a full dungeon right? Something like Molten Weapons Facility? That was really cool

nicodemus.3812:

Death Shorud #2 was ground targeted!?! Bring that back imo. Would love to have some real mobility.

I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 since beta, always mained a Necromancer and that change was for better. That skill was ridicously OP back in those days, period.

Anyway, I think if they make the claw travel a bit faster we will notice a nice improve on mobility in general

JonathanSharp.7094:

Hey all! Just wanted to say thanks for keeping this thread so positive and constructive. The balance guys and I are watching this thread, and we’ve really enjoyed some of the ideas you guys are putting out.

I’m really glad to hear this coming from a dev, thank you Chap ^^

In other hand, I will suggest some traits fusion (like other professions already got) and some brand new to fit the holes left by the fusions (maybe a trait related to the new skill of DS?).
I think if you do this properly -adjusting numbers if necessary- necros will be again a nice profession to play because, you know, right now is a bit awful U.U

Thank you so much for showing up here and calming us Colin, it’s really nice to read your thoughts about the future of the game

Anyway, I have one concern more about this topic. I really love Living Story, it’s a brilliant and fresh idea to keep players playing the game with something always fresh but, on the other hand, wouldn’t be cooler (if that is possible) opening up new zones like Crystal Desert, with new places to explore, new hearts to do, new events, new dungeon, etc.
I know you probably have an ultra-secret plan for that but I’m really interested on what you think about this kind of permanent content.

JonPeters.5630:

I’ll take a look at how it compares to Necro staff auto. I will say that when this does hit it is the highest DPS #1 skill in the game. We wanted it to feel this powerful but difficult to land but the effect may be too exaggerated. I’ll play some PvE and PvP scepter Guardian later today.

Jon

Since you mentioned necro staff #1, can you play him with staff after playing guardian with scepter?

Theplayboy.6417:

And FYI if you were staring at your skill bar the entire time in Guild Wars 1 you are an absolute fail of player…………

Totally agree, you need to watch what is happening as well: elementalists casting their fire magic’s AoEs on you, ranger trappers, where is their monk, etc.
Sure thing is that instead of watching some animations in the middle of a chaotic combat (like currently is in GW2), you had to watch a casting bar. Or sometimes you need to look at your bars for micro-controlling some CDs, hp or mana JUST LIKE in GW2 hp, CDs and energy for dodges…. So I don’t see much difference.

-1
They just need to make a lot more skin choices so you can make your character look as you want and everyone is happy.

This is an awesome idea for bringing back some life to the racial cities.
+1

Tanek.5983:

If they already have an Alpha and are open to putting some types of content on the live servers for feedback, I’m not sure where a separate Beta or Test Server program would benefit anyone.

Plus, while public betas can be fun, I have seen them have adverse effects. Some players in the beta can get burned out on the content more quickly and, for me, new content feels less new by the time it goes “live”.

Well, maybe you are right about the thing that if they already have an Alpha test, a Beta Server won’t server for anything.

About players getting burned, that’s about their own style of play. I take myself as an example: I got burned of this game 3 months after the release (leveled 2 chars to 80, 1 of them fully equiped from several dungeons, played a lot on WvW and got dolyak on sPvP) so I take a break of it, played other games and came back when I wanted.

This is my method nowadays, I never play so much time like I used to on GW1 because, for me, this game gets boring very very fast.

In conclussion, you opened my eyes about the beta server idea anyway

PS.: Thank you Robert for that fast answer, I wish all devs were just like you ^^

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We do have an Alpha program where players are invited to test things before they go live.

I think that’s a good idea but I want to know if it’s possible we can see in the future a Test Server or something like that. This is a very common thing in other games (especially in MMOs) and I think it would help you guys a lot giving nice feedback before launching something on live servers.