I still play it (sometimes) because it works in PVE and because the other character I got to 80 is an engineer. I tend to spend most of my time bouncing between alts though as it’s pretty boring.
…I see the world as a huge obstacle that I will over come even if everyone claims it to be impossible to over come.
It’s in the way? Where are you going?
Does this screw up if it happens between firing an arrow (as in auto-attack) and it hitting? I’ve noticed lately I sometimes use my heal and find myself already with ‘revealed’ on, and I guess if I’m taking slow damage it must trigger about the same time as I want to use HiS.
It occurred to me that if they just made it a short-duration (like 2s) version of smokescreen, it’d be defensive without getting in the way and it would still be possible to stealth yourself from it if certain skills were available (like HS).
Have fun with low damage, no protection and blinds :<
Forgot to mention blinds… in PVE I mostly only come across this in Orr (risen wizards like to use it constantly) but it does get irritating. Usually my backup set is axe/warhorn for extra swiftness, and dealing with times when slow attacks just infuriate me.
It’s rarely used on me in WvW though, and I usually have a lot of condition clearing (either 3 shouts & WH, or two shouts & signet) so idk how much of an issue that would be on other builds.
This makes no sense from a balance perspective and the wording is irrelevant because even if it is too confusing for people, that’s not a reason to give banners another traited cooldown reduction and a boost to another trait’s damage, only a reason to change the words.
I haven’t liked any of the legendaries I’ve seen so far. The greatswords’ effects seem fun to stare at but theme-wise I wouldn’t even put them on my warrior. Maybe if I had a mesmer though…
Does the toolbelt skill for hidden pistol still look like shooting at the moon…?
In other news, I was previewing stuff looking for shoulder pads (are they so awful on all charr, or is it just this body-type?) and noticed the Inquest medium armour looks decent: http://i.imgur.com/ZGDCCsR.jpg
You can’t see it here but it actually works with tails. A-net devs work in mysterious ways (or at least, in mysterious order) apparently.
Edit: do skip the helmet though, unless you plan to look like Dune-cat. Also I really need to install a better image editing program than ms-paint, these artifacts in my .png’s are maddening. T__T
(edited by LameFox.6349)
…I’m not really sure what you’re talking about but I suppose I might see a branch to pick up sooner or later. Does it count if I beat it out of an oakheart, or are those different?
The stock Ash-legion look is pretty easy to achieve armour-wise because it’s the level 40 crafted skin (minus the horrific shoulderpad). There’s a kind of tail-clipping thing that goes on with it, but it’s less noticeable than in most armour (just look at the NPCs and you’ll see what I mean). I think this is more or less it, though I can’t tell what the colours on their pants are because you don’t really see them: http://i.imgur.com/gb39PBR.jpg
Note that I haven’t skinned the weapons though, not that I actually see them use shortbow. The darker colour there is also abyss which I’ve heard is expensive now, but was only 7g or so when I bought it. ‘Pitch’ and probably various other dark colours look pretty similar though TBH.
Otherwise I’d probably go with duellist, even though it costs more, since the cultural medium armours seem more fitting of a ranger to me. T1 might appear on some NPCs though, I forget now. They mix a lot of stuff together anyway sometimes.
I think before even comparing the weapons directly it’s important to figure out if you’ll be reducing its cooldowns. Because that’s at least 20 points you therefore can’t put in an offensive line, and the massive 20% boost only applies (or so I’ve read anyway) to enemies under stun/daze and knockdown, which really don’t last long or apply often (relative to things like bleeding in the arms line or weakness for the mace trait, and the trait that just gives greatsword better damage). It also doesn’t get to stack might by itself, so there’s that.
Also note that if you’re farming lots of weaker enemies the horrendously slow attacks will make tagging things in a hurry somewhat troublesome, although the F1 is alright when it’s there.
Overall I don’t mind it, and it’s not like I time them or anything but I’ve never felt its damage output (against AI – everything else will dodge or block) was a problem. That said, I don’t try to speed-run anything because sprinting through content over and over is very boring for me. I wouldn’t recommend it for that at all, though I guess someone who already did that with a GS wouldn’t lose much by buying a hammer and trying that out.
Incidentally OP the site you’re using seems to be out of date, banner still showing as 90 + 10%.
Im curious whether people know that if you run the same main hand you dont need to buy 2….aka have your main set as axe shield and your 2ndary set as just warhorn…when you weap swap it keeps the axe in mainhand and just swaps offhands…
the only thing ive yet to test is whether regarding above scenario if having sigil of battle on that 1 axe will still proc with each and every weapon swap. I assume it would…which be amazing.
If an on-swap sigil isn’t on cooldown and that weapon is in the set being swapped to, then yes. It also works when you were holding a banner and let go of it, thus swapping back to that weapon.
I kinda like it actually. I suppose functionally it wouldn’t make any difference though since it doesn’t even need to be an actual scythe at all.
I think I’ve only seen one player use that model so far…
‘Rally ambient creatures’ should be some kind of ability…
Actually, I just logged in (I had to), and looked at the comparative skull sizes. Compared to my human female character, who is the minimum height possible, they are pretty similar, the rats aren’t actually all that small, including the skulls, which appear much closer to adult size when you look at it.
Is head size tied to height as well as its own setting? I feel like I should know this given all those alts but eh.
My comparison is mainly based on dead enemies on the floor and staring at the jagged horror as it fails its way into battle, so it’s possible I was looking at something larger than actual human characters (can they be as big as risen are now, or do those like… expand when wet?).
Unless you happen to be reduced to 25% of less health mid skill execution – which happens all the kitten time. If my health is hovering around 30%…I’m probably doing kitten – trying to finish the fight, running away, trying to enter stealth…etc.
Taking an inadvertent revealed debuff kind of sucks in any situation – It’s catastrophic when I’m at 25% health. Its hilariously sad when it happens mid HS out of a BP.
Even in that circumstance, it is still useful as the next attack by the enemy(s) is a complete miss and HS still lands. If a thief is down to the wire on HP, that blind is incredibly important. It is likely the difference between one HS and two. People are only focusing on the stealth but ignoring the benefits of the blindness condition.
This ability firing mid-attack will happen but it costing a player a significant number of fights is highly unlikely. I think people are just remembering those half dozen fights it cost them and are blowing over X times more often that blindness saved them.
This is only true of enemies within a small radius of you, and even then only of one potential hit, meaning without the stealth aspect to break targeting anything that makes lots of fast attacks will be minimally affected. So… if someone is hitting you with a hammer or a very painful and close-ranged utility, sure.
I’ve always wondered, where I got the tiny humanoid skulls from for the bone minions/jagged horrors (I honestly can think of a single creature that’d have that shape skull at that size…)
Because people die, and there is no age limit. I imagine in “reality” Zhaitan (or any other of the deadly creatures) doesn’t exactly hold back because you aren’t an adult.
I dunno, the skulls look more down-scaled than infant to me. Sort of like how charr cubs are just regular charr but shrunken and with different voices.
Why would a minion necromancer use staff over axe?
I’m not a fan of minions, but I suspect the constant regen, plus area-weakness combos, and the transfer of conditions from minions to enemies in the process probably adds up a bit. And chill is always nice.
It does stack higher than 2% if they’re being hit constantly and don’t clear it, though I view the idea of it being useful as opposed to beginning to compensate for the weapon’s flaws with a pretty extreme degree of scepticism. I guess it depends firstly how well you can keep it applied, then if you + your team’s direct damage to that target is amplified enough to cover not having a more damaging weapon, and thirdly whether you wouldn’t be better off using just the focus & well vulnerability (or since he’s talking about tournaments, whether it should be you as a necro applying the vulnerability at all).
/shrug
Not a thing I care enough to find out, but I’m sure someone could experiment and compare.
As for the staff: I don’t really like the idea of a beam aesthetically for necro, much less a beam of fire, but I can’t say the current attack feels amazing or anything. I tend to think of it as a graphical effect that happens between casting marks.
you guys are looking at the reason why minions have no regen all the wrong reasons
the main reason why they have no regen is so that players would not park their character near a spawn point and go afk for hours of end allowing them to come back and pick up as many loot bags what ever your pets killed , think about it
you trait minions to have 30 % more damage , 50% more health , trait to get the 50% more life siphon and Trait to get when minions attack they Life siphon and transfer it back to you . if all your minions also regained their life you could literally go afk at some spot where a npc spawns and once it attacked you your minnions would then start attacking it and killing it , after that their health would regenerate back to full health to then kill again and they would never die . you have a blood fiend , bone minions , shadow fiend , flesh golem , flesh worm , bone fiend , granted you cant summon all of them together but still . even with shadow fiend bone fiend blood fiend and flesh golem and flesh worm they would never die , you would get free xp , loot bags . that is why they dont regen , and the flesh golem on it on can take 1 npc , imagine all of your pets . it would be a no contest .
You would need to be botting, or not actually AFK in order to get loot before it despawned. Otherwise you’d come back after hours and only get the last handful of bags.
And if you had enough health/toughness you could sit there with the flesh golem anyway, and have the bone fiend or shade-thing on ‘auto-attack’ which means it’ll use its ability whenever it can, and be replaced when it dies. Or just have some other utility like that, if it seemed more useful. Only the ones that kill themselves wouldn’t work out.
I’ve always wondered, where I got the tiny humanoid skulls from for the bone minions/jagged horrors (I honestly can think of a single creature that’d have that shape skull at that size…)
There’s probably a tag on the back that says ‘do not tumble dry’.
I guess there’s a reason it’s the ‘last’ refuge. :P
Thieves have some of the worst weapon sets in the game. (P/P) and probably the worst utility in the game. (Venom.)
It amazes me how bad venoms are for a 45sec cooldown. One of my other characters is a necromancer, so I found this one particularly insulting…
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ice_Drake_Venom
Compare… http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chillblains and http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spinal_Shivers http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Spectral_Grasp
It might be nice… if three utilities were overkill and I wanted a decoration.
I find the shortbow’s evade and cripple an awful skill. It only works if I’m standing still (not because it cancels or anything, because I bounce around like a rubber ball if it moves me when I’m running, and often end up landing on the enemy – it’s similar to the thing which used to happen whenever dodging coincided with an attack) and that really ruins it because if I stop during the cast, the short range isn’t worth the initiative cost and I’d be better off sideways-running.
Oddly enough, the P/D skill which teleports me doesn’t care if I’m moving, the bouncing effect is non-existent for it. Both of them will randomly ‘hit’ minor imperfections in terrain I would have run right over though. That also seems to be true of shortbow #5.
SB #5 though is otherwise much better, and my only complaint is that it’s bad for fleeing because the cast time, arrow travel time, and range mean that I’ve almost run that far anyway. With speed from stealth or signet maybe I actually will have run that far… but as long as I don’t waste initiative trying to escape with it, it can help to get out of effects, and naturally applying blind is nice.
I’d say ‘broken’ more than punished. The only use left in them is getting out of AoE… and then, only with someone there to revive you, because it can’t lose aggro thanks to a whole second of stealth. Enemies carry on attacking longer than that, nevermind them giving you time to do anything.
I’m just curious whether they overlooked that entirely when changing things or they just don’t want it to exist but haven’t committed to actually removing it.
I dislike the bounciness of the 4-legged run and I think the 2 legged one looks worse because the charr looks like she is facing sideways.
It’s a weapons-drawn thing, they’re keeping their off-hand (or the pointy end of the rifle, the handle of the bow, etc.) more forward. It makes sense if you imagine all charr are right-handed and they’re running like this when they’re about to attack something. If you toggle run off you walk ‘straight’ and stay upright, so it’s not like they just have twisted spines or anything.
Oddly enough, there’s even an upright running animation with a straight torso – NPCs run like this instead of the bounding thing. I expected it would happen if I equipped no weapons and ran ‘holding’ them, but instead, the game just freaks out and makes the arms look weird.
I really wish they’d do something to standardise that, it seems really out of place having players run one way and NPCs another.
……‘multiple’.
I do wish it would clear condition>heal as opposed to other way around.
I wish that of all heals that remove conditions. Be nice for instance if they removed the poison first…… seems kinda intuitive of such a skill.
I think necro’s condition-eating one does though; it’s an awesome skill and makes the other two look pretty sad.
That… would explain a lot actually… it never did seem like it sucked so bad in theory.
If you want to melee bosses, I think basically it comes down to still kiting them, but ducking in and attacking between their swings. Keep in mind I’ve not done this on a thief really, but for instance that champion at the end of Plinx’s event I’ve soloed as a warrior with axes, and what impairments that guy isn’t immune to wash over him in an instant (no I didn’t tank his damage, can that even be done?).
I’m not sure if AI can attack on the move, but they sure don’t seem to want to. Getting into range makes them stop and swing, and what you’ve done by then is approach, hit them as they’re stopping to attack, and start side-running away, or dodge if it’s too close. By the time their attack would have hit you, you’re usually just outside their range again, and they flail at the air in futility.
Thief could potentially do this I think since they’ve got blinds, stealth, the odd daze (or stun, I always forget), etc. and more evades. Also caltrops, lots of them. I’d be wary of being too glassy though since you will occasionally be hit and you don’t want to get downed. Thief downed state in PVE now, might as well be bypassed and just drop dead. Also, to do this with groups of not-bosses, you’d really want a sword for the cleave I think, else it might end up as an infinite loop of kiting, killing, and them respawning on you.
They do if you have a staff and a decent supply of ambient creatures. ;P
Of course with charr, the tradeoff is that they look bad in 90% of the armour instead… even stuff designed for them in some cases. How they left clipping issues and that silly puffed up look on the CoF medium and T3 cultural light armour is quite mysterious.
…the Legionnaire weapon set (the weapons all Charr NPC use, including the Flame Legion).
That annoys me… they have their own set of weapons, they even drop them all over the place when they get killed, but visually they just use the same legionnaire stuff. Wut.
Yeah that was one of the others, I think the second one I came across, by which time it was getting a bit weird. It was implied my character had been there previously and left for a time… though, at least with a charr, that’s actually plausible.
What’s odd is that even if I had just made a norn character… I’m not sure why I’d know what they were talking about. It was like my character had suffered amnesia or something and I was going back and putting its life story together. o__o
…they have so many evades with their sword.
Fight by a cliff and use spectral walk to leap off (then teleport back, naturally) as they reach the 3rd stage of their auto-attack. :P
(edited by LameFox.6349)
Uh yeah…….If i was running dagger MH I guess i’d pick up weakening. But wells + slow/freeze is the point of this. Also Enfeebling blood ds trait is nice, just not better than being able to use ground-targeting on wells.(also its mainly for melee counter).
You focused on the dagger offhand when its really only going to be used for enfeebling blood and on the offchance its blind. Its just more preferable than any of the other offhand because it lets me unload with scepter/dagger and use the staff for utility.
——————————————
Dagger mastery 15% c.d is pointless since won’t spend enough time in the weapon to get another EB off.
————————-No offense but you basically just said: I’d change your build to melee.
-Not the point of this build and quite honestly an inferior choice in pvp.25% movement speed makes up a lot in pvp. I’m not a sit-and-tank every hit all the time and dodging gives me extra bleeds.
I was mainly just bringing up options, since your post didn’t really say much besides liking conditions. As necro has like… a melee attack, even with dagger… having ranged weapons on it doesn’t necessarily imply being dead-set on that. Also, wells’ radius isn’t any lower than plague form iirc, hydromancy sigil isn’t kidding about ‘nearby’ foes, and you were gathering a reasonable amount of toughness.
I think you’ll get tired of the signet though. Relative to movement skills and/or swiftness you’ll still be slow, except when someone is chilled, in which case relative to you without it they’d still be slow. So it seems like a delicate yet varying and unpredictable balance, compared to focusing more on slowing them or putting out more damage.
I assume spectral grasp is out due to bringing them closer, but maybe something like epidemic? Wouldn’t use it with a blind because it’s short and goes away if they swing/shoot at you, and the resulting chill is short too, but chillblains and dark path chills are longer, as is the one on a focus if you tried that. It’s also got a natively low c/d and feeds you a not-directly-harmful condition to either send at people with your staff, eat for health, or just ignore if you want ‘cause it’s 3% (anyway you did mention liking AOE, so this is sort of like an adaptor for non-AOE to AOE).
Or for evasion there’s spectral walk, sort of like a sprint compared to locust’s marathon, and even that wurm with its teleport if you like. I’ve never really tried that thing but it does (sacrificed) give area poison, break stun, and apparently is a blast finisher. So I’m sure there’s some kind of weird potential scenario in that where you cast some wells on a wurm, explode into the place with poison, and use plague form or DS’ life transfer in the middle of everything. o__T
So on my second or third character completing exploration here, I noticed some oddities…
a) There are NPCs my (charr) character is apparently familiar with. I forget the names now and I don’t think I’ve actually had anything to do with them, especially on this character. One was a thief/pickpocket in a temple, which made me think maybe it’s a profession thing (character is a thief), but idk. The others weren’t as far as I could tell.
Is this normal/intended? Outside of a select few from the storyline and some I met in quests my characters don’t seem to (mutually) know anyone. Maybe those NPCs just know you no matter what?
b) http://i.imgur.com/eUmapnk.jpg
I never really paid attention before, but it’s interesting/weird that the ‘missing, maybe dead’ shrines have ghost heads on them, compared to the ‘certainly dead’ owl spirit having a statue. I’m not even sure what to make of that. If it were a hint, it’s… less subtle than I’d expect. Like, surely people would notice. But what does that leave? Norn hologram? The spiritual equivalent of a deer’s head on a wall?
…I don’t get it.
Bullets seem to just go for their exact range and disappear, arrows keep going for a bit, sort of like how you can still melee things when the auto-attack gives up on the edge of range.
There is a sliver of health sacrifice still in the game, in the form of the self-inflicted bleed from blood is power. But beyond that the concept is indeed pretty much gone. Now if Life Force had picked up some of that slack…
And here I thought that was just for when I needed my heal to work better and had no conditions. :P
I’d take dagger mastery over mark of evasion, especially since you have chilling darkness. The off-hand skills are slow enough to feel the difference and both quite useful defensively.
I’d also have sacrificed focused rituals for either weakening shroud or withering precision (I’ve never really compared these, but more weakness sounds good both for protection and having an extra condition for ‘target the weak’, since the dagger o/h skill only lasts about half its traited cooldown), but I see that you have only ranged weapons on. ;P
Still, you can make up for it somewhat by combo-ing with the staff.
Also, do you take locust sig into pvp? Is it useful there? I always found it nice in PVE but ended up ditching it the few times I went to pvp, because everyone is still faster than me anyway as necro, and the heal is so miserable that combined with losing the speed buff it usually makes the situation worse for me lol.
Minion masters are a fantastic example. You can fill your entire bar with minions, but those weapon slots can’t summon. You WILL be doing something other than just focusing on minions. I like this aspect.
Yes… like cursing at the little ones to attack something or at the least stand near it so you can make them explode, and yelling for the bone fiend to stop trying to tank things with its face. Then there’s that little death-rat-thing, which tries so hard to be meaningful in the short time it has, but… no. T__T
I don’t mind the axe being there, only that with such an awful auto-attack and then two utilities, it should have just been an off-hand with no auto at all. The animation does seem a little lacking though, which to some extent I think of dagger’s auto-attack as well, but who even sees that tiny little weapon anyway…
Life transfer especially feels very meek to me. I didn’t play GW1 so I’m not familiar with what it was there, but seeing the traits and handful of skills necro has made me think I’d be able to actually build around that… which I suppose I can, but there’s no functional reason I’d want to. I hoped it would be the sort of thing where I can ‘steal’ an amount of the damage I do in health, which is always fun because of the weird and often inverted way it scales, where you’re better facing a few enemies at a time than one (like the hostile equivalent to altruistic healing), but instead I simply get health when the skill does something.
And I definitely agree on DS as well, I completely utterly hate the way it’s so limited. No matter what weapons I have, no matter what my build is or what my strategy may be… same stale-cardboard flavoured skill bar… ugh.
You can hit him with melee weapons.
But you cant hit him where he spawns though and its dangerous too to stand near his body when he spawns. Get a lot of ‘invisible’ damage(black mist).If u use the trick that the top poster posted, that should help.
The targettable area is pretty much in between the middle portal (where everyone waits and stand) the boss itself.
The phase when he drops his head to the ground and screams is as close as i can describe the location to hit him. Even before he drops his head, that is the area i spam my melee attacks.
The place where he puts his head is where I expected it to work, but nothing was happening even when his face was right there. I don’t normally have movement skills for PVE but I guess in the future I can equip one if I really want to go after that thing, it just seemed weird because in most cases standing right next to the targetable part lets me hit it.
Draconic, T2 and T3 cultural, that gem shop helmet if they fixed the clipping issue (or maybe that isn’t even for all characters, mine had a long jaw), the Iron Marches helmet if you like that weirdo style it has (as in, it’s not ugly, but weird and I don’t like it), and the one you get from WvW (not very interesting, but fits without looking too stupid), which is also available via karma but I forget where now… and the temple karma ones are kinda like the Iron Marches one, in that they’re odd but not inherently bad.
I totally forget the dungeon helmets but they’re easy enough to check anyway.
Well when it does let me in, it seems like I can reset the grey ‘play’ button by clicking on another character and back again, but getting into a server isn’t actually playable anyway, there’s like 5+ second delays when it eventually loads.
I started seeing skills take (literally) minutes to activate, logged off to character select, couldn’t select ‘play’, closed game (naturally it crashed on closing, lol) and now can’t log in.
/facepalm