Guild Wars 2

Kodama.6453:

Lily.1935:

• Jagged Horrors: Remove the natural degeneration from these minions. Cap the number of Jagged horrors you can have out at a time to 8.

Sry but this is just ridiculous. Minions are affected by these traits:
extra health for minions and toughness for you for each minion
minions do more damage and transfer conditions from you to the enemy
dead minions explode in a poison cloud
minions siphon health for you
your minions gain protection if you leave DS

And you want all this with a total minion number of 14 (6 minions from utility skills/heal/elite and 8 jagged horrors from minor trait). You can’t be serious.

So let me better explain this. You’re assuming that we’ll have all the minions active at the start of the fight. But Jagged horrors take a while to build up unless you take either “Rise”(which we don’t have access to yet) or Lich form which means you lose out on flesh golem. With the changes you’ll still start with maybe 6 minions at most on entering the fight. And there is a chance your minions will die. But if you play your cards right and you walk away from the fight you might increase your numbers by a little bit. The further you go down and the more victories you have the higher your numbers could become. Which translates to a snowball effect with the minion build. Starting its about as strong as it normally is but as you progress through a match or dungeon your numbers start to snowball. This is a zergling strategy and its a fun one to play. But it also has allot of holes in it. Jagged horrors wont be the problem if the build becomes popular. You’ll be able to cleave through them pretty easily. And if it ever got out of hand there is always the hard counter in Moa.

Bhawb.7408:

What are you smoking? The Chilling Darkness nerf was stupid, but it hardly affects Reaper, the only builds that would have picked it up were condi builds. The stacking “nerf” is hardly a nerf, it won’t affect Reaper in any meaningful way, and the movement change is unlikely to matter a huge deal. I get that the “woe is me” crap is popular on the forums, but if you’re going to complain at least be reasonable about it.

Thats true. But it was a motivation to take Curses. And at the moment I’m considering not taking curses at all on a condition build with reaper. Their multiple attacks along with dhuumfire combine with either death magic or spite has me covered pretty well. I don’t really want to take curses when not taking it should almost feel like a loss. At the moment it looks to be a burden to take it.

Kodama.6453:

Lily.1935:

• Jagged Horrors: Remove the natural degeneration from these minions. Cap the number of Jagged horrors you can have out at a time to 8.

Sry but this is just ridiculous. Minions are affected by these traits:
extra health for minions and toughness for you for each minion
minions do more damage and transfer conditions from you to the enemy
dead minions explode in a poison cloud
minions siphon health for you
your minions gain protection if you leave DS

And you want all this with a total minion number of 14 (6 minions from utility skills/heal/elite and 8 jagged horrors from minor trait). You can’t be serious.

Moa still kills all your minions. Plus the death nova has pretty low damage. Totally serious. If you have a better suggestion I’ll be happy to hear it. I imagine since you’re going to provide criticism you have a great alternative, right? I’m all ears.

Spectral Skills

These skills actually just straight up can’t stay the same if we’re going to use utility while in death shroud. Sure, having the 5% life force from a trait would nullify their cost which is fine, but otherwise they need more changes than just that. Otherwise they could easily cause some problems. Well, Spectral wall wont, but the others will.

*Spectral Armor: Function flips While in shroud remove vulnerability. You don’t take bonus damage from critical hits while under the effect of Spectral armor.

• Spectral walk: Added Function remove immobilize, chill and crippling on activation. Flipped function: While in shroud gain 1 stack of stability each second for 1 second while under the effect of spectral walk.

• Spectral Grasp: Flipped function, while in shroud send out a much larger hand that grabs up to 3 targets.

• Plague: Surround yourself in a sickly aura that poisons foes around you. Attacks against you copy conditions you’re suffering on your attacker. Striking a foe with your skills spreads one stack of one condition on them to nearby foes. Increase your health pool. Applies bleeding to yourself each second. Traited with Master of corruption will grant resistance each second for 3 seconds every 3 seconds as well as self inflicting poison each second. Suddenly the skill gets allot more interesting. No longer a transformation but a aura type effect gives us some variety in our elites and makes this an easy choice for a condition build. No more fighting over if you want to take a racial skill over plague. You just take plague.

• Lich Form: No longer destroys minions on entering Shroud. _I don’t mind having my minions destroyed when people moa me. But come on. Destroying them myself? No.

Minions

So many problems with minions. First their AI needs to be fixed before anything can really happen. Other than that a few quality of life changes should be in order for this.

• “Rise”: Summon Shambling horrors. When shambling horror dies, it spawns a Jagged horror. Although it would be really fun to have this summon something like bone minions and get a potential 7 minion explosions out of it, I really feel it should just summon an entirely new type of minion that has its own unique skin. This will also be functional with a minion spammer build as well since its still our highest number minion spawning skill outside of Lich form.

• Jagged Horrors: Remove the natural degeneration from these minions. Cap the number of Jagged horrors you can have out at a time to 8.

• General minion change: Reduce Cast time to 1 second for each minion.

• Shadow Fiend: Have it teleport instantly.

I think that about covers it for as much as I can handle at the moment. These changes would provide an extremely high number of potential builds into the game. And I’m not a 100% sure on the spectral changes I’m suggesting seeing as we’ve never had utility in Death shroud before. So its rather unpredictable how good or bad any potential changes could be in that realm. Over all I think this is a good start and even with part of these changes our usefulness and people interest in us could spike.

As always, I look forward to hearing your guys’s thoughts. I did have other ideas that other people mentioned considered for my list, such as Making Foot in the grave a minor trait but thinking about it I figured with the other changes I’ve suggested that might actually be a bit too powerful with everything else. I’m sure some of the numbers would need to be adjusted here but for the most part I feel this direction for us could be extremely helpful.

Shroud Changes

Death shroud has been a real thorn in our sides for a long time. Lots of anti synergy with our profession with one of these problems being fixed just last month. The life stealing one.

• Allow utility skills to be used in shroud: I believe we should be allowed to use these while in death shroud or reaper’s shroud. But it shouldn’t be free. Activating a utility skill should cost us 2-5% of our total life force. Depending on how we should balance it. This way you have to make a choice. Do I want to use these skills in death shroud? Or do I want to wait until i’m in the clear to use them outside. Signets shouldn’t cost any life force for using them but should provide their passive when off cool down.

• Healing should be visible in shroud but grayed out: being able to see when your heal is off cool down is important. But at the same time the passive skills from something like signet of vampirism should still function just as it normally would.

• Elites should be usable in Death shroud: Transform skills should drop you out of death shroud. So Lich, for example would force you out while your “Chilled to the bone” or Flesh golem’s charge wouldn’t. These skills could also cost life force like your utility as to reward good players.

Skill

• Consume condition: Revert the skill back, reduce recharge to 25 seconds. Even with the changes I’ve suggested I still am firmly in the camp of keeping this skill the way it used to be. With some of these changes and existing ones in the game we could be seeing some major competition with CC even in its old version.

• Well of blood: Change to a water field. Its blood. its a liquid. Having it as a light field is just awkward. Yeah, the combo to give your minions retaliation is cute, but it should be a water field.

• Necrotic Grasp&Life blast/plague blast: Each should be a projectile finisher with 100% to trigger. Pretty self explanatory. Both have a rather long cast time and the 20% on Grasp is rarely noticeable and Life Blast/plague blast shouldn’t be excluded.

• Axe:

1. Axe 1: Should be a 3 skill chain. Rending claws 1/2 cast time, 1 stack of vulnerability for 7 seconds. Tearing claws 1/2 cast time, 1 stack of vulnerability for 7 seconds. Tainted claws. 1/2 cast time and convert a boon on the foe struck into a condition.
2. Ghastly Claws: added function to be a whirl finisher at your location and damaging up to 3 targets in melee range along with the damage applied at range. With these two changes the axe suddenly becomes an extremely powerful weapon both capable of comboing with fields as well as dealing double damage with its skill two to foes within your melee, rewarding you for getting close. The ability to corrupt boons gives this weapon a powerful dual function as both a condition weapon and a power weapon. Being valuable in both without overshadowing the other weapons with higher range.

• Feast of Corruption: Remove the bonus damage and have it apply 2 stacks of vulnerability per condition on your target. This should be a dedicated condition weapon. And one that further rewards condition builds just makes sense. This weapon isn’t designed like a hybrid weapon anywhere else, we shouldn’t treat it like it was meant to be one.

• Deathly Swarm: Add function to grant 2% life force for each target hit, double the life force if a condition was transferred. Not having our off hand condition weapon provide life force puts allot of attention on the scepter as a bad life force weapon when it really isn’kittens just not often pared with a offhand that can also provide life force. So giving Offhand dagger the ability to provide life force should alleviate the issue.

• Corrosive Poison Cloud: Break Stun. Surround yourself in a corrosive poison cloud that destroys projectiles, poisons and weakens foes and moves with you for 6 seconds. 60 second cool down. A very strange suggestion. This completely changes the function of this skill. But its something we desperately need. And having a corruption skill that is a stun break gives us the option to not run non corruption builds aside from our heal if CC gets changed back.

• Signet of Undeath: Reduce cool down to 120 seconds, decrease cast time to 2 seconds, increase life force to 3% every 3 seconds and increase radius to 240. I’m not suggesting to change its function entirely. Just make it good at it since utility slots are more valuable than elites allot of the time. It should be worth taking even if its in a very fringe situation.

• Well of darkness: Reduce recharge to 40 seconds.

• Well of Power: Added function. Well of power pulses 1 stack of stability to allies in it for 1 second each second.

Death Magic

Another rather strong line. Decent in its balance but its issue is more the skills and other trait lines surrounding it rather than the line itself. Still a few traits could be improved to be more effective as an option.

• Soul Comprehension: Added effect, Gain 5% life force when your health drops below 50% 20 second cool down. Can’t trigger while in shroud We are in the defensive line. We should be able to survive a bit longer. I didn’t want to remove its base function. But its also important that we have minor traits that aren’t completely useless in many situations.

• Unholy Sanctuary: Increase its base healing. Added function to grant 2 seconds of invulnerability when its triggered. compared to the other two traits, this really isn’t very impressive. Giving us a way to escape large amounts of damage when being focus fired then giving a small window to punish people for trying is something we sorely need. Especially considering we are expected to stick the entire fight out.

Blood Magic

Mostly solid trait line. Only really one change I’d really make. With the move of Unholy Martyr I suggested above blood magic will need a replacement don’t you think?

• Parasitic Contagion, renamed to Blood Drinker: Bleeds you apply heal allies for 10% of their damage around your foes. 240 radius. A blood build should be a thing in my opinion. And blood magic should have a grandmaster trait to really support a blood necromancer. Giving us the ability to provide decent and consistence heals with a condition build could give us a good decent GM for the condi necros.

Soul Reaping

Soul reaping is really powerful. It has great traits, but you often find that you’re stuck with a few traits and really not exploring too much in this line. Especially at the master tier. My suggestions have already removed one trait from master so this leaves an open slot to play with.

• Speed of Shadows rename to Deathly pursuit: Add Function, if you are in combat gain super speed for 2 seconds when you enter shroud. To catch our prey we can’t just be running as fast as them, we need to be faster than them. At least for a short duration. Give us a way to close the gap just a bit quicker. This trait really has stiff competition at the moment and it would be nice to have this added function to help it out.

• Cultist’s Fervor(new): Reduce the recharge rate of Utility Skills used while in shroud by 15%, but they cost 3% more as much life force to cast. What??? We can’t use utility skills in Death shroud/reaper’s shroud? OH I know! But I’m also going to suggest allowing us to have access to them. So just wait and it’ll all make sense.

• Foot in the Grave: break stun and gain stability for 3 seconds and every 3 seconds you are in death shroud gain one stack of stability for 3 seconds. Being hard to CC should be on our list of things to do. Yet we’re pretty easy. Once people figure out Foot in the grave though its not going to threaten them. They’ll be able to control us just as easily as before. With this change we can dish a beating while we’re taking a beating without worrying that we’ll be face down in the dirt the whole time.

• Dhuumfire: Shroud skill one applies 1 stack of burning for 3 seconds. Shroud skills 2-5 apply burning for 2 seconds one striking a foe.Will this be too much? I really don’t know. But giving us a major reason to stick around in death shroud and burst out some burning seems like it could give high incentive to stick it out. You still have allot of skills with massive cool down with Life transfer and tainted shackles with an extremely high cool down of 40 seconds each. How would this effect reaper? hard to really say at this point, but we need a reason to take it without reaper. Even 1 second of burning with the other skills might be enough. Hmm. I’ll have to think on that.

• Terror: Move up to Grandmaster slot, Increase its base damage, fuse with Fear of Death. No, I’m not joking with this one. Terror should be a defining build. But we also need to have the tools in order to do it. Freeing up two slots to make this work would be worth it. It can’t be competing with 3 traits that all fill a role in the exact same type of build.

• Weakening Shroud: Drop to Master tier and adjust numbers accordingly. I know a few people like this trait. And it is good, but I was never that impressed with it. That’s me personally though I still want it but I don’t feel its a build defining trait as a grandmaster trait should have that sort of quality or at least do something really amazing.

• Lingering Curse: Put 50% of the condition duration into the base duration of the scepter and change it to increase condition duration by 30% for all outgoing conditions while wielding a scepter or trident. Gain a bonus 20% condition duration while in shroud. +150 condition damage. This should be the dedicated condition trait. But it should be worth taking. Just adding condition duration to what is effectively 2 skills just doesn’t cut it as a grandmaster. But it should stay as one. The added duration in death shroud should also give a condi player incentive to stay in shroud a bit longer.

• Remove Parasitic Contagion from Curses.

• Move Unholy Martyr to Curses and change Function to: Draw conditions from allies and gain 2% life force for each condition drawn this way. Up to 1 condition from up to 5 allies in a 600 radius. Add function. Critical hits while in shroud copy a condition you are suffering onto your target. 33% chance. Can’t copy an entire stack of a condition only 1 stack. This could be really interesting for the necromancer. Combine with Master of corruptions you suddenly have an outlet to turn your suffering into everyone’s suffering without being a carbon copy skill of the revenant’s Mallyx stance. As well as having a way to support allies in a minor way outside of blood is a nice touch as well.

No introduction needed. We have a tone of problems with trait placement and there isn’t a single trait line that doesn’t have at least one useless trait. If not more. So I’m going to go through a list of traits I feel should be changed and give a few suggestions to help improve their usefulness. Gimmicks will be included as well since not all builds can be meta builds. Some should just be really fun in concept and execution. We also have a few skills that just aren’t very good.

I’ve had some time to calm down about yet another nerf so I wanted to post with a clear mind. Well, lets get into it.

Spite

Spite has 2 useless traits in its line. The rest are fairly solid. We have Spiteful Spirit and Unholy Fervor. Spiteful spirit could be improved but Unholy Fervor is only useless because of how bad of a weapon Axe is. If axe was a better weapon Unholy Fervor could see allot of use.

• Spiteful Spirit: Cast Unholy Feast when you enter shroud. When you corrupt a boon the condition applied lasts twice as long. A bit of a odd change, but I feel with the axe changes I’ll be suggesting later this will make allot of sense. The extra duration can go along way into making this a contender for Signet of Suffering.

• Alternative Spiteful Spirit: Retaliation you apply steals life rather than just dealing damage. I honestly couldn’t decide between these two. I really like the increased corrupted condition duration, but at the same time giving the necromancer a actual retaliation build that rewards you for being hit is also tempting.

Curses

Probably the worst trait line out of all of them, this one needs the most work.

• Barbed Precision: Increase its bleed on crit trigger back to 66% and reduce its duration to 2 seconds. The only justification for the change was reaper. But even that is flimsy as other professions hit 2 to 3 times more often than even the reaper’s shroud does with a comparable trait that does almost the exact same thing.

• Chilling Darkness: Blinding a target will also apply chill. Cannot occur more than 5 times in 10 seconds. The nerf was uncalled for. But I understand why. The reaper might cause a problem with this trait. But they shouldn’t be afraid to use experimental ideas with these traits. Allowing it to trigger multiple times will cap it quickly against multiple foes so it can still scale without totally crippling the trait. It is just a minor after all. Although I’d much prefer its old function this is a decent compromise. Not that I’m really in that position it would be nice if arena net listened to these ideas and use the tools at hand.

• Master of corruption: Reduce recharge reduction from 33% to 25% and have each corruption skill grant 3 seconds of resistance along with the bonus conditions. It doesn’t make sense to me why we weaken ourselves even further by taking this trait. It just doesn’t. From any stand point. The “Oh I can just send it back” argument is really bad because that fails to understand that we’re sacrificing vital defenses to do that with potentially no pay off for doing so which means we sacrifice a trait slot and a skill if not another trait to achieve this effect. Basically the pay off isn’t remotely worth it. With resistance it becomes worth it but still risky as someone else might corrupt it or strip it off before you can send the conditions back, giving it some more interesting counter play as well as providing a defensive trait that can go wrong if used poorly.

Shiki.7148:

Bhawb.7408:

I’m sure they felt there was a reasonable justification to do this change, contrary to popular belief Anet doesn’t go out of their way to screw us over, they just really suck at balancing us. Its an issue of ineptitude, not malice.

I’m sorry but the way they concentrate on this and not the massive problems engis ans mesmers cause makes it really hard to believe that. Even if it isn’t it is a case of "we don’t want to nerf our favourite classes so let’s seek for stuff to “balance” that isn’T needed yet only maybe when HoT launches but not sure…oh, chill and the Reaper. perfect, let’s do this change months before it may actually be needed without having tested if it would actually be too strong and make it kitten poor."

one of the issues is they don’t have anyone on the design team who really likes the necromancer even in the slightest.

Bhawb.7408:

I’m sure they felt there was a reasonable justification to do this change, contrary to popular belief Anet doesn’t go out of their way to screw us over, they just really suck at balancing us. Its an issue of ineptitude, not malice.

If I was going to make a guess, they nerfed chilling darkness because of Nightfall, not Well of darkness. Nightfall with that trait seems really strong, in theory. But Well of Darkness is pretty weak as is and the change makes it useless. But with the changes to the way chill will works with it only able to be stacked 5 times while its up seems to kill a well of darkness + Nightfall combo anyway so it seems they’re over nerfing it. They really only needed to hit one and not both if the argument stands at all. At the moment it didn’t seem like they needed to touch either with the core profession.

But yeah, I agree with you in that.

Why do I play this profession again? We’ve been crying out for proper balance for traits for weeks now, especially the terrible curses line needing some MAJOR reworking and they made it worse? I was already considering NEVER TAKING curses with reaper even on a condi build anyway and chilling darkness was about the only justification I could make to take it and now with this chance I have no reason to use Curse. I’m losing a reason to take curses on core necromancer. I might just have to give my full sinister ascended armor to my mesmer. Seeing as she’ll make better use of it.

I have an eternal dent in my wall called “Necromancer Balance”. Its where I go to discuss the balance of our profession.

Lots of people aren’t happy with the axe as it currently is on the necromancer. Which is understandable. Many people want to increase its range to 900 or even as high as 1,200. I’m not in that camp to increase its range. I feel the axe should stay at 600 but it should make up for it in its utility and damage. Which it currently doesn’t.
So my proposal is why not make this our dedicated boon corruption weapon? Originally My idea was to give its auto attack a skill chain and I still stand by that. So a couple seemingly small but major changes here could make the axe a really cool and interesting weapon to run.
Skill 1: Make this a 3 attack chain with a half second cast time on each strike. First two strikes would cause vulnerability while the third strike would corrupt a boon. Also, increase is base damage slightly. The mesmer has a boon stripping weapon in the form of the sword and they can get clones to also strip boons for them so why not have a boon corruption auto on necromancer? Its still short range so why not?
Skill 2: Have this skill strike your target, generating Life force but at the same time strike foes at the base of the weapon where you’re spinning the axe. Change it into a whirl finisher.
Skill 3: Maybe slightly reduce its cast time.
I feel that with these changes we could make the axe an interesting and rewarding weapon to use. Any thoughts?

(Copied from my other post.)

Azure.8670:

Hi lily.

We actually have 2 current threads both started by me to collect ideas on axe. While we only need one, the original, the 2nd happened by mistame. Great ideas, throw it in the official axe for help thread

I’ll go ahead and copy it and past in in there.

Lots of people aren’t happy with the axe as it currently is on the necromancer. Which is understandable. Many people want to increase its range to 900 or even as high as 1,200. I’m not in that camp to increase its range. I feel the axe should stay at 600 but it should make up for it in its utility and damage. Which it currently doesn’t.

So my proposal is why not make this our dedicated boon corruption weapon? Originally My idea was to give its auto attack a skill chain and I still stand by that. So a couple seemingly small but major changes here could make the axe a really cool and interesting weapon to run.

Skill 1: Make this a 3 attack chain with a half second cast time on each strike. First two strikes would cause vulnerability while the third strike would corrupt a boon. Also, increase is base damage slightly. The mesmer has a boon stripping weapon in the form of the sword and they can get clones to also strip boons for them so why not have a boon corruption auto on necromancer? Its still short range so why not?

Skill 2: Have this skill strike your target, generating Life force but at the same time strike foes at the base of the weapon where you’re spinning the axe. Change it into a whirl finisher.

Skill 3: Maybe slightly reduce its cast time.

I feel that with these changes we could make the axe an interesting and rewarding weapon to use. Any thoughts?

A longing for the GW1 necromancer mostly. Hard core nostalgia. I probably developed an affinity for the necromancer because of my affinity for death.

Curses is easily the necromancer’s worst trait line right now. Which is a big contrast from its previous version where it was one of our best. Which isn’t saying much honestly. It needs allot of work. Soul reaping doesn’t need quite as much work but it could use with some touch ups.

Check out my post for more information. https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Condi-Anti-Synergy/first#post5213037

Sacrifice is such a strong word. I don’t feel like I have to sacrifice anything. None of my normal builds go away because of the reaper. I just get new builds.

nekretaal.6485:

Sylent.3165:

Thief.5186:

I honestly dont see the problem with necro damage in pve

The problem isn’t that it’s bad, simply very very low compared to others. Yes wells provide great burst but we don’t have good sustained damage at all. Guardian sword auto attack beats our damage with dagger power build and well even. I do hope the greatsword really makes us do some decent melee damage

The guy who crunches the DPS numbers on YouTube figured out that a traited Power Death Shroud user does less half the dps of every other procession. Less than half of what engineers are doing.

Thats complete nonsense. In practical situations the necromancer’s damage is comparable. You’ll have to link the video. Because Its more than likely that they’re either cheesing it hard or going strictly off their burst damage and not DPS.

Sylent.3165:

Thief.5186:

I honestly dont see the problem with necro damage in pve

The problem isn’t that it’s bad, simply very very low compared to others. Yes wells provide great burst but we don’t have good sustained damage at all. Guardian sword auto attack beats our damage with dagger power build and well even. I do hope the greatsword really makes us do some decent melee damage

This seems to be the issue. Our damage isn’t bad in short bursts. And we can hit extremely hard against single targets but because of the number of enemies we struggle a bit the greater the numbers. Personally, I prefer to run Condi as opposed to power because a condi build has more chances to tag groups than power does. Damage isn’t so much our issue in these situations as it is the ability to deal damage to a higher number of targets more frequently which reaper will achieve that.

As for dungeons, its not our damage holding us back its group utility.

Currently I’m using well of blood and Signet of Vampirism depending on the build I’m running in PvE. SoV is kinda weak, but I’m getting allot of healing from life stealing on my signet condi build that its not so much of a problem. But I probably wouldn’t run it without blood magic. Well of blood is for my power build and its the same way. I wouldn’t run that without blood magic. Vampiric ritual reduces its recharge to 32 seconds which is reasonable enough. But if I’m not using either of those, Prayer of Dwayna is surprisingly powerful.

Currently I wont touch CC even in PvE. Its horrendous is in its current form And I’m not a fan of running blood fiend without other minions and since I’m not running minions until they fix their horrible AI that’s out of the question. Although I don’t have a problem with the ranged minions, the melee minions are causing a problem.

I suppose I’m just lucky I chose a human. For elite I’m running Lich and Avatar of Grenth. Hounds of balthazar aren’t bad but their recharge is too high for me at the moment. Plague is just really bad especially since I have a a ton of bleeding duration on my condi build and on power I just have a lot of self sustain from blood so in both cases its either not needed or just a terrible option.

Salamander.2504:

Lily.1935:

I’ve suggested this twice. First time I suggested it people didn’t like the idea. Second time people really wanted it to happen. So Now I’m seeing this pop up again. Yeah, we should have utility.

This baffles me. Why?

I also suggested that Death shroud might need to be rebalanced, healing in death shroud(all healing), some skill’s flipping their function while in shroud such as spectral skills. People kinda rejected the whole idea.

The second time I just suggested that we should have utility but they should cost life force as to incentivize players to make a choice between burning their shroud quicker and using the utility or saving them for when they exit. The second time was much more popular And I understand why. But people don’t want to have a draw back to anything at all so they didn’t want any of the skills to cost life force.

I’ve suggested this twice. First time I suggested it people didn’t like the idea. Second time people really wanted it to happen. So Now I’m seeing this pop up again. Yeah, we should have utility.

I really want to play a minion build after all these years of them never being that good. I’d love to run one. But without the proper AI fixes they just aren’t worth it. Technically they should get into hyber aggressive mode, kill everything that moves when you enter combat but they don’t. They should attack anything and everything thats around you if you’re in combat. I don’t think we should have nearly as much control over them as a ranger does their pet because personally I don’t feel that’s in their flavor. But they need to actually defend us.

Not a whole lot actually. A few trait changes should help it quite a bit. The biggest issue I’m seeing at the moment is with Corruptions, condi duration and trait placement. Although the placement is fine for a signet condi build a corruption or terror build is just abysmal at the moment and I feel these are two areas that need to be improved. The missing 30% duration I used to enjoy is really hurting me in PvE as well.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

Alright, you guys know the drill! How are the changes so far? Either answer these questions for me or just talk about what you feel is important to mention for Necromancer.

Specific questions:

1. Blood line is clearly awesome. How’s the death line? Are you using it at all in non-minion master builds?
2. Condi was thought to be really bad before everything came out. Have you tried out This build by Zombify? How did you like it?
3. Have you been successfully running any odd builds such as minion master or bunker?
4. Yes, I already have feedback on CC and Plague. I nearly ran lich on my terrormancer. I stopped mid fight to say in say chat to my enemies “Can we take a moment to recognize the fact that my Flesh Golem is literally not helping me at all?”

1. I’m really liking Blood. It functions really well and the life steal. Though I still have complaints about it I’ll get into that in a bit. Death is awesome so far. But it feels like some synergy is missing from Curses. Which isn’t death’s fault.
2. I’m not a fan of signets. Signet builds are kinda meh for me and even with these changes its meh. Considering I’m primarily a PvE player the boon conversion hasn’t helped me much at all. Overall the condition build in pve is extremely slow build up and rather inconsistent thats to the large amount of self weakness and if you’re foolish enough to take CC, blind. The build really needs at least short duration resistance to make it function semi decently because it just feels dreadful to run at the moment.
3. Minions still aren’t working properly. So no. I haven’t been. Although I did try a suicide rampager’s build with death, curses and I’m struggling between spite and Soul reaping. I’m thinking spite but idk. That build has a few holes in it as well so it doesn’t even work properly.
4. Never thought I’d be using human racial elites as opposed to necromancer elites on a condi build.

The issue I have with allot of these changes, especially the changes to blood and Curses is that they seem to be balanced around the reaper and not the core necromancer. Which although you can do that for other professions, the reaper is almost a completely different beast than the necromancer. Which leaves a good chunk of traits feeling lacking our outright useless(Dhuumfire) for the time being.

Overall though? The changes are good. I’m having fun with blood so there is that.

Lopez.7369:

Okay, that’s fine. We’ll just agree to disagree.

No, show me a video. You’ve made a unsubstantial claim I’m willing to be wrong but you have to actually show it. You claimed you can average 12k, show it. Its not a disagree thing. You have the chance to prove you’re right. SHOW ME!

Lopez.7369:

I think you’re severely underestimating DPS in general. Berserker Life Blast, assuming full might and vulnerability, does way more than 3,000 DPS — it can easily hit 8,000 DPS.

with food and full might and valn its 8-11k. Without food and max valn+might its closer to 4-7k. Reason its such a high range is because of how big the difference is above 50% health. I’m not underestimating the damage. You’re over estimating. You’re talking about optimal situation. I’m looking at it from a more realistic. The hit of Life blast is around 1.5k not crit. Full sinisters adds no ferocity to that so you’re doing only getting the 150% of normal damage. That doesn’t double the damage. Critical it can go up to about 4k-5k with full sinister but will average about 3k on crit.

Look at it from a practical stand point. What you’re claiming is optimal, the absolute perfect situation. Which Is why I want to see a video. I know the damage of both in their optimal situation. I’ve rune those builds for years. The build up is really slow with a tone of self harm. The weakness is especially harmful. I know how much I can do now as well as then.

Morfedel.4165:

I actually considered swapping the offhand, going warhorn with mainhand dagger and offhand dagger with scepter.

The reason why I wanted the dagger is the ability to clear off more conditions, as well as it has more bleed stacking. When coupled with the scepter, which I should have considered in the first place, puts all my bleeding in one set, for triggering Blood Bond, and dagger’s #5 doesnt recharge fast enough to help the bleed blood bond trigger with mainhand dagger.

Honestly, I dont NEED any specific offhand. I am open to any of them. What I want is mainhand dagger, in part for skill #2, more vampiric, and it heals over 200 per pulse, and it has 9 pulses.

I wanted scepter for the bleed for Blood Bond.

So that leaves what I need for offhand; warhorn for swiftness, and therefore focus, or dagger? If you hvae a good argument for focus instead, I’m all ears!

I’m beginning to lean towards flesh golem over lich; it adds even more of my various minion trait goodies I have slotted. But Lich is just so fun!

After those two thief encounters I’m very happy with signet of vampirism for my healing skill now.

I see you want the trigger from the signet. I personally would still rather take the dagger trait in order to get the 25% movement speed and 33% recharge reduction with dagger skills to make your immobilize and life steal more frequent. And if you do use a dagger with your second weapon it helps there as well. The Life stealing from the bleed shouldn’t really matter too much but honestly its entirely up to you. Since I’m In PvE most the time I rely heavily on the ability to have AoE, so Dagger/warhorn and staff are prefered with wells. Since minions don’t last too long. In pvp I can see what you’re getting at.

Lopez.7369:

Life Blast alone does more than 3,000 DPS.

Anyway, the math is up there. I am warming up to a non-Death Shroud, though, which does about 12,000 DPS on average.

How are you getting max berserker damage and max condi damage at the same time? Your math is either horribly flawed or you’re lying. Show me a video. Show me the actual numbers in practice.

Lopez.7369:

I think my numbers are self-explanatory. I posted the full math and the conditions required. I think the problem might be that you’re ignoring the bleeds and poison that are applied before Death Shroud, since 7,000 DPS is how much you get from Life Blast and burning alone.

As for weakness, Necromancer has more of it because Corrosive Poison Cloud now has a shorter cooldown and is a more viable option since it does decent damage.

Zaroua.2714:

You’re misunderstanding. What you’re posting is burst damage over one second. DPS is a representation of the total damage you do during a set rotation or over a set period of time (usually a few minutes of combat if you run a priority system that doesn’t loop).

Of course. I explicitly said this is peak DPS in Death Shroud, and that the average is more around 9,000 to 10,000.

7k? try 3k. IF that, closer to 1.5k

Lopez.7369:

Even if we say four stacks of burning (I might have overestimated), that’s still 11,000 DPS. That’s still pretty good, especially since I’m not counting torment to be a bit conservative.

For reference, average berserker necromancer DPS is around 10,000. But thieves and elementalists are around 15,000 to 17,000, so necromancers are just flat-out worse across the board.

I don’t know where you’re getting the numbers for Necro because even with your rotation you can’t get higher than 7k. At the moment I’ve dropped Soul reaping entirely. Though if I was to take it up again I’d take food in the grave over Dhuumfire. Every test I’ve done shows that spamming Dhuumfire drops your DPS after 3 seconds. Doesn’t matter which combination you’re using. You lose damage by entering DS and charging Dhuumfire because that’s a time you’re building up your burning but all the while your poison stacks are dropping like a rock and your bleed stacks are dropping off as well thanks to the barbed precision nerf. After that you just barely match your DPS lost at the 3rd hit and staying in any longer means you’re losing damage in the thousands.

So I need a video. Thats all their is to it.

Lopez.7369:

Blood Magic is pretty nice. But I think people might be overlooking condition necromancer’s constant weakness application. It’s really useful in high-end fractals.

With power and condition necromancer right now, the choice essentially comes down to more weakness (conditions) or more vulnerability (power). Considering the proliferation of vulnerability, I find the weakness more compelling.

Our weakness application is just as strong as it was before. If it didn’t get us into groups before why should we expect it too now?

Tim.6450:

@ lopez how do you get 5.5 stacks of burning? dhuumfire applies 6 seconds of burning at most and in 6 seconds you you can only fire 4 life blasts.

In the testing I was doing I could only maintain 4. The cast time plus the after cast delay makes it impossible to stack 6 burns. Its why I wanted a video of it. So same question you have. Unless a guardian is granting virtues to allies there isn’t a way for you to stack burns that high without being a reaper.

Currently I’m running full zerker in PvE. Spite, Blood and Soul reaping. Wells are the selection I’ve chosen because of they hit more targets and the elite is Lich. Pretty standard stuff really. I’d defiantly take warhorn if i were you. And if you insist on using off hand dagger I’d suggest using it with an Axe and the warhorn with your mainhand dagger. Having the warhorn as an option to add extra life steal is nice especially with melee range focus. And if you need some spacing the axe is your most frequent hitting weapon to provide life stealing more often. The Offhand Dagger with that lets to you get the bonus 25% movement speed no matter which weapon you choose so that’s a nice touch.

I wouldn’t call that optimal but, it could be quite fun. Try out wells see what you think. I’ve found them extremely fun. so, give it a go.

Lopez.7369:

Here is some math for the Death Shroud numbers. My assumptions are sinister, full consumables, full might, full vulnerability, 5.5 stacks of burning, 10 stacks of bleeding, and four stacks of poison. I left out torment to be conservative.

12,105.125 DPS = 4000 + 1.25 * 1.4 * (5.5 * (7.5 + 1.55 * 80 + 0.155 * 2100) + 10 * (2 + 0.25 * 80 + 0.06 * 2100) + 4 * (3.5 + 0.375 * 80 + 0.06 * 2100))

It’s entirely possible I’m getting something wrong here, but this seems like a reasonable peak for condition necromancers in Death Shroud.

see, I tested it and if I stay in DS longer than 3 second I start losing allot of damage. Which is one of the complaints I’ve always had with Condition builds. You don’t want to stay in DS. Even with the dhuumfire changes you’re still losing damage. And I’d drop blood for spite if you’re running hybrid. The extra might and valn you get from spite is more valuable than life stealing imo.

Bhawb.7408:

Lily.1935:

And If I’m not using Well of Blood and I’m using a condi build without Blood magic I take Prayer of Dwayna. For PvP? If your going to run condi I’d suggest running a signet build and forgetting about using CC entirely. Signet of vampirism may not be that great but at least you can get a few of its triggers while in DS if you really need the healing.

The change of the active working through DS, plus it being buffed by 20% baseline made it a decent heal. I wouldn’t say it is a great skill, but I’ve been enjoying using it, if they just fixed the stupid passive I’d love it.

I’m fully aware of those changes. I’m personally not a fan. But that’s just me. If I was to use the signet build I’d pick that. If CC worked like it used to there isn’t a question in my mind about which one I’d choose. Old CC any day.

I’m looking over the damage rotation and the build up is extremely slow. I’m also noticing you’re getting a bit of damage from allies. I’ve done some testing myself and I can safely say that dhuumfire isn’t worth taking. You end up losing allot of damage for staying in death shroud that long.

Lopez.7369:

zapv.8051:

Can I please see a video, some math, and/or a build for that 12000 number your getting?

I use scepter/dagger and scepter/focus, full sinister, Runes of Balthazar, Sigil of Earth, Sigil of Malice, Rare Veggie Pizza, and Toxic Focusing Crystal with Curses / Soul Reaping / Blood Magic.

The ideal rotation on a boss is Corrosive Poison Cloud to Blood is Power to Deathly Swarm to Enfeebling Blood to Grasping Dead to Reaper’s Touch to Death Shroud to Tainted Shackles to Dark Path to Life Blast spam to Dark Path to Reaper’s Touch to Corrosive Poison Cloud to Blood is Power to Deathly Swarm to Enfeebling Blood to Grasping Dead to Feast of Corruption to Death Shroud to Dark Path to Life Blast spam to Dark Path and you rinse and repeat from there. You can throw in Well of Suffering on bosses if you don’t need Epidemic.

To be clear, the build doesn’t get an average of 12,000 DPS overall. It’s probably more around 10,000 DPS. But in Death Shroud, it can get up to 12,000 DPS. Again, that’s pretty good considering the passive weakness, Blood Magic support, and high AOE damage potential of Epidemic provided by the build. (The weakness and Epidemic are only really good in fractals, though, since dungeon and world mobs and bosses die way too quickly at the moment.)

Nevermind. Tested it myself. I’m getting about 7k with curse, spite and soul reaping. With your build, I’m getting closer to 5-6k… and still I’m killing myself while doing it and the ramp up time is insanely high. So i’m going to have to see a video. Because you could get 12k… If you have allies also granting bonus conditions while you attack like a venom share thief or burn guard. Otherwise, I’m not seeing the numbers you’re seeing.

Lopez.7369:

I think you’re severely underestimating the damage boost we got. In Death Shroud with full might and vulnerability and proper condition duration gear and consumables, we can get upwards of 12,000 DPS. That’s higher than power’s average DPS — and it’s also pretty impressive when considering condition necromancer can now keep passive weakness on bosses since Corrosive Poison Cloud is now worth using, while providing decent support and DPS to the group through Blood Magic.

Could you make a video of this? I’d like to see its damage with both with and without food. Because This is really important. I feel that if a build can’t stand up on its own without cons than it probably isn’t worth running.

I don’t mind that its poop. The trait itself is pretty awesome.

I’ve been testing a few different condi builds for PvE to see how well they might work in comparison to other professions. If I said I was disappointed that would be an understatement. A few issues I’m having no matter what build I use is the ramp time and duration. Once we hit the max damage out put on the ramp up we do in fact deal greater damage than we used to. Barely. But the damage to get to that point is lower and its much more difficult to get to that point. I compared it with other professions and they seemed to have a much shorter ramp time with close to twice our damage output. I did find a way to get close to their damage output but its fickle, the traits that are supposed to combo together don’t, and we end up doing far more damage to ourselves than the extra damage to our opponents.

For example one of the places that where synergy is supposed to work but doesn’t work very well is Plague Sending + Master of corruption. So epidemic and Corrosive poison cloud both cause weakness when you use them with master of corruption. Corrosive poison cloud causes weakness on its own and epidemic has it added. Well, weakness makes it so you can’t crit 50% of the time. And Plague sending requires you to critically hit. This means that you’ll probably have to use one of your condi transfer skills which are more valuable than a trait. BUT WAIT! There’s more, when you do beware using deathly swarm or Putrid Mark because they might just crit and waste two transfers at once.

I can’t seem to win for losing with this. Its so frustrating to use a condition build in PvE now its almost hilarious. Something needs to be done about these traits because its not rewarding to play this way and its high risk.

What can we change?:

1. Buff barbed precision back to 66%. We don’t rely on a bunch of little hits like other professions do we rely on big single hits. We can’t strike nearly as often as they can and this is especially true for condi builds. So having this back would be a nice start.
2. Put 50% of the condi duration from Lingering curse into the base duration of the scepter and make Lingering curse give 50% condition duration to all conditions while wielding a scepter. Perhaps some bonus duration while in shroud as well seeing as neither death shroud or reaper’s shroud have very many damaging conditions.
3. Move Terror up to grandmaster and combine it with master of terror. as well is revert it back to its original damage. I agree, terror should be its own defining build. But it can’t be fighting with itself to do so. And there are allot of traits that seem to fight itself to prevent this build from working too well.
4. Reduce the recharge of skills on Master of corruption to 25%, keep the bonus condition application and have it grant us resistance for 3 seconds after casting a corruption skill.
5. Move Prasitic Contagion to Blood magic and change its function to heal allies around foes who are suffering conditions you applied to them. This could give condi some well needed support. Its numbers might need to be adjusted or change to only be effected by one condition but either of those changes would be decent as it would help allies in high risk situations. its radius could be rather low like 180.
6. Drop weakening Shroud down to Master and adjust its stats accordingly. Its a nice trait to have and I don’t think it should be taken from people. My personal opinion of this trait is that it really shouldn’t be a grandmaster.
7. Move Unholy Martyr to Curses and add new function. Add to its description that critical hits while in death shroud copy a condition you are currently suffering. This would be a random condition and it wouldn’t get rid of the condition. It could provide some really interesting play with the corruption skills and you could jump into DS right after gaining some resistance to critical to avoid the weakness from blind or weakness. If its too strong as is a chance to trigger could be added to it as to prevent unbalance. At the moment there isn’t a reason to want to take this trait. But a move and added trigger could make it really interesting.
8. Lastly, this leaves an Open spot in soul reaping. I’m not sure what should go there. But the idea I had would be to give yourself and all minions you control quickness for 3 seconds on entering death shroud. Maybe that’s too much and that doesn’t directly impact condition builds but it would be nice to have a little bit of this.

These are my ideas. What are your guys’s thoughts? too much? not enough?

I honestly haven’t been using it. Each time I do I just feel really bad for using it. I’ve been using well of blood mostly as its got a 2 second difference with the vampiric ritual trait and the valn REALLY REALLY hurts! I mean, you might as well not heal at all it hurts so much.

And If I’m not using Well of Blood and I’m using a condi build without Blood magic I take Prayer of Dwayna. For PvP? If your going to run condi I’d suggest running a signet build and forgetting about using CC entirely. Signet of vampirism may not be that great but at least you can get a few of its triggers while in DS if you really need the healing.

I’m doing some testing for myself and the weakness given to you from master of corruption on epidemic as well as the passive weakness from corrosive poison cloud actually blocks your critical hits which harms your barbed precision as well as makes it so your plague signet doesn’t hit as frequently either.

Much of the complaints about the patch was about consume condition and the over all changes to Curses. The rest of it was decent or fairly good. The loss of spectral walk being able to cheat fall damage isn’t that big of a deal. But the destruction of our only really good heal was a pretty big hit.

Over All, we really didn’t get much from this. An interesting signet build and vampiric build actually working for the first time ever. It feels like these changes were specifically designed for the reaper and not the core profession. All the nerfs and even the numbers make allot more sense when you can hit far more targets at a much faster rate. This fact is the criticism the community, myself included, have had. My favorite build for necromancer was condi. And it feels really really terrible to run now.

Its actually weaker than I thought it would be. I’m not getting NEARLY the bleed stacks I did before and not only that poison isn’t making up for it.

Doomed! Doooooooooooooooooommmmed!

Sagat.3285:

I think nostalgia is blinding them when it comes to balance.

Nostalgia? What are you talking about? if they were nostalgic the Master of corruption trait would cause AOE damage when you used a corruption. Consume conditions would eat conditions form nearby allies as well with no drawback. Minions would be highly spammable. The necromancer would have AoE confusion. They wouldn’t have a shred of burning on them at all. Life stealing wouldn’t be split and would scale exclusively with one stat and its numbers would be much higher. When we suffered a new condition we would have a trait to make everyone else suffer along with us. We’d have skills to sacrifice health with major benefit to us without actually killing us for no reason.

There is Very little nostalgia in the necromancer design. And the Profession that it was inspired by is nothing like this. The GW1 necromancer was legendary. The GW2 necromancer? The GW2 necromancer is basically Dan from Street Fighter.

Foefaller.1082:

Cecilia.5179:

Bhawb.7408:

Realistically the only bad parts of the patch were Corruption related. Everything else was arguably fine, some great maybe a little bit mediocre here and there, but if we could ignore everything related to corruptions we’d have a very different opinion.

The problem is Consume Conditions got wrapped up in that, as did Plague.

I would say that the Curses line and the Master tier of Soul Reaping really hurt Condi necros because of how poorly they were layed out.

I can get Curses, but how is the master tier of Soul Reaping hurt condition necros in terms of choice? Fear of Death seems like the no brainer for a condition build. Vital Persistence is nice, but I don’t think Dhummfire in it’s current state is good enough to justify picking VP up… or are you talking about Spectral Mastery, or Foot in the Grave vs. Dhummfire in the GM tier?

You want the reduced cool down of your skills in death shroud which helps path of corruption and doom primarily. You also want the 50% fear duration. Spectral master is also helpful to us because condi builds struggle to build life force. At least pure condi builds do. Although that last one isn’t so big of a problem seeing as you couldn’t take that trait with path and terror before anyway.

Cecilia.5179:

Bhawb.7408:

Realistically the only bad parts of the patch were Corruption related. Everything else was arguably fine, some great maybe a little bit mediocre here and there, but if we could ignore everything related to corruptions we’d have a very different opinion.

The problem is Consume Conditions got wrapped up in that, as did Plague.

I would say that the Curses line and the Master tier of Soul Reaping really hurt Condi necros because of how poorly they were layed out.

master and Grandmaster Tiers. Both are really bad at the moment. Parasitic contagion really shouldn’t be in Curses at all, Lingering Curse should really improve condition damage besides just scepter even if that means it takes a hit to the duration it provides. Master is easily the worst though.

Barbed precision was also an unnecessary nerf.