Guild Wars 2

spoj.9672:

Lily.1935:

Bhawb.7408:

What do you mean any more? We have no meaningful finishers on anything except minions right now. I’m not saying we should just Oprah-style give them to every ability, but we 100% need finishers sprinkled into our skills.

I’m not saying we don’t need more finishers. just blast finishers. Currently the primary reason that I’ve seen why people want blast finishers is because of pre-buffing in PvE. And the necromancer can already give a group half its might through blast finishers and bip.

Thats just a false presumption you have. The primary reason for blast finishers is not for fire fields. Its for interacting with any useful field in a useful way. That means smoke, lightning, water and of course fire as well. And blasting dark and poison fields could become a thing. So theres that too.

Its incredibly frustrating to be in an organised group when players are dropping fields like smoke/lighting and everyone can drop a blast or two to contribute. Except you, the necro, just sits there and thinks “Hmmm…. yep…. Maybe i can use a bone minio…. Nope. We are already moving on and my minion would have missed the field anyway….”. Its not a good feeling and its totally contradictory of group content where you should all be working together.

Its not false. I’ve played with those groups, they stand still to blast might. And while in combat I have zero issue blasting with my staff. Which is far more useful since its at range.

nearlight.3064:

Well considering axe has 900 range now I don’t see any reason why you’d want to run the old scepter over the new axe for a ranged somewhat underpowered power based weapon, just saying.

Why would I run axe over staff? That seems illogical.

Rising Dusk.2408:

554883kitten.1705:

Weird, cause everyone else in my guild insists that other projectile absorptions and reflects don’t work against those projectiles. Guess I might have to get on my thief and try to see how smoke screen works in comparison.

Many of them used to, but don’t anymore. I am entirely certain that CPC blocking the normally unblockable projectiles is unintended and will be fixed in the next bug fix round. It is not critical enough that it will get hotfixed, though.

That said, I love the new CPC a lot. I wish the special effect would be updated to look like the Toxic Alliance krait AOE field, but that can happen later. Functionally it’s great right now.

The only thing I absolutely hate is the self-weakness. Seriously, any other condition, but weakness is crippling to DPS and has to be cleansed immediately or you cannot even capitalize on the projectile destruction.

Should poison. ALso, taking it with master of corrupting cripples you litterally. Which is just worse.

It was further invalidate curses which isn’t a good thing. I’m already finding plenty of reasons never to run curses as it is. I don’t need this extra push. Also, it would be strict better than comparable traits on other professions.

Also, close to death is already extremely powerful. It doesn’t need to be more powerful.

Shiki.7148:

Lily.1935:

So I just want to gush over this skill for a bit because the changes they’ve made to it have been just… OMG! Everything about the changes to this skill just makes the nerdy fan girl in my squee so hard!

Talk about missing utility that we really needed. I am super happy that arena net took this suggestion and rolled with it. (now if only they’d also roll with my death’s charge projectile destruction suggestion as well) But by Grenth this is an awesome skill. Its basically your swiss army knife of Corruptions. Its fantastic. It slices, it dices, it will even cook you a sandwich and walk your dog. Well maybe not, but still! its awesome none the less.

The poison duration and changes to how it stacks is just great. I could get about 8 stacks from this while before I couldn’t get past 3 unless I was going heavy into poison duration. It also hinders foes trying to attack you in melee, causing weakness which is just icing. And foes can’t even snipe you for the duration which makes it hit both melee and ranged rather well. Oh! did I mention its ground targeted? Yeah, because that’s a thing. I can drop this on an ally who’s surrounded and hinder the melee foes and stop the ranged foes from killing them, giving me time to save them. Or just put up my death bubble around my foe. If I have 2 necromancers in a party with a chronomancer with alacrity sharing we can straight up invalidate fire shaman’s attacks with almost perfect cloud up time. oh, the lava elementals are giving us a problem? NOPE! Poison clouds everywhere!

Thank you arena net for taking mine and other’s suggestion to make this a projectile block. I will use it to great effect.

I don’t know your exact suggestion, but Deaths Charge does destroy projectiles as of last BWE.

They did! I must have missed that. OMG! that’s awesome

So I just want to gush over this skill for a bit because the changes they’ve made to it have been just… OMG! Everything about the changes to this skill just makes the nerdy fan girl in my squee so hard!

Talk about missing utility that we really needed. I am super happy that arena net took this suggestion and rolled with it. (now if only they’d also roll with my death’s charge projectile destruction suggestion as well) But by Grenth this is an awesome skill. Its basically your swiss army knife of Corruptions. Its fantastic. It slices, it dices, it will even cook you a sandwich and walk your dog. Well maybe not, but still! its awesome none the less.

The poison duration and changes to how it stacks is just great. I could get about 8 stacks from this while before I couldn’t get past 3 unless I was going heavy into poison duration. It also hinders foes trying to attack you in melee, causing weakness which is just icing. And foes can’t even snipe you for the duration which makes it hit both melee and ranged rather well. Oh! did I mention its ground targeted? Yeah, because that’s a thing. I can drop this on an ally who’s surrounded and hinder the melee foes and stop the ranged foes from killing them, giving me time to save them. Or just put up my death bubble around my foe. If I have 2 necromancers in a party with a chronomancer with alacrity sharing we can straight up invalidate fire shaman’s attacks with almost perfect cloud up time. oh, the lava elementals are giving us a problem? NOPE! Poison clouds everywhere!

Thank you arena net for taking mine and other’s suggestion to make this a projectile block. I will use it to great effect.

Bhawb.7408:

What do you mean any more? We have no meaningful finishers on anything except minions right now. I’m not saying we should just Oprah-style give them to every ability, but we 100% need finishers sprinkled into our skills.

I’m not saying we don’t need more finishers. just blast finishers. Currently the primary reason that I’ve seen why people want blast finishers is because of pre-buffing in PvE. And the necromancer can already give a group half its might through blast finishers and bip. Adding a blast finisher does bring us up to 23 might for our group pre-buffing but this is a part of the zerker meta which arena net has gone on record in saying that they don’t want it to be a thing anymore(though i’ll admit I’m skeptical on how they’ll actually achieve this goal in the majority of Tyria). And if this happens this means that blast finishers that can function at range will have more value for group support than a melee range blast finish like what the axe would give us. Which would still mean that the axe would still be invalidated by staff. And this isn’t entirely because a melee blast finisher is a bad thing. The engineer’s shield blast finisher is great in combat, but the engineer has far more mobility than we do and can utilize it to a greater effect.

Yes, I do want to see more finishers. Whirl and projectile finishers to be honest. Or even a new type of finisher that arena net hasn’t implemented into the game that could have interesting synergies with our existing abilities.

I just can’t see a situation where this would be better for the necromancer than the staff in any situation outside of pre-buffing. Maybe I’m missing something, but as far as I can see this doesn’t become useful to us without piggy backing on someone else’s fire/water fields which the professions that have them tend to bring several blasts of their own anyway.

Lastly I do want to clarify something else. I do think the necromancer should eventually get more blast finishers on a future elite specialization.

Play with it a bit more before judging it too harshly. I was skeptical at first, but after playing with it with the extra bleed on auto, the duration increase on skill 2 and the torment it feels fantastic.

Although I still feel curses is a terrible trait line and I’m looking into ways to not run it on my condi builds. Scepter? Scepter is cool though.

Jelzouki.4128:

I always dislike your feedback.

That’s nice.

Bhawb.7408:

Basically this patch was just

1. Bug fixes, which are always nice, though I’m sad they didn’t fix Blood Bond’s healing through shroud if they were going to touch it.
2. Scepter buffs, which are really nice
3. Axe buffs, which make axe a bit nicer but the Unholy Feast buffs were in the wrong direction (needs to blast), the 1 skill needs animation changes, and the 2 skill needs damage buffs
4. CPC buffs, which are really cool

Overall an okay patch for us. The D/D nerfs are bigger than anything, though Scepter buffs should help out condi a lot. All around steps in the right direction.

enough with the blast finishers… We don’t need them! Or any more I should say.

silvermember.8941:

Lily.1935:

the axe’s problem was never its range. It was its lack of useful abilities that hindered it. Even with 900 range on the first two attacks unholy feast is still 600 range. Arguably its most useful skills is still stuck in that range and this also causes another problem since the axe can’t keep people from running away from you when they’re beyond that 600 range. So, in my opinion the range buff was absolutely pointless.

I still see no reason to take this over the staff. Even with its vulnerability and boon corruption it wasn’t very good and you couldn’t justify taking it.

If I was to make some changes I’d play more into that corruption theme and probably have its damage scale up the closer you are to foes as opposed to the further away you are.

Actually, range was also a problem. I hope you do realize they can be more than 1 problem with a weapon.

The axe has a niche and that niche is are bosses like taco that makes being in range a problem. It might not be the best weapon we have, but it is an improvement and it can be improved.

Being overly melodramatic does not get results.

life blast does about the same damage at 1,200 range as axe does. It wasn’t a problem. We honestly didn’t need another long ranged weapon and the range was never a problem because of how death shroud functioned. And we always had access to death shroud so no, I have to disagree. It wasn’t a problem.

Robert Gee.9246:

One of the reasons we are more conservative about axe when it comes to balance is because axe uses a unique attack action in our game that cannot be avoided using positioning. Normal melee attacks have an attack arc and normal ranged attacks use projectiles. Enemy players can use positioning and movement to avoid these attacks. Axe 1 and 2 by contrast just hit you when you are in range regardless of your positioning. While some utility skills (like Corrupt Boon) also use this targeting method, it’s rare on weapon skills and thus we are wary of buffing it too much.

As for the animation on axe 1, it was changed because of an exploit with cancel casting that allowed players to get significantly more damage from the skill by continually canceling it. At the time I tried to just adjust the original animation so we could keep it but due to its construction that ended up not being feasible. The resulting animation looked extremely choppy and didn’t sync well across races. You are always welcome to make suggestions on alternate animations you’d like to see, but going back to the original animation at this point is extremely unlikely.

I feel that changing the skill one to a chain skill could actually fix this animation issue and the canceling issue. We never had that problem with Scepter. And scepter is in that same boat that its not a projectile auto attack. And isn’t the Mesmer’s greatsword the same as well? At least in the past when I used it it wasn’t blocked by reflects or projectile destruction you just needed line of sight. Like you do the axe. The only difference I see between them is that one makes a purple beam that you can see. But in theory you should be able to use the same tactics to avoid the axe attacks.

The axe had allot of issues before the animation was changed and it wasn’t a favored weapon before. The animation change just sorta made people snap because it was already such a neglected weapon with nothing notable to really talk about. Scepter was condition, staff was substantial control, dagger was amazing in melee, warhorn has great life force and control, off hand dagger has conditions, focus removed boons. It just sorta sat there in this weird limbo where it wasn’t doing anything remarkably well.

So these changes have just felt lack luster to be perfectly honest about it. I know you guys are doing your best and working your hardest to make the necromancer lots of fun and fixing many of their issues. And I applaud that. Corrosive poison cloud has gone from being one of the necromancer’s worst skills to probably one of the most powerful projectile blocks in the game. Scepter feels allot better to run now thanks to that added torment. My lich form or plague not destroying my minions is great. And I’m loving all those changes.

However, back to the Axe, it really isn’t a weapon that can be given a quick fix and be expected to preform well when compared to other weapons like staff or scepter. I feel that the entire philosophy of the weapon needs to be reviewed.

the axe’s problem was never its range. It was its lack of useful abilities that hindered it. Even with 900 range on the first two attacks unholy feast is still 600 range. Arguably its most useful skills is still stuck in that range and this also causes another problem since the axe can’t keep people from running away from you when they’re beyond that 600 range. So, in my opinion the range buff was absolutely pointless.

I still see no reason to take this over the staff. Even with its vulnerability and boon corruption it wasn’t very good and you couldn’t justify taking it.

If I was to make some changes I’d play more into that corruption theme and probably have its damage scale up the closer you are to foes as opposed to the further away you are.

I just… Really? Even with axe still being a worse weapon than staff I would have used it but the animation still kills it for me. I don’t want to make my enemies feel uncomfortable to death. I’m really tired of the paddling animation and its what made me stop using it in the first place.

is that it? No mention of the horrible axe animation? No reason to take the axe over staff? No curses fix? No soul reaping fix to reduce our dependency on it? No well of darkness fix? Nothing for healing in death shroud? Nothing about utility in death shroud?

meow one twenty.4376:

Lily.1935:

I really hope they fix curses. One useful minor, 3 competing masters, 1 useless grandmaster and another underwhelming grandmaster that seems out of place, an extremely weak minor that would be extremely powerful on any other profession but necromancer. cough barbed precision cough

And how many alternative methods of increasing Crit chance/Vuln do we need?? Target the Weak, Death Perception, Decimate Defenses and Chilling Darkness, Bitter Chill, Rending Shroud (, and I’m counting Axe auto because it is worthless besides the Vuln). Eventually these thing start being redundant and taking away from what could be potentially good options because they have capacity limits. We have no way of really benefiting from the max Precision because of the cap limit and no Power/Ferocity/Condi armor to turn our traits into fully offensive benefits.

Also, Lily I have disagreed with you on things, but I realize I haven’t shown how much I agree with you on other things. Keep up the good comments.

I’m being sassy. But yeah, I’d be scared if you agreed with me on everything. I have a few rather unpopular opinions. Though when talking about skill balance I’m usually in line with most people or not too far off.

And actually I made a comment about giving grasping dead chill instead of crippling. I thought I was reaching and that’d be too much. but apparently people agree with me. I think 3-4 seconds of chill wouldn’t be too bad on that skill. Would make it rather frightening with condi reaper. Which I’m so running because I love condi.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lily.1935:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lily.1935:

I’m going to go in the reverse direction. You see, giving allies buffs in any form like this would be uncharacteristic of us. how ever. How about this.

Give necromancer a debuff that makes foes incapable of blocking. Like on well of darkness.

Already been suggested in the thread

fair enough. Still some well of darkness use would be nice.

Well of Darkness does need something else, for sure. This could thematically work out, actually, as it’s too dark for them to see attacks coming to properly block them.

Could pulse a 1 second debuff that prevents blocking from working.

thats what I was thinking. Give it some counter play to it so people could leave the field and prevent themselves from being destroyed. Also the chill on blind could make it harder to leave improving it further. But its still iffy even with that trait. I could see major use for something like that in a few areas of the game, like against Dulfy in the charr fractal, the Dredge champion before the main boss, Fire shaman.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lily.1935:

I’m going to go in the reverse direction. You see, giving allies buffs in any form like this would be uncharacteristic of us. how ever. How about this.

Give necromancer a debuff that makes foes incapable of blocking. Like on well of darkness.

Already been suggested in the thread

fair enough. Still some well of darkness use would be nice.

I’m going to go in the reverse direction. You see, giving allies buffs in any form like this would be uncharacteristic of us. how ever. How about this.

Give necromancer a debuff that makes foes incapable of blocking. Like on well of darkness.

I really hope they fix curses. One useful minor, 3 competing masters, 1 useless grandmaster and another underwhelming grandmaster that seems out of place, an extremely weak minor that would be extremely powerful on any other profession but necromancer. cough barbed precision cough

Dead.5829:

Lily.1935:

Interestingly, the reaper’s scythe auto has higher DPS than life blast. At least its supposed to. Which is actually a frightening thought.

I think you mean the best thought >:)

Oh, its frightening. Since its damage is back loaded too. And the final swing of the scythe hits 5 targets. Making it the strongest cleave in the game. Yeah… think about that. Than add reaper’s onslaught. Than add 100% crit chance… than add might+vuln per attack… Oh dear, that scythe is going to rip people to shreds.

Actually. It already does. I’ve played it in the beta and its awesome. Not as strong as gravedigger but gravedigger is the ultimate executioner ability.

nekretaal.6485:

Power.

Condition necromancer will not be a thing.

None of the conditions that the necromancer/reaper has scale well. This means that additional stats from gear don’t really help you.

(Unless they do something unexpected like turn the greatsword trait from a lifesteal trait to a condition trait).

& before anybody says “but dhuumfire…” understand that reaper RS uptime is tiny because of all of the extra damage that you are face tanking. Dhuumfire is still a bad trait.

I wouldn’t count your chickens just yet. Considering the Husks that show up in silverwastes and you can bet there will be elite husk type enemies in raids. one or two condi users might be necessary to taking those things out. Much like in Triple trouble. And if their is a high enough number epidemic might become an extremely handy tool that could be demanded.

I say that a condi necro could be a thing. Which we’ll have to wait and see with this upcoming patch.

Dead.5829:

Lily.1935:

life blast is slow. Life blast’s damage is absolutely insane. it hits like a truck and keeps hitting again and again getting stronger and stronger each time it does thanks to spite. But because of this it tends to be a slow but strong projectile

If only the successive cast time was actually 1s for each blast. :’( That aftercast is a killer to the dps.

you can get about 2.5 life blasts off in the time it takes a warrior to use 100b as long as you’re on top of things. Its cast time really doesn’t cripple it all too much. It does when you’re trying to track close targets though. It has its uses.

Interestingly, the reaper’s scythe auto has higher DPS than life blast. At least its supposed to. Which is actually a frightening thought.

Pelopidas.2140:

Also @Lily while i agree with most of your points, using focus4 and wells is a pretty good burst i think.

The focus’s burst becomes less effective in a group with multiple foes because it has four bounces and last I checked it checked for 4 targets flat, regardless if they’re allies or foes. I don’t think their burst is bad, its just slow when compared to other professions. Wells are great. I use power wells all the time.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Pelopidas.2140:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

All this posturing, kitten measuring and damage showing gets us what exactly?

Even if we are less behind the other classes dps than people think what does this gain us? We have no group utility and our damage is still behind, even if it isn’t REALLY far behind. None of this makes a group want to take a necro.

The best we can hope for is, we aren’t the worst by 100% we are only the worst by 10%, see guys, you should take us!

This doesn’t seem like something we should be celebrating to me.

(Hopefully the damage pressure in raids make us more valuable for needing less healing, keeping up dps pressure, and self buffing in chaotic phases)

It is true though that there are scrub players out there who hate on the class. So i dont find anything wrong showing these people that we dont suck like they think. I really dislike not seeing a meta necro build in metabattle, and im sure the devs have decided against buffing necromancer dps for reasons random whiners in forums don’t know (including me). And this has been discussed to death, its not the damage, its the content that doesnt fit our support options, which are also a bit lacking…(soft cc like chill-cripple, fear blinds, lots of vuln.)

Also @Lily while i agree with most of your points, using focus4 and wells is a pretty good burst i think.

@ZudetGambeous – Inb4ModBan: 80% of your comments are about how useless necro is, how he sucks at everything etc (remember when you were saying condi necro does like 3k dps…). And the funny thing is your trash talk gets corrected everytime yet you keep your kittenposting.

If the best you can do is reference my dps calculation from before the condition damage changes then I’m not too worried lol. I’ve yet to be corrected on anything, everything i’ve said is or was at the time true.

Except before the condi damage changes the necromancer’s condi DPS was higher than 3k then as well… So.. You being wrong now makes you less wrong then??? 3k is just from the bleeds. This didn’t include the burning, your base damage, the poison, torment and terror. I’m not saying the condi rotation before was fantastic. But it’s average was closer to 5 or 6k in sinisters.

Hexalot.8194:

Holl.3109:

Full valkyrie is quite bad for pvp/wvw since you rely on traits for ctit% soooo much.
For PvE it doesn’t really matter…

With upcoming Reaper being able to stack crit based on vuln on enemy (and this is outside of shroud), I think valks will indeed be a valid alternative for Necros.

the issue isn’t valkyrie’s lack of precision or the reliance on traits. Its its lack of recovery that hurts it. Any heal you want to use, any heal used on you is less effective because of your high health pool. Compared to a similar set with toughness rather than vitality, the toughness set has easier recovery. Now, Vitality does scale with both power and condition damage while toughness only scales with power. However, when trying to recover high vitality compared to high toughness, vitality has a much harder time recovering than toughness. And since condition damage isn’t very common in PvE, the extra health is really more a hindrance.

Also, I’ve been testing full valkyrie in the beta weekends. It still has greater survivability than berserker or sinister. But its weaknesses make me suggest mixing it with cavalier so recovery isn’t so kitten you. or you could mix it with clerics if you don’t care about the crit loss.

Rym.1469:

These suggestions are for current PvE content, which is basically Patchwerk-like style of beating a training dummy . Nobody knows how PvE raid content will look like in HoT yet.

That’s said, you can always re-forge your ascended set to other stats if needed.

I wasn’t making a suggestion. I was just talking about the damage comparison. Truthfully I wouldn’t run sinister or Berserker all too often in HoT. If I was to make a suggestion I’d actually suggest NOT running full Valkyrie. Although its better than berserker/sinister for survival its absolutely horrible for recovery.

At the moment I’m looking into running a Valkyrie+cavalier hybrid for that content. Though I’d prefer a primary power, toughness, ferocity set over Valkyrie and cavalier, its not currently available to us.

Norjena.5172:

Support will not be changed, only our dmg can get a change.

So forget Nemesis and all the self proclaiming videos he made.

He told us so much wrong stuff in the past. I can´t even imaging why he has still so many “fanboys”.
His Guardianguide was fail, his hybridbuild was not “the best dps” hybrid, his rotation was fail, his “dps necromancer” guide was complelty fail. He told us “axe is the best dps weapon”. Just to give u a few examples.

Yes all them are old, but thats things he tried to tell us.

Things he tried to sell us as fact. Even if we all know that they are not true.

The Meta is not the necromancers problem, the necromancer itself is the problem in pve.

Liliys opinion is the same.

We will never get a complete class overhaul to be a second mesmer.

And the AI was never the problem, and not the reason why necros are so bad for pve.

And exploits aren´t used these days. Even most pugs don´t stack in corners anymore, and even if they don´t use icebows they don´t want necros for a reason.

Be sure, raidbosses will be everything u want, everything u think that necros will be great for. And we will not rly get a place, remember this when HoT comes out.

The only thing we probably can change is anets view. We can hope that we will get a pve dps buff. And a few small tweeks.

And people only ever listen to half of what you have to say. Also. The hell they don’t. I was just in a fractal the other day where we had people INSIST on stacking in a corner. On a level 5 fractal no less. A LEVEL 5! And he said “You’ll do this all the time when you get to higher levels.” Which I basically told him I run 50s and never resort to that.

Also my “opinion” is shared with allot of people and you can’t dismiss it just because you don’t agree with it. You’ll have to prove it wrong if you want to do that. And its not wrong, everything I’ve said is true and remains true to this day.

To get a better understanding as to why people don’t want the necromancer, Most people actually DON’T know why. They just assume that “damage” is the reason and it never has been.

I also never said “necros need a complete class overhaul” I was comparing two situations where people assume the damage of something is bad but take it anyway for its utility. I don’t want necros to be a second mesmer or anything ridiculous like that. Stacking in a corner is exploiting. People still do it all the time and guides will tell you to do so.

And I never said the meta was the problem either. The devs did! I didn’t. But then again, what do they know. They only made the game, its not like they know anything about it. And by the way, that was sarcasm! In case you can’t catch that since you only like to listen to half of what people say.

Damage isn’t the necromancer’s problem People claim the damage of the mesmer is extremely low as well however they get into groups. The issue was never with the necromancer’s damage but their utility. Which the reaper actually provides through how reliable their vuln stacking is and how long their stacks last. Blood is power is cute, but its not phalanx. Corrosive poison cloud will be great, but its not wall of reflection or feedback. Vampiric aura is nice but it doesn’t really compare to banners. Transfusion is great but its not Battle Standard.

You have allot of situations where the necromancer is just being out classed while trying to provide the same type of support. And thats the issue. It never was damage. And it never will be damage. The necromancer has rather high damage. The issue with their damage has been a few things and I’ll list them for you to help you understand.

1. Many of their damaging skills create dark fields. Players don’t like having dark fields around because they might blast on the wrong field negating their might stacking while they’re sitting in a corner.
2. Dagger hits very few targets. The dagger only strikes 2 targets with the auto. The auto attack’s damage is quite sizable, but it struggles when trying to cleave down the foes while you’re stacking in a corner which makes even the mesmer’s sword more useful in that situation.
3. Necromancers have poor burst DPS. Although their sustained damage is extremely good, actually getting stronger as the fight goes longer, this isn’t wanted in groups who can just disable the boss for 5 seconds and have it dead with exploits before it even knew what happened.
4. Life blast doesn’t cleave. Another problem for your corner stacking. The necromancer’s life blast can pierce but not cleave. this makes it less valuable in corner stacking.
5. life blast is slow. Life blast’s damage is absolutely insane. it hits like a truck and keeps hitting again and again getting stronger and stronger each time it does thanks to spite. But because of this it tends to be a slow but strong projectile. While other people are doing 2-3 attacks in that same time and cleaving down the foes while you’ve maybe only got off a few blasts because you’re stacked in a corner.
6. People stack in corners. A lot of people like to pull mobs and stack in a corner, cleaving them down as quickly as possible before reacting. The necromancer isn’t favored in this situation because of their poor cleaving weapons. Although there is nothing wrong with the dagger as it is, it just doesn’t hit 5 targets…

Basically, get out of the corner and actually fight. I’ve run dungeons and fractals both ways and it is a million times more rewarding to fight the boss as they intended it and not exploiting bad AI…

I used both berserker and Sinister in the beta. A theoretical power/ferocity/condition damage might not be the best for damage though since you can’t stick in reaper’s shroud 100% of the time. And to get that 100% crit chance means you pretty much have to run Spite and soul reaping. Of course if you have allies applying the vuln for you than you can run something else like curses.

Now as for which does more? Thats very difficult to say actually. Its not as clear cut as people think it is. While testing both I was killing foes just as quickly with condi as I was power.

Although I will mention that Valkyrie vs Sinister, sinister is by far much stronger DPS than Valkyrie. Its about that DPS up time and Valkyrie loses allot of damage when out of reaper’s shroud

Compared to Berserker? its a bit harder to tell. I think berserker slightly wins out but only at the beginning. Once you get to the midfight the sinister build seems to scale much higher.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Nemesis: “Necromancer is not lacking in damage”
Engineer does it 2 minutes faster.

That literally means that in this case the Engineer is doing roughly 50% more average DPS than the Necromancer in an identical scenario. If that isn’t telling about the current state of the Necromancer I don’t know what is.

He also mentioned that a profession like necromancer who’s attack more frequently require a target prevents him from having 100% DPS up time while the engineer can sustain their DPS up time because of their lack of a target requirement keeping their DPS up time even when mossman was in stealth. Which he’s not wrong.

Zenith.7301:

Lily.1935:

Zenith.7301:

I’d rather not have the flavor of displacing my foes off my well bombing let alone spreading mobs after the guardian/mesmer just pulled them together.

If anything I hate necromancers who use staff 5 right as I dropped my well of suffering and corruption in PvE >:(

I would say give Wail of Doom a blast finisher and a chill on top of its effect. Make Locust Swarm groupwide.

Chilling wail of doom would be awesome. But no group locus swarm. You think people hate necromancer’s now, wait till no one can stealth past mobs in dungeons thanks to trolly necromancers.

Why would you use Locust Swarm during a skip? And if they do to troll, you can troll already by just running ahead before the group.

The end solution is the same for all. Kick them.

Locust Swarm for the group would be great utility. Groupwide leeching procs and cripple for area denial, it would actually add appreciable DPS to the group for a single skill, and it’s a group peel tool by allowing your allies to peel foes off themselves or chase better.

Necromancers are in great need of more ally support, and Locust Swarm would be a great place to start.

its a cool idea, but not as its base. A trait that does it would be nicer. But again it might just cause more problems than help. Unless it only puts you in combat and not allies. I could see issues with stealth ressing unintentionally as well so it doesn’t work too well with specific groups.

Zenith.7301:

I’d rather not have the flavor of displacing my foes off my well bombing let alone spreading mobs after the guardian/mesmer just pulled them together.

If anything I hate necromancers who use staff 5 right as I dropped my well of suffering and corruption in PvE >:(

I would say give Wail of Doom a blast finisher and a chill on top of its effect. Make Locust Swarm groupwide.

Chilling wail of doom would be awesome. But no group locus swarm. You think people hate necromancer’s now, wait till no one can stealth past mobs in dungeons thanks to trolly necromancers.

Bhawb.7408:

Lily.1935:

But its so boring and not even remotely flavorful.

While I agree it is a pretty boring skill overall, Fear is the weakest of the hard CCs. It has all the counterplay of a condition, on top of all the counterplay of a hard CC, and also displaces enemies which isn’t always wanted. I quite like the Daze (other “screams” in the game use daze) as is, the only real thing I’d ever add is a blast finisher, because finishers make things have more play outside their single use.

Yeah, a blast finisher would be nice. However fear has synergy with other traits, as such as terror, master of terror and Shivers of Dread for reaper. With the Locus swarm’s crippling it also prevents them from going too far, if at all. It would also have its own synergy with banshee’s wail which would further augment its duration making it one the the longest fears in the game. You could send people extremely far from points or get foes off enemies. If HoT gives us what it promises with raids fear should have a solid use comparable to knock backs.

I understand your concern with it and I’m fully aware of it. I also understand that fear doesn’t have enough play on our profession at the moment and another source would be nice. Warhorn has been one of the many disappointments for me when I first started the game. Not only did wail of doom not apply confusion like they said it would it didn’t even apply fear. Thus lowering its synergy even further. If we had something that cared about dazes I might be more inclined to like the skill.

I still use warhorn, don’t get me wrong. Its one of our best weapons. I just kinda wish it had more play to it.

Bhawb.7408:

spoj.9672:

Lily.1935:

Also. while I’m at it. Wail of doom. Can we get the alpha version of this skill? Were it feared instead of dazed?

No thank you.

Same.

But its so boring and not even remotely flavorful.

Bhawb.7408:

Chill would be a nice upgrade, as it is now the skill isn’t much to mention except to add a few bleeds.

Might even make that 50% duration from Lingering curse actually worth while. As it is now, I couldn’t care less about that trait. And this is coming from one of the forums token condimancers.

Also. while I’m at it. Wail of doom. Can we get the alpha version of this skill? Were it feared instead of dazed?

Hey can you change Grasping dead’s crippling to chill? That’d be great, thanks.

Nyth.3492:

I really think some people underestimate how big of a buff it is to be able to use axe from 900 range instead of 600 range.
Many dismiss it as something that is pointless, but it’s one of the major things that we asked for in the “axe discussion” thread that has been around.

I’m assuming that these are just a few of the things we’ll be seeing. But axe range increase puts axe back from a semi-melee weapon into finally having a ranged power weapon.
Also with range being 900 range it gives it a reason to not have as much dps as dagger or upcoming greatsword. Not that it doesn’t need buffs (god we all know it will need to have damage buffs on TOP of this), but at least it will stop competing with 2 other weapons the necro has/will get access to.

Why should I take axe over the staff? In any situation. 900 range isn’t anywhere near enough to justify this weapon over a staff. Staff is the necromancer’s best weapon and axe was already losing an uphill battle with the staff and even scepter as it was. At 900 range is barely beats out scepter for power although scepter’s previous version I’d still take over the axe with 900 range for power, and can’t come close to touching the staff. Staff is just so much better at the moment and axe doesn’t fill a real niche that can’t be done far better elsewhere.

Pst. Arena net. Lingering curse is currently a bad trait and I don’t take it with 100% duration and people have suggested dropping it down to master with the full 100% duration with how bad it was. And it still wouldn’t be taken. Adding a bit of torment doesn’t make this trait suddenly good. If you gave us a flat 50% to all outgoing conditions its great. But since its just a nerf to a bad trait in a horrible trait line I’m still just going to take Withering shroud in all game modes.

sigh

I really just want back that flat 30% condition duration I lost from the transition to the mastery system.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

The change in lingering curse only decrease condi necro’s bleed by 30-15% tbh, since the same traitline already increase bleed duration by 20% and condi necro generally run nightmare for 15% condi duration and fear damage. Even more negligible in WvW/PvE situations due to food but power dominated there anyway.

I’m not a fan of increasing reliance on food. The duration of conditions on scepter was already rather poor. And a double decrease seems really bad when the condi build really needed a flat 30% duration increase to everything.

My concern is that we already have a lack luster trait in Lingering curse that gave 100% duration with 150 condi damage that it was still better for you to take Weakening Shroud. Is this a flat 50% boost to all outgoing conditions? or just scepter. Because we need the former. I’d be okay with just 30% from the former, but seriously. Necros need a flat condition duration to all outgoing conditions for their traits.

Bhawb.7408:

Lily.1935:

You also need to remember my suggestion to have utility skills have a life force cost to be activated while in shroud. Which could balance them as well as provide new utility options as well as let us share a common rune that triggers on resource spending with revenant or thief.

That alone is a huge set of changes to the mechanic overall which will require massive balancing. It is just too much to reasonably expect any time soon.

Death shroud is due for a technical overhaul anyway. Especially if you’ve notice lately the bug that locks you in place when you transform. Noticed it heavily in the beta but since then I’ve noticed it on basic death shroud and also transforms from other professions.

Andlat Helsonr.1284:

Lily.1935:

Andlat Helsonr.1284:

Their mechanic is much more similar to the Berserk mode of warrior than to Death Shroud.

No it isn’t. Berserk doesn’t change your weapon skills.

Well, true. It only changes one of your skills depending on your weapon set.

This one has an engineer kit attached to it, but both lack the bonus damage soaking functionality, which is one of the most important mechanics DS brings to the table.

its a transform that builds on healing and attacking. The reverse of necromancer’s shroud which builds on death and skills. Death vs Life. its the reverse death shroud.

SlyDevil.3952:

Plenty of people read the rotations on meta battle and can memorize them, the people killing bosses in 11-14secs in dungeons are the ones able to perform those rotations consistently regardless of the circumstances. It is a much higher skill ceiling than you imagine it to be. There’s a reason pug groups with meta builds can’t phase the 2nd archdiviner in ~12 seconds, and it’s not just the lack of communication.

I can type really well. I memorized were all the buttons are. I can do It without looking at it at all. Its a skill I have but not a very impressive skill at all. A chimpanzee can do the exact same thing. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that a chimpanzee would be better at the rotation than the top players of GW2 if it was trained. I’d put money on that.

Andlat Helsonr.1284:

Their mechanic is much more similar to the Berserk mode of warrior than to Death Shroud.

No it isn’t. Berserk doesn’t change your weapon skills.

I was hoping for the Dungeons and dragons aspect of the druid. more along those lines who had 3 specific types of play style. Shapeshiftery brawler type, group healer/support, and beastcaller(summonerish). We get one of three and I have to say I’m rather underwhelmed. No utility to support pets aside from one trait but it doesn’t give any incentive to run underused pets. Nothing along those lines at all.

I disagree. That is all.

Bhawb.7408:

I think it’d be too much work to do at this point. I was a much bigger fan of this concept back when we were really weak, because mechanically I think this is a really good idea. But at this point we are getting to a point of being strong (at least in PvP/WvW, PvE we’re weak for reasons that wouldn’t be touched by this), and this would put us over the top. Death Shroud currently allows for massive stalling in some situations, and if you were able to not only stall but completely reset fights through things like SoL/Healing skill use, it would be too strong.

That means that DS/RS and all of our utilities would have to be rebalanced to allow this, and I think that’s too much right now. However, seeing the CDs should be done. No one else has to hide their utility CDs like we do.

Not all of our utility would have to be re-balanced. Just spectral skills really. Heals I don’t think should heal. Perhaps recover life force maybe? But you should still be able to sue them. Which could be useful for all of our currently heals in one way or another. Still getting the on hit effect from SoV could make it a really strong heal. Too strong? I’d like to see that first.

You also need to remember my suggestion to have utility skills have a life force cost to be activated while in shroud. Which could balance them as well as provide new utility options as well as let us share a common rune that triggers on resource spending with revenant or thief.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Zalavaaris.5329:

Sustained dps is 20 seconds? Rofl no wonder my raiding friends didn’t want to come play this game, that’s embarassing. I wonder what burst dps is, 2 seconds? Lol

It is measured at 20s because that is the longest CD. You could measure it over any amount of time you want, but it will always come down to what your longest CD is on a standard rotation.

But yes in the current metagame, bosses live from 2-25 seconds before dying. The problem is there is a very high skill ceiling in this game. Low skill groups still fail many of these dungeons, average skill groups take 3-4 minutes to kill a boss, and high skill groups can kill the same boss in 11 seconds or so. Many people are hoping that raids are different.

I wouldn’t call a group capable of killing the boss in 11-25 seconds high skilled. At that point its just memorizing the rotation. Something a chimpanzee could easily do. Heck you could probably teach a parrot to kill a boss in that time if you really wanted to.

I don’t mean to be rude. However a truly skilled player could adjust to a situation on the fly. Something that such a short burst doesn’t allow. I’d say a group that takes 3-4 minutes to kill the boss but succeeds without anyone going down is far more skilled than the 20 second group.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Lily.1935:

SlyDevil.3952:

Ehm, you need to check your meta build. MS cd is 20secs, you could call it a 21 sec rotation if you wanted to add that you lava font before the meteor shower. Sustained damage doesn’t have this mysterious 30second threshold, it just means it’s a repeatable rotation for all skills included. A burst ele rotation can include lightning storm, dragon’s tooth, lava font, pheonix/burning speed, meteor shower, ice storm, frost fan, deep freeze for tempest defense, eruption, ice spike, fiery whirl, fire storm, fireballs. The sustained rotation is just lava font, fireballs, MS.

Burst is dps, they aren’t 2 separate entities, you just have a shorter interval over which you’re calculating the damage.

Edit: Forgot to include attunement swapping in the burst possibilities, extra 20% multiplier during ice spike, ice storm and parts of lightning storm/MS/lava font depending on which element you start your rotation in.

Wow, the wiki is very wrong.. Oh well no biggy. Also meta battle doesn’t account for everything. It doesn’t even seem to have appropriate builds for people in PvE outside of prebuffing teams. Which is designed around burst.

And let me clarify. When I’m talking about DPS I’m talking about Sustaind DPS, not Burst DPS. Just to clear up the confusion. I know its my fault, I should have been more clear.

I think you might be forgetting that the Ele build traits for shorter fire attunement cooldowns which, being a 33% reduction, means that Meteor Shower is on a 20 second cooldown.

Maybe. I don’t remember all the ele’s traits.