Guild Wars 2

I agree with a mai trin rework along with a bugfix. On one hand, the relog bug means no one even tries to learn the fight because of the relog bug (its very possible to res people in off cannon phases) buf the wayfight is a mess of conflicting design decisions that make it frankly stupid in multiple ways, then throw in some buggy behavior and its so bleh.

Lets hope that some fixes made it into the fractal 100 updates

Add damage meters to squads!

From what I understand. Free players will be required to buy HOT to continue playing once it is released.

Windsagio.1340:

Jerus.4350:

Windsagio.1340:

We can’t have DPS meters without a change of player mindset. Meters are ultimately far more of a cause of conflict than they are an efficiency tool.

Anet knows this, and they don’t want the pain — and they probably don’t want us playing to the spreadsheet anyways (knowing that some people certainly enjoy that).

It’s a huge potential CS problem for a tool that a small % of the population will use and an even smaller % will use right.

As dlonie, you’re letting the terrorists win. Shun those drama queens if they try to create an issue due to stats being shown. It’s really quite easy. My friends list is full of people who wouldn’t be like that.

I admire your optimism :p Been around the block enough times to know how meters are used when released into the wild.

More importantly, PHIW rhetoric aside, Arenanet doesn’t want us playing that way. They don’t want us absolutely optimizing, and they certainly don’t want us excluding players based on a spreadsheet.

And again, I want to stress, most people will misuse a meter, even a detailed one like you’re requesting — and people in harder contexts will be the worst.

People already play this way on bad data! People get excluded based on dated perceptions. You make baseless generalizations of the player pop. I dont look forward to wiping on enrages with a “good” comp and having no idea why. I already saw this happening last week. What can a raid leader do then? Bash their head until they quit?

As long as dps is comparable and the trade offs seem reasonable, I dont foresee many players getting excluded from reasonable people. I just want to better myself as a player and prove that my non-meta builds are viable and mayve even superior. Right now I just have conjecture.

I dont expect enrage timers to be so strict that everyone will need to play 100% most optimal builds, and the variety of utilities required even just for vale guardian mean for many comps you will be required to take suboptimal traits, weapons or utilities to meet those needs. Whats also an important distinction about gw2 from something like wow is the ability to swap on the fly at any time out of combat. It would often require additional sets of gear but that increases the value of something like legendary equips. Although I know it would result in some elitism, it would result in better players overall. You could figure out what does and doesnt work in a spec easier. We’re in this weird purgatory right now that I hate. The QT dps tool needs enhancements, it doesnt snapshot often or large enough (8 lines of the log every second I think? ), and others are questionable if theyre allowed. Its a really kittenty place to be. I dont expect gw2 to get to wow levels of “you can only be x spec and your only rotation is y”, because of everything else needed in raids

Toxicity exists regardless. It sucks because the meta isnt well supported with data.

Yes yes yes. Class elitism exists anyways, without good data to support it. Peoples biases stick with them for years despite myriad changes.

There are a lot of features that would be helpful in accounting for utility, but id be happy with very basic meters, the intelligent raid leaders would know to account for a lot of factors. Its tought for players to know now if they really are underperforming or not because you cant compare it to anything

I agree. Hopefully the mechanic is used in a variety of ways, but as a necro, my soft cc condis feels gutted because now its almost entirely useless while breakbar is down. (The only use is effects based on # of condis like Target the Weak)Hopefully there are more fights where its up the entire fight and we get to cc more regularly, or other unique ways to use it. If it is something so conditionally available, it should take everything the raid has to take it down, not just a cc or two from every guy.

Enrage timers are fine, though personally I prefer soft enrages, from a design perspective. Like if the room instead of being consumed by aoe 1/3rd (and eventually 2/3rds at a time, it slowly increased until it consumed the whole room, or if the enrage damage increased over time.

Enrages are good though, overall.

I don’t mind being crit heavy, I think it’s an interesting theme, but we need some more armor options with ferocity but not precision, IMO. Power/Fer/Toughness would be mean tank gear, I think. Power/Fer/Condi would be neat too. Maybe some more cool on crit traits too.

I think a good way to do it would be to have the squad lead or first person enter be able to start the instance, and than use their recorded progress (i.e. 1st boss down so 2nd boss stuff available) to setup the instance. Any player could join or enter even if they have already cleared, but wouldn’t be eligible for additional rewards until next week. This would operate in a similar manner to fractals, I’d think.

But has anyone said anything in particular? I think having a well designed lockout will really make or break this content. I can see a lot of problems if you say, log in to help a new group with a boss but then are locked to their instance or something, or if you have to return with the identical group throughout that week. That would be a nightmare, especially for larger guilds.

I’m pretty sure mastery over transfusion will secure necros/reapers a spot in raids. The ability to pop groups of people out of dangerous situations on a <30 second cd.

I need practice, its really embarrassing ruining a fight when you tele people in fresh aoe.

I will say my soft cc being useless on most the fight is kinda disappointing, hopefully other bosses have other ways of using breakbars (i.e. he has a breakbar that is much more difficult to break that is up most the fight)

Well that doesn’t seem too unreasonable if you want to spec your shroud!

ozzy.8059:

i would agree with you if there was no 10 second timer tied to shroud but sadly there is.. anyone with a brain the size of a pea knows to burst when a necro leaves shroud because they cant get back in it

if they took away the timer then yes necro could be played this way but with it then there is zero chance of this ever happening

oh I take speed of shadows I guess

ozzy.8059:

i would think any necro build would focus on staying in its shroud for as long as possible seeing as its the only way to stay alive on the class… and also because you are usually the focal point in a team engagement.

In this example, you’d actually probably want to just be popping in to absorb damage, rather than camping shroud. You’d have to be spending more time out of shroud generating LF. (or at least pop it sub 50 for spectral armor proc)

I’ve definitely made this mistake, but there are too many beneficial traits that you get for entering shroud and quickly leaving that I’d hate to give up some strategic advantage to prevent my fat fingering

If I were a developer, I would definitely err on the side of undertuning my fights in the beta weekend so I could get more feedback rather than overtuning so a bunch of people hit a wall and you get nothing meaningful from their experience. You might be able to argue that if they overtuned, if anyone did beat it you could examine it to see what are the most OP things in the game are…but I think you’d get a lot more out of examining data from a lot more groups anyway.

If you guys expect this to be an accurate representation of raid content, you’re probably not going to be happy. In fact, I imagine the first wing won’t be as challenging as most people will want, and that’s fine, this is their first foray into medium sized group content.

The 5 second freeze is the other OP thing about it. Most stuns can’t come close, there’s a few 3 second stuns and rangers can get a 4 sec daze with a traited moa. However hopefully the breakbar system makes it more in-line. As as a result it feels like half of a fight’s chatter is spent managing stacks to set up a mini burn phase with the 5 second stun.

Linecasting with ice bow was very OP, but content is too easy for most people to learn how to do it properly. Thats how people were doing these 30 second bloomhungers.

It was definitely out of line and deserving of a nerf. I’m not sure what you want, or are trying to get out of this thread but it seems unnecessarily abrasive, and baiting on a falsified premise to make your point (that people said ice bow was 90% of people’s damage, and that “challenging content” was going to be had from nerfing it.)

Anyway, stun should be nerfed to 3 seconds.

Like I can see the argument for wanting to see other resources, and then the slope of being able to see their endurance, but IDK, something just seems like it reads a little different to me when its 20k+ EHP. Maybe I should just shut up and take my combat advantage, though. I play with spectral traits so I have insane LF gen.

Because it’s frustrating when fighting a necro (even as a necro) to have no idea how much LF they have. It’s not quite the same as initiative, since you will have to punch through it most the time. As far as helping our allies, they would have a better idea of whether not we’re about to die and they need to support us immediately, or can reasonably expect us to save ourselves. I’m forseeing wasted healing in raids when necros pop ds to stop themselves from dying. It would be cool if allies could be aware.

Probably just a whole lot of this:

I noticed that Revs show their resource bar (sometimes?), why don’t necros show life force yet? It’s kinda crazy that this has never been implemented, even though you can see our health bar while in DS. It would benefit allies and enemies both.

I wish I knew. I tried Necro, Engi, Ele and Mes in the first betas and expected to like necro the least, but I ended up liking the playstyle the most. Death Shroud doesn’t seem like too cool of a mechanic on paper, but learning to play with it is really a lot of fun. Weapons I think feel pretty good, especially after this last patch. They’re fairly unconventional kits too (I would consider something like Warrior hammer more conventional).

I think it really has to do with that innate tankiness though. It feels good knowing you can get out of most situations fine, and encourages reckless behavior that probably vexes my allies. The reaper is an extension of that playstyle so it will probably be really fun.

This is what I run in PvE and I think it’s spectacular.

http://de.gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQRAod7Yjc0QLN2cDW3A/NOyFq5QsEJBMAagVIm1bQIA-TBTBABUrsKw9BOfhBn1sQpqGmpE8KlKSrWSGnEA80ToxRAAgHAApAUUYF-e

50% zerker, 50% sinister. Some interesting things to note is I currently take 4 traveler’s and 2 trapper runes for 20% condition duration, but could push that to 25 if i swapped out the traveler’s, I’m just hesitant at losing 15% boon duration even though all I give is might from BIP. The veggie pizza is essential for condi durations as well. 36-40% is too huge to pass up. The effect is too massive. I’d pack an axe in your bags too, for some fights. The geomancy rune on scepter could probably be replaced with something as well, not sure with what though, sigil of malice maybe.

I’ve almost always tried to make hybrid work for years now, Necro always had lots of advantages and good reasons to play hybrid, it’s a natural fit given traitlines like Curses, and how many of our weapon skills do things for both. I really hope some condi/power/ferocity armor comes out (and/or power/condi/ferocity), because of how high necros can get crit through traits, precision isn’t always warranted.

As nice as that would be, it would be OP. Try to bait out their cc first before transferring.

Also worth noting this is partially achievable with foot in the grave.

Eh, I find vuln stacks to be very spikey, and most are way shorter duration than might. Regardless, why compare them when you should have both. That’s how I feel about comparisons of protection vs weakness, as well.

I think giving some kind of increased potency for DS should have been done by now. I think it’s kind of frustrating how condi build doesn’t play nice with our main class mechanics at all. DS is underwhelming as condi, life force generation is crappy as condi, and it just doesn’t feel well designed. This is something that an elite spec would definitely be a good fit for, but condi necros shouldn’t have to wait so long. Even if you tried to play wiht some class mechanics like minions as condi spreaders and life force gen, it would be underwhelming and a bit at odds with minion design (wait, do minions scale with any of our stats?)

Dhuumfire used to fit this bill a bit before they reworked it to be balanced with reaper shroud. Kind of unfortunate. Wait, I just realized DS2 has a 240 radius? I actually had no idea. That’s just the chill though? And Path of Corruption doesn’t appear to be AOE either. If they made the bleeds AOE and a longer duration, I think DS2 would be a lot stronger for condi builds.

This is currently my opener in a lot of fights. I think you’re going to love the combo with plague sending and MOC. It’s a really strong opener if you follow up with scepter 2 -> 3 (maybe d5 instead of s3 if its a group of enemies)

For a single target that combo would put up 4 poison, 9 torment, 7 bleeds in 4 casts. Not bad! Not to mention 8 might stacks, loads of weakness, cripple and safety from projectiles. Cripple and torment are good buddies with one another.

By release, no, but it unloaded a bunch of bleeds and unholy feast used to be basically AoE feast of corruption (bonus damage per condi)

I guess it’s a good thing we’re getting a true power 2h wep then. Shame it won’t affect life blast, though.

So what’s the damage diff in ideal situations? max gear, 25 might, 25 vuln (100% crit)

Well, the wording is: “Reduce recharge of axe skills. Axe skills deal increased damage to vulnerable foes.”

Sounds like it only affects axe 1/2/3. Haven’t tested either. How much more damage is staff in DS anyway?

Just pointing out that gross over-simplifications of things are how misconceptions get spread in the first place. “no cleaving/group utility whatsoever” is one of those. It may be redundant or not useful in many scenarios(which I think could be argued, anyway), but falsifying statements to prove a point in nuanced discussions frustrate me.

Lingering Curse was not nerfed. Half of it’s duration effect was just put as baseline onto scepter. It is only nerfed if you don’t finish your chain. And if you do finish, it’s actually a buff because of increased ramp time on bleeds (though the damage over time is the same)

Not enough players pay attention to it. People need to l2p. More people need to stress vuln’s importance and shut up about defiance stacks a little bit.

Odeezee.7362:

Mega Skeleton.8259:

People should temper expectations for balance changes. Balance in a game like this is often a game of inches. Additionally, people often tend to get this idea that if something is worse than something else, it is therefore bad, which is fallacious. I think that’s part of the reason necros have the reputation we do.

LMFAO, you say that with a straight face in a game where Eles have been OP for over 2 years, tsk, tsk. this is the reason why Necros don’t get buffed. and yeah if something is worse than something else it’s bad, hence why meta is a thing and all /facedesk.

Facedesk indeed.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

That’s great except you can’t get another 27% duration. You can get 10% from a utility and 10% from runes. The only exception is if you built entirely around torment and completely sacrificed bleeds and took runes of tormenting, but your dps would suffer significantly more that way. So you are stuck at 9.5s plus there is nearly a 1s cast (including animation and travel time) so you really need to hit 11s to get 100% uptime.

And yes scepter 2 got a tiny bit better, but scepter 1 got a tiny bit worse, working out to 0 change between them.

Only worse if you don’t finish the chain, then it’s better, in practice, because of a quicker ramp up, which is necros main failing as condi, IMO. Also you can technically get 25% condi duration through runes if you mix and match sets.

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.

Prebuffing too I think is just a relic of how we’ve played that should probably go away in a normal circumstance. From what I understand its generally a DPS loss, almost certainly if you count the time spent prebuffing. It’s very quick to start the fight and buff in combat, and you don’t waste cooldowns in the process. There’s probably more nuance than that.

As an aside, I’m pretty sure anyone who prebuffs BIP is probably doing it wrong, if anything because the duration of the stacks is quite short. I’m not 100% sure on how might stacks overwrite each other, so any clarification would be welcome. I’m not 100% sure of the correct usage in combat, however, whether to open with it for dot damage, to wait a few seconds to refresh might stacks about to fall off, or to wait until stacks noticeably go down (by which point if you had opened with it it may have been coming off CD already). Like I said, I don’t fully understand the mechanics of stacking effects, the wiki article doesn’t go into overwriting effects of different durations.

Zenith.7301:

Hexalot.8194:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Well, the wiki isn’t updated yet.

Currently the axe does 238 damage every 0.95 seconds. With a 10% buff, this amounts to 262 per hit, or 267 DPS. At 2 × 7 vulnerability per hit, this comes to 14.7 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

Life Blast does 345 damage within 600 range, and hits every 1.4 seconds. This comes to about 246 DPS. With unyielding blast, this comes to 14.3 stacks of vulnerability sustained.

This is… interesting. Rending claws now does more damage than life blast at any range. Unyielding Blast pierces, but Rending Claws basically bypasses any defense that isn’t a straight up block.

If anything, I’d say that axe is actually a decent weapon now.

In actual practice, the above isn’t true. If traited correctly, you can currently achieve 100% crit rate with life blast, which means its actual DPS will always be much higher than anything Axe can do.

He can pull up decimate defenses. 50% crit chance on top of your berzerker’s 45% crit chance+ fury is 100% without deathly perception.

So a reaper will indeed have 100% crit chance on axe.

Doesn’t change the fact that the axe is the crappiest ranged weapon out of all PvE classes, with one of the lowest DPS and no cleaving/group utility whatsoever.

No group utility? Vulnerability is even more important than maintaining might stacks, yes there are plenty of sources of it but I often see it not maxed out. I don’t think enough people stress this point and focus only on how many might stacks you can bring.

I was messing around with axe in my fotms last night and since I play hybrid, my condition duration brought the vuln up to 13 seconds, so I could actually maintain 25 if that’s all I did (which I wouldn’t do for obvious reasons). But even with good comps, I frequently see vuln sitting far too low at like 8-15 stacks. I’m going to try playing tonight focusing on making sure that vuln is always above 20 stacks, and see how smoothly the run goes when someone is dedicated to watching out for it. I always notice how bosses just melt when stacks are well maintained so I expect good results. As a hybrid build I have a unique opportunity to try it, because of my long non-damaging condition durations and variety of conditions I bring.

I imagine, at least because of my lower investment in auto attack damage that a sacrifice in personal DPS will be more than made up for across the group if I watch vulnerability closely.

It bothers me how much people focus on getting their leet ice bow freezes off but don’t pay as much attention to things like vuln.

Going to try slapping a sigil of vuln on it too, since that should be cheap, but if I don’t need or like it I’ll throw force on there. Either way, I’m happy to have a good reason to keep this axe in my bag now. I think there’s no reason not to bring it for fights where melee is too much of a liability. As power or hybrid.

Yeah I mean, ask any designer and the buffs it got are a fairly large incremental improvement. I think the concerns of not wanting to make such an easy to hit weapon too OP is very reasonable. Still, would have been cool to see like a half second shaved off axe 2’s cast.

People should temper expectations for balance changes. Balance in a game like this is often a game of inches. Additionally, people often tend to get this idea that if something is worse than something else, it is therefore bad, which is fallacious. I think that’s part of the reason necros have the reputation we do.

I’ve got nothing against making corruptions stronger, but I do rarely find myself having issues getting them off. The only obnoxious thing is forgetting to get that blind off from CC. I think if anything they should increase the effects of the self-harm, so the transfers become even more potent. In their current state they’re an annoyance on you but not really enough to justify blowing those CDs or wasting time getting them off you. I think one of the best I’ve heard is making MOC increase the duration of transferred conditions, though it might make sense as a different trait.

Depends on what you’re trying to do. It’s not meta for pvp or pve, but still strong (or at least annoying) in pvp, and not really needed in group PvE content, currently. With some of the trait changes it could be fun though. I hadn’t thought about MM with Reaper but there is a build there. Whether its a good one though, idk.

It’s frustrating to have access to a lot of fields but having no ways to use them. Doesn’t have to be blasts but just any reasonable finishers. but blast on axe 3 would be amazing. Then Unholy Feast truly would do everything.

No the ramp is pretty bad, for sure. I’m mostly in a pve mindset right now though (which is actually atypical, but prepping for HOT I’ve been doing lots of work on my hybrid DPS pve spec and its coming along very nicely) I think there’s a lot of good reasons to play hybrid dps, but if they ever do power/fero/condi armor I think it will reach new heights.

With corruptions and the auto-plague signet trait, you can improve ramp a bit with your self-inflicted conditions (I take BIP and CPC, so a little extra damage), but still pales in compare to burst of other condi specs.

Overall this was a buff for my spec and I think people are underestimating the value of an additional 300 range on axe. It’s tough to compete with the raw damage of ds, but I don’t see why pve power specs wouldn’t run d/w a/f now. I’ve watched and played enough that sometimes you can’t keep camping death shroud and also can’t get close to a boss, so your DPS drops to near zero. Why not switch axe/focus, burn 4 then 2 while you wait for some LF or DS to come off CD?

ZDragon.3046:

Condition duration is becoming a lackluster thing on all other professions I dont see why necro is still being held back by it. IF we look at engi and mesmer their conditions don’t last very long but they hit very hard because of the number of stacks applied. Necros can’t apply very many stacks so they want to try and make up for it in condition duration…. not really a good bonus these days like it was back 2 years ago.

I don’t see why that would be the case. It would be even better on things with short durations since you will likely get the full use out of the stat. Not sure what you’re on about, please elaborate. I haven’t mathed it out but I imagine the amount of condi damage that would be required for a 10% increase in your DPS would be a lot more expensive than 10% condition duration. And you can easily stack that to over a 50% bonus with food/runes

Also I’d still definitely take Lingering in PvE. I have enough weakness with CPC and D5.

Odeezee.7362:

wtf is wrong with you people? sorry but can you not see that other than CPC now Blocking (the only actual buff to Necros btw) everything else is either reshuffling or a straight up nerf? PLEASE view these changes logically in the context of the game as a whole and NOT just in the context of Necros alone; we don’t get many buffs at all so all positive words without any actual substance seem like a buff to some Necros.

What? The only nerf here is that scepter AA needs to finish its combo chain to be at its old levels, however it will pile up DPS faster so it is more practical in reality. However, it is a lot better untraited now. Otherwise they increased damage on 2, added torment on 3 (some LF loss), and straight buffed the axe, improved some QOL stuff and bug fixes. Please tell me what you’re referring to.

ZDragon.3046:

splatticus.1278:

ZDragon.3046:

splatticus.1278:

Spot the error.

LOL not scaling with movement wtf xD

Well yeah that skills useless af

Well, the upside is that my very short and basic testing seemed to indicate that it’s only the tooltip that is wrong, the torment still works as it should. :P

Its alot shorter than i expeced 4 seconds is not very good for a 3 scepter skill. I was expecting at least a 5 second baseline for it.

Well, remember it’s 6 seconds traited, then any condition duration you’ve got on your food/utility or runes.

Awesome stuff guys. Straight buffs is a blessing of its own. Making grasping dead even better is crazy to me.

Personally I think having 7 stacks of torment on command is going to be fun in pve. I.E. hitting it when the boss starts moving. Axe should be a lot more usable on ranged fights.

I’m excited guys. Hope to see some more improvements to Axe or Death Shroud, as well, but I’m very happy so far.

My guild is already pretty on board with necros in our FOTM 50s and I can’t wait for my GM’s reaction when I join Triple Trouble reflect teams on my necro.

Master of corruptions is fine in pve. Please don’t change ANet. Haven’t tried corruptions in pvp.

Conceptually I’d like them to add more to it. Maybe an elite spec down the road, but I think of it as the spiritual successor to the life sac skills in gw1. I think trying to take away the self-harm aspect isn’t fun design. There are plenty of traits that take care of condis, or turn them into a benefit. Improve those if they aren’t good enough. Don’t take away corruptions’ uniqueness.