I use a great sword, but that’s because it goes extremely well with my sword and torch as my finisher. Judge’s intervention combined with the majority of the greatsword’s skills are an awesome follow up after I complete my sword/torch burst.
I’ve tried a hammer and a scepter, but I either lose all of my momentum or I have difficulty closing the gap my sword/torch combo creates.
The recent update had me testing out axe/focus and dagger/warhorn, but I feel that the idea of a greatsword would work far better with the axe/focus than the dagger/warhorn does. Rooting down and dazing my foe so I can drop every possession I own on him is not my kind of fight.
It’s all a bunch of wishful thinking, but necromancer needs more mobile, power based, aoe options without wasting 2/3rds of his utility slots.
I ditched the staff on my power build because of it’s defensive nature. Although it’s extremely strong on conditionmancers since you can afford to go defensive. The slow projectile and my only damaging mark being my cleanser sort of got to me.
This is nice and all, but they didn’t even touch the blood magic trait line in a way that matters. Having to wait for 2+ months for something that may or may not come is going to eat up a hell of a lot of bank space holding this pointless gear and it’ll cost an arm and a leg to replace it.
Sounds crazy. Most classes I’ve seen using zerker has distance closers, reliable ranged abilities, are outright invisible or escape combat quickly. I’de enjoy hearing the tales of a necromancer who is pulling this off.
PvP is definitely just an issue of perception in the community. Every tournament team I have played with have been completely fine with necromancers. The reason being that we have the most survivability with the least amount of investment. We also have builds that completely and utterly counter two of the most popular classes: guardians and elementalists (seriously, we crap all over them day and night). We are perfectly fine in PvP, and just as competitive as others.
That’s just wording our terrible survivability with investment (vs other survival builds) to sound positive. Your last point does a better job at making necromancer sound situational than a competitive class.
I’de spend 30 minutes up to 2 hours (of course while I do something else) on naming my characters. I ultimately end up deleting those characters no matter how much time I spend. You would think I would have gotten nowhere in this game with habits like those but I have two names that I’ve been spamming for almost 10 years (I’m 21 now) on my male and female characters. They’re easily my favourite names, but they’re also a curse since I can’t seem to come up with anything that rivals the nostalgia each one carries.
My favourite of which was created by me not noticing a default name when I input my own name into FF tactics advanced (bad kitten game) and the letter limitation replaces the last letter with each new one that was selected giving me Marcheten. Edit: My forum name is also my ff tactics clan name lol.
Whenever I fight thieves I normally use ds to tank their initial burst and I try not to rely on it till they skull fear me. With signet of undeath, I normally have enough to pop in to tank a bit more damage, or ds 3 them if need be. Although that brings up OP’s point about carrying awkward skills just to fight certain classes and while I agree, signet of undeath still has a bit of a purpose on my build (especially that revival if you can afford to carry it). I say all that but I can’t vouch for everyone who uses it nor do I recommend using it because I know how much each skill counts with the current state of the necromancer.
I shelved my necro until anet gets the time to look at the class.
Ehh, I’ll stick to cliff diving, it’s simpler and gets off all you need to know about how bad kitten it is. Using death shroud to jump works, but wait till you land and that random mesmer just finished killing a deer 10 or so meters away. Not to mention it leaves you horribly vulnerable to the guys who trait for decreased damage if the drop is survivable.
Arena net can turn the necromancer upside down for all I care (they won’t), as long as they leave spectral walk alone I will continue to play this class.
yea, you don’t have escape skills, but you have mad survivability. in WvW, the best i can do when i want to flee an enemy zerg is to kite and tank them while inching towards the nearest friendly structure. with all the chill and fear, consume conditions being the best heal in the game + locust signet’s massive heal, it’s not uncommon to lead 5+ people on a wild goose chase all the way to a tower or keep.
Or off a cliff. Half the time I get pulled or blown away attempting to lead 5+ people because stability on necromancer isn’t cheap. Although spectral walk combined with the necromancers various slows probably annoys the hell out of most chasers.
Necromancer’s escapes aren’t good enough to make opponents give up early, and they aren’t bad enough to make escaping impossible. Goose chases for everyone.
He said that Life steal should give life force as well, so every time I steal health I should also get life force. His post and my response had absolutely nothing to do with healing power.
My apologies some people say HP instead of healing power, I’m not exactly sure how I got mixed up since I understood your first use of HP.
We get a second, separately refillable HP bar… therefore we need more HP sustain? wut?DS isn’t our only defensive tool, its our class mechanic, which happens to function amazingly well for defense.
So investing in healing power on a set that heals shouldn’t give you any benefit because every necromancer has death shroud what? Might as well make everyone a power or condition necro then.
Btw, anyone else noticed that there is now culling in pve as well? I never had that happening before (I think)!
Noticing that too in Orr. No significant change in WvW, albeit a little less predictable, and culling in PvE now too.
ANet already offers an option in settings menu to color all players gear the same as their WvW color. I wish they’d just add an option to normalize the gear and character models as well.
8 professions * 5 races * 2 sexes = 80 gear/char permutations. Have a default character model for each race/sex, and use the WvW Invader’s gear for all the gear skins. Cache those in RAM and load them first instantly, then replace with custom gear/models as able on a lower priority.
Hell, I wouldn’t mind if the enemy rendered in as a bunch of naked asura, as long as I knew I was going to die after seeing my opponent.
The developers should honestly just implement a culling scale. The lowest being for those people still playing on toasters, and the highest being for massive computer kittens.
Id love deathshroad, if only 1 thing changed. After playing the necromancer(not for long mind you), that 2nd hp bar, is litterly the best thing ever. Now, I would like there to be more then 4 skills. I would prefer there to be skills based on your current weapon when you go into deathshroad.
For example, DS Ax, your first two are based on the axe. And you carry a warhorn so your last two are based on warhorn.
I know it sounds ambitious, but I would prefer it to be a little less The same no matter what. It’s a wonderfull mechanic though.
Agreed, this would also address the problem that condition necro’s have with death shroud. Such changes are far too ambitious for arena net, but DS definitely needs more than a UI tweak.
Necromancers best escape ability honestly lies in hugging the edge of a cliff while you move across the map. Hell I even carry spectral walk just so I can have death shroud available to fight that random guy fighting a mob at the bottom of the cliff. But escaping someone on level ground really depends on how dumb your opponent is. Most people just follow me at just under the 1200 range they need to attack me with their blink ability on stand by for when I teleport to continue giving chase. Or they hit me with an insane amount of speed lowering conditions to make my teleport useless.
Honestly if there is no cliff nearby you best have a partner or a zerg.
They’re alright. Other than the jagged horror which is forced on us I normally use the flesh golem, but that’s mostly because the necromancer is lacking in some areas. No knockdown and fairly terrible getaways (which depend on how bored your opponent gets) which the flesh golem somewhat alleviates. Other than the flesh golem the only other minion I would use is the flesh worm while defending.
Next is the blood trait line,which while it does work anet has the ammount of healing nerfed down to prevent bots from using them for farming.
Is that seriously the case? I’m pretty sure you could just make a bulky signet of malice thief and it would get the job done better and faster than a vampiric necromancer.
My main complaint with Spiteful Vigor is that it only works with one of our heals. It does not work with Blood Fiend/Taste of Death nor Well of Blood. While Consume Conditions is the best PvP heal anyway, I still feel really annoyed that we have a trait that only works with a single skill.
It would be cool if skills that actually gave you health on use (like life siphon, but not skills like reaper’s touch or mark of blood) triggered it.
I have a necromancer based around the blood magic tree using hp and I must say, it’s fairly underwhelming. I have a pvp power build that uses precision instead of healing power and the healing results are very similar, but the damage is completely different. Traits like vampiric, vampiric precision, transfusion, vampiric master, and vampiric rituals really should scale from healing power. That honestly feels like the only thing stopping healing power from being viable on a necromancer.
That’s why I moved my DS to mouse 4. It’s located in a place where I have to think to press it and I can’t really spam with my thumb, so every click is very much intentional. Though I spam click my elite forms all the time.
I feel like they need to completely redesign skill #3. I get it’s use in pvp, but on the pve side of things it’s a completely counterintuitive thing for the mainhand dagger to have. In pve, a root’s for keeping the enemy away, and yet the dagger’s a close combat weapon, so what’s the point of it?
Replacing the root with some sort of closing move makes sense to me.
Closing is nice, but necromancer can’t really do anything but mash one once he does (which is easier with current three imo). Only thing I see arena net possibly changing would be the siphoning amounts and that’s if we’re extremely lucky.
I don’t really see AN making massive changes such as removing minions. If you’re lucky maybe they will buff them, but I doubt that too. It would be cool if the flesh golem applied weakness with that cripple since those two seem to go hand in hand, but right now I’de just settle for them actually attacking in fights.
MH dagger – great in power builds , #2 if improved could:
a) make life siphoning builds a reality (actualy well siphoning would also need to lend a stronger hand )
b) make power users actualy use it: #1 is strong enough so: lower dmg , but add gap closer/leap finisher
Can’t see such massive changes, but who knows how much damage I would give up to be able to close distance without DS2.
Wha? Deathshround still kills you if you take more damage than deathshroud life.
I guess maybe if you jumped at 10% life, and took a fall for 80% of your life, and you used DS to absorb that?
Fun fact, in the Harpy Fractal, if you fall off the platform and hit DS quickly you don’t die when you get ported over to the revive spot.
Before the spectral walk cliff diving I used to jump off cliffs with DS full or not, DS is just more precious than spectral walk imo especially if you end up in a fight soon after landing.
Jumping off a cliff and then hitting spectral walk twice just before hitting the bottom to take none or minimal fall damage. I use death shroud as a backup if I somehow screwed up.
It’s extremely lame how the minions act, so I hope this will be addressed in the upcoming update. While the other elites are nice, they are more like a “I win button” for that exact moment and I (and many other players for that matter) would sacrifice a lot that power for something more like the flesh golem. To bad he is currently a knockdown with a fairly large cast time, but even then I still find myself using him.
I heard summoning him mid fight will net you better results, but having to kill off your minion after each fight by switching elites is tedious.
Your forgetting about the Necros escape plan….Cliff Diving (And I am serious its an awesome way to escape)
Honestly that’s one of the more interesting ways to escape a fight when compared to using a blink and even though I only play necro, I doubt anyone sees it as cheap when they have more then enough opportunities to stop me. I hope it doesn’t get “fixed” for any reason.
On topic: I’ve once rolled with a condition mancer and I think it is a pretty good way to fight. I’m a siphon necro so I got in as close as possible while applying cc’s to draw attention so the condition mancer can stack his conditions on as well before he feasts without interruption. We were doing extremely well until we came in on a d/d ele and a p/d thief(?) with a solo ranger joining in soon after.
I don’t like how the conditionmancer handles, but when we are complimenting each other like that? I have no issues.
I’m no ranger, but the last good ranger I fought was spamming omnomberry pies, so you can take a wild guess how that went. I can’t really talk as a necro, but I’de really like to see these classes gain some weird but viable builds instead of struggling with the one or two viable ones.
Would it be game breaking for the vampiric traits to scale with hp? It feels like it’s the one thing that’s stopping siphoning necros from being decent, especially since other classes that aren’t even specced into hp somehow seem to heal off as much if not more damage than my necro.
I’de really hope that life siphoning necro’s get a slight buff (as in hp actually increases how much you heal). it’s sort of underwhelming to see green 30s pop up with over 1.4k healing power.
While it would be awesome I can see it adding a lot of clutter. If they can make it work without making you feel like they are throwing too much information onto your screen, I would indeed be one of those happy necros you mentioned.
Well for starters, thieves that abuse the culling issue are manageable but terribly annoying so I can see why they aren’t mentioned. So fixing culling is a massive nerf to the current thief, I don’t see a need for anything else atm.
A working flesh golem would be a massive asset to allow me to get into close range with my dagger/focus/staff build, but as it is my elite is a knockdown.
My main is already my healing power, power, toughness guy. I think it’s pretty viable in pve, but I’m probably terribly biased. If it’s not viable (which I think it is) it’s atleast extremely fun.
If the devs ever lets the various life steals scale even slightly with hp/power, the hp, power, toughness build would be a force to be reckoned with.
I already have a power, toughness, healing power set in hopes that healing power will effect the majority of ways we heal. Traits like vampiric and vampiric rituals should scale with healing power imho.
I personally use the leeching wellomancer. It definitely fits your style of play imho and would be a great asset to your team.
I use a staff, dagger and focus with full clerics gear and superior dwayna runes. I use well of blood, locust signet, plague signet, well of darkness, and plague form with 20 0 30 20 0 for traits. You can definitely fill a more supportive role but I wanted to be able to deal a bit of damage myself.
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