Guild Wars 2

I feel like the necro being that high up the tier list is very much boosted by the fact The Abjured use a necromancer.

In the higher leagues it’s still more common to see a guardian on point or to see a team opt for an engineer or warrior rather than a necro.

The only thing I think we can all agree on is that Ranger is by far the worst pvp class atm.
Necromancer definitely isn’t last though; they are currently a decent counter for a meta that consists of a lot of elementalists and condi classes.

Riot Inducer.8964:

Nyth.3492:

I agree the difference is quite high. But the longer I think about it, the more I think “it’s fine”. Zerkers have an innate weakness to kiting more so than most other builds; they might need this more than a necromancer would.
Also they trade a lot of damage to pick that up, as their other GM traits are just as mindboggling OP

See, I’m not convinced. How are berserkers any more weak to kiting than standard warriors? They still have full access to everything vanilla warriors have that makes kiting them difficult. The only thing they lose is vanilla burst skills if they are in berserk mode and of those only sword’s burst losing immobilize would make them any easier to kite.

Maybe I’m just a bit salty, but honestly I’m just not seeing any weaknesses or drawbacks to anything about the berserker. :-/

I don’t know. I don’t play warrior.

But that was literally what Robert Gee mentioned in the stream. That warriors give up mobility and some sustain for a bit more “in your face”-damage.

manveruppd.7601:

I don’t normally do this – I know that comparing skills or traits from different professions one-to-one is a pointless exercise, because different professions have different strengths and weaknesses. But in this particular instance I couldn’t resist.

Compare Eternal Champion from the warrior’s Berserker specialisation, revealed earlier today:

Eternal Champion: Get pulsing stability in Berserk mode. Gain stability also when you break a stun. Make it harder for you to get restunned.

(source: http://dulfy.net/2015/08/21/gw2-berserker-warrior-elite-specialization-livestream-notes/#Traits )

with this:

Foot in the Grave: Gain stability and break stuns when you enter shroud.

(source: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Foot_in_the_Grave )

The power differential is just, well, mind-boggling.

I agree the difference is quite high. But the longer I think about it, the more I think “it’s fine”. Zerkers have an innate weakness to kiting more so than most other builds; they might need this more than a necromancer would.
Also they trade a lot of damage to pick that up, as their other GM traits are just as mindboggling OP

The only thing that makes me slightly salty is that there is clearly more passion put into the berzerker traits. I don’t even play warrior and I’m already going like: “Wow that looks awesome to try out, and then I can combine X with Y and then and then and then”.
With Reaper traits I’m more like: “Meh…. i guess this and this together aint too bad”.

Don’t guardians lose their default F-skills as well ?

Personally, I think it’s fine.
The only thing I hope is that DS gets a bit of love so that it’s not by default much weaker than reaper shroud. It doesn’t have to be equal, a bit weaker is fine with me; it’s a safer choice and you get it without having to spec into the Reaper traitline.

+1

I understand you can never get AI to be great. But it would be nice to know if they at least tried to fix some issues.
Pathing issues and stuff are issues I know you’ll never be able to fully solve (although they should be minimal in sPvP !); but I would like it if minions were at least a bit more responsive.
If minions would just attack, then I’d already be semi-satisfied. And it would at least make minion builds more viable.

I think Zerger will beat reaper. But I also think that a good cele necro will beat a berzerker with it’s own weapons.

The traits made me slightly salty, as they seem to get all the cool things we were denied in the name of balance.
Pulsing stability while in zerker stance vs FitG.
AoE fire spread on crit without silly ICD (Granted chill arguably the strongest condition, so spreading that is different).
Elite that is practically similar, but on 1/6th of the cooldown.

That all said. You can’t compare classes based on their skills in a vacuum. A zerker will apparently have major downsides (E.g. a zerker is more vulnerable to kiting apparently).

Thanks for answering Robert Gee

Robert Gee.9246:

Having condition transfer on shroud was something I was playing with when doing the trait revamp. Plague Sending originally used shroud 1 as its trigger condition rather than critical hit. I ended up changing it because shroud 1 already had several traits that affected it and I didn’t want to overload it, plus the curses line had several traits that affected shroud in some way already. I think it would be a bit overpowered though if Life Blast could transfer conditions on every hit though.

I think most necro’s actually agree with this. Condition transfer on AA without some kind of massive ICD or big downside is way too strong.
I also don’t think a lot of necromancers really want this; I’m not even sure why there is so much discussion about this, as it’s clearly unrealistic.

What many Necro’s do want however is faster cast time on Life Blast. That’s why Plague blast is often mentioned.

Robert Gee.9246:

On the topic of increasing the cast speed of Life Blast: I think we would need to lower the damage multiplier if we wanted to increase the cast speed. The damage per second on that skill at its current cast time is already about as high as we are comfortable with. It’s a tricky skill to balance because we’d need to also look at adjusting all the traits that affect it.

I’m quite surprised to hear the stance of ANet on LB DPS is that it is as high as it can go currently.
Mostly because it doesn’t really compete with other classes their dps; you lose all your skills while using it; it’s on a limited resource; etc.
I can understand that you don’t want Deathshroud to become the only way for necro to dps though (though frankly that has more to do with the lackluster dps of our general weapon skills).

That said, lets get to the point. A faster cast speed would improve DS a lot; even if you lower the damage so the direct DPS doesn’t increase.
The current Lifeblast is really slow and predictable and is unattractive for condimancers.

Increasing the cast speed would allow Dhuumfire condimancers to see some more play. The only concern might be the increased ease at which we can stack might and vulnerability through traits; but I’m not sure if it’s unfair to just see that as a buff to the class.

There are plenty of reasons not to go reaper to be frank.

Spite, Curses, Soul Reaping and Blood Magic are 4 excellent trait lines that a lot of builds will still want to opt in; or rather have trouble ditching.

Going reaper traitline gives you access to:
a) The reaper traits
b) Greatsword
c) Reaper Shroud

A) isn’t all that special. There are some really good traits in there, but frankly I think the traits of the 4 aforementioned trait-lines are overall more impressive.
Reaper traits are pretty good if you want to go for a chill oriented build or if you want to go a melee build.

B) Is also up for grabs. The greatsword is great fun and will probably be pretty good after the last changes. But there are a lot of builds / situations where you don’t really need it. For DPS the dagger might still be preferred. Condimancer want to grab scepter and probably staff. Ranged power necros (wellbombing or something) will probably want to keep staff and maybe the axe to keep the distance a bit.

C) Reapershroud is really fun, but again very melee oriented. I still hope they reduce the casttime of Life Blast, because the only reason the reaper is SO much more attractive, is because it has viable damage (both for condi with dhuumfire as well as for power).
But even without that there will be builds that will skip on reaper in favor for more sustain (blood magic) or straight up damage (curses/spite).

Not to mention that reaper often “forces” you into soul reaping for the boost to Reaper Shroud.

I think updating LB to have the same cast time as PB would not only make DS more attractive, it would also increase it’s viability a lot for condition specs. Currently speccing into dhuumfire is all but pointless. If the cast time would increase than it gives conditionmancers better access to burning which would help their viability in various aspects of the game.

With Reapershroud coming, you get 2 shroud skills that both are very skewed towards powermancer builds. Tainted Shackles on DS is but a minor thing. So Dhuumfire could be used to make both shrouds a bit more attractive for condimancers by giving them some limited burn potential. RS does this quite okish with it’s fast attack speed and cleave, but DS could definitely improve. Faster attack speed = faster burn application.

I don’t even need the condition transfer, we have plenty of that already. Just the attack speed.

Bandrell.4357:

My beef with dagger is that it has a clearly defined purpose as a life force generator. In the case, the greatsword would be well served as a higher dps weapon.

While true. It’s a bit more difficult than that.
I think DPS wise it would be smart if all weapons did (nearly) equal dps, and that the weapons differentiate themselves more by style and certain “secondary” advantages.

For example Dagger vs Axe:
If both do similar DPS the difference between the two would basically be that axe has longer range and maybe a bit more on demand burst (skill #2) and that the dagger has more sustain (both through LF generation and life siphon).
Both have advantages in certain scenario’s but neither is flat out better. Since GW2 doesn’t have any kind of solid DPS tracker, it doesn’t even have to be really really accurate, as long as it’s ballpark the same dps.

Greatsword vs Dagger should have similar differences.
Greatsword can hit more opponents; greatsword can put out more burst.
But the dagger has a bit more LF generation, which again gives a different niche that isn’t TOO imbalanced. And the dagger has faster attack speed on the AA making it easier to land.

They could make the GS do more dps (which has recently been done to offset the slow swing timer), but it can’t be too much or the dagger sees no play.
Of course in the case of GS, the slow swing time was such a huge downside that it simply NEEDS to do more dps to be viable. But that’s a pretty extreme case.

In the end, the dps a weapon produces is often going to be a major factor in determining it’s potency, as it’s easier to “get around” survivability issues (dodge better, certain utility skills, smart use of shroud, positioning) than it is to increase dps.
We’ve seen with a lot of classes (and this is enhanced the more time people get to learn encounters, maximize potency with weapons etc), that once a certain weapon isn’t within 10% (ballpark figure) dps of the top dps weapon, it starts losing its viability. Rare exceptions not withstanding.

Let me first state that I’m a big fan of minion builds. I have played similar style builds in a lot of RPGs (Diablo series, Elder scroll series to some extend, GW1 of couse, and many other RPGs).

Back in GW1 I loved the minion builds. There were a lot of different builds that all had something unique. The minion bomber was really fun in its own little way.

Thing is, it won’t really work in GW2.
There is a lack of undead army (sure if you go through some hoops you can keep a lot of jagged horrors up, but that’s not how it was in GW1). And minions almost feel more like pets in GW2 where you really want to keep them around as much as possible, for their buffs and damage; instead of them being disposable tools / meatshields.
There are mechanical issues too, like the pathing, lack of aggro, stuck with using certain kinds of minions, etc.

The F2 skill is something we simply won’t see. Nor do I think it would be a very elegant implementation.
If there would be some kind of tricky minion bombing trick like the one you mentioned; it would be cool to see it used in some weird builds, but I really think they’re more eager to nerf it down than to make it a viable playstyle.

EremiteAngel.9765:

does anyone actually use focus?

if yes, wvw roaming or pvp or pve?

PvE: Yes
Focus #4 is actually a pretty nice DPS increase if you can make it bounce a bit (which you often can); not just the damage but also the vuln.
Focus #5 is so-so, the cast time is a bit too long in most cases. If you have Spiteful Talisman as trait, it’s important to keep your opponent boon-free though, so it can be useful sometimes if you don’t have another boonstrip/corrupt ability.
Dagger/WH + Dagger/Focus are pretty solid for your weapon swap setup.

PvP: A bit less. Personally I quite like warhorn for the interrupt and speed as power user. And as condimancer I’m more inclined to go for dagger OH.
Also in PvP you often have to bring a staff as your secondary for utility, which limits your options.

All in all, I think dagger offhand is in more need of a buff.
Focus would probably benefit most from some cast time adjustments. I would prefer if #4 / #5 would be a 0.5 / 0.75 sec cast instead of the current (0.75 / 1.25). Cast times are really a major “unfun” factor for the necromancer. And I have yet to really understand why we’re the prime class that has such major ffin casttimes on everything.

Bhawb.7408:

The TL;DR is it isn’t needed on AA, but some kind of reliable LF generation, and can’t be tied to a single easy to miss skill, and has to be from the weapon itself. Traits and utilities should exist to empower and augment your build, not make up for base deficiencies caused by a weapon that is too weak. If this isn’t the case, your weaker weapon causes you to make choices to make up for that weakness, which in turn weakens the rest of your build.

Thanks for a very extensive reply. And I totally agree with most of the things you mentioned.
The thing is (and this is one of the reasons I made this topic), is there realistically any good weapon skill that we can put it on other than auto attacks? By design there are abilities with long cooldowns, or abilities you don’t always want to use the moment they are up.

I’m fine with some disparities, especially since certain weapons have a different role to play. A dagger player is bound to take more face damage than a scepter condimancer for example, so extra LF generation is appropriate. But not to the extend where you’re trivially filling a bar in the blink of an eye, whereas the other spec has trouble filling it in a whole fight.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The issues of axe go beyond life force generation. It is actually decent for that bit, but basically all the weapon does is damage, and poorly at that. Then there’s Unholy Feast, which is actually a good skill, but isn’t worth the other two skills.

I fully realize this. And I’m not saying that ALL that is wrong with the weapons other than dagger or staff is the lack of LF generation.
But I do think it’s a major aspect. Maybe not so much on axe, as #2 is decent and it’s also often combined with warhorn or focus OH. But definitely on the Scepter and GS (the latter might be fixed now), as well as some of the offhands.
Warhorn for example generates a ton with Locust Swarm, and Focus #4 isn’t half bad either. OH dagger on the other hand has nothing at all.

Sigfodr.9576:

Problem here is that we first need to decide for what and for where, PvP, WvW, open PvE or Dungeon. Is it Condi or power, or some kind of mix.

Why is this importent, well not all build benefit from LF (atleast not as DS is right now).

Very true. And I’m quite sure that this is taken into consideration to some point. I mean take Axe vs Dagger. Dagger generates more LF, but dagger is also point blank and often in need of that extra sustain.

The problem is that the imbalances are too large. And, especially for the more PvP oriented things, Death Shroud is sold as our “sustain”, our “active defense”, our “reason to not get more damage”, etc.
If I pick up Scepter/Dagger conditions, I have EXTREMELY little access to shroud. And that’s making builds more one dimensional as you’re pigeonholed into certain traits and utility skills.

My issue is that the difference currently are not just “noticeable”, but mind-staggering large in some cases. And it’s been picked up in the recent surge of “weapon balance suggestion” threads and I really haven’t seen my good solutions other than: ‘put LF on AA’.

Just floating this topic, because there have been a lot of topics around on how to improve certain weapons.

In general those weapons have been greatsword, axe and scepter.

One of the often returning concepts was that auto attacks need to generate Life Force. We’ve seen this suggestion opted a lot for GS and has been implemented as of the latest beta build.

So I’m kind of wondering. Is LF generation on auto attack a major factor in the viability of a weapon?

On one hand, having LF generation on an auto attack means that the weapon will supply a steady and reliable inflow of LF. Something a lot of the currently “less valid” weapons like the scepter and axe seem to miss a bit. Having LF generation on axe #2 is pretty nice for some burst LF, but it has quite a big impact if for some reason that attack doesn’t finish (you dodge, opponent dodges, you have to heal right away, opponent CCs you, etc etc), since these abilities generally come with cooldowns.

On the other hand, having all LF generation come from auto attacks (+ generally one of the #4 / #5 abilities), can be a bit bland.

Just wondering what your opinion on this matter is.
I don’t think it’s necessary, but I do think it would help axe and scepter a lot of they would have LF generation on their AAs.

EremiteAngel.9765:

i feel that scepters are good where they are now.
except maybe buff the bleed on the autos by a bit.
dont forget its a 900 range weapon with a pretty fast auto attack that bleeds and poisons.
the other 2 skills are more situational but still useful.

I disagree.

As a condition applying weapon it falls far short of what other professions are capable of. Keep in mind that we don’t have easy access to burning, which is what a lot of other condi-classes have access to.
To compensate that, the bleeds and poison we apply need to be sufficient, which it currently arguably isn’t.

The duration on our #1 conditions are rather short. And the auto attack really isn’t all that fast. The entire chain takes 2.4 seconds.
I mean the elementalist scepter fire auto deals a stack of burning every 1.5 seconds, that’s almost as strong as our entire chain 2.4 second chain.

Scepter skill #2 is practically fine. It applies a good set of bleeds and cripples so we can keep distance. The cooldown feels pretty solid too; but the skill is nothing special other than just being solid.

Scepter skill #3 however is a complete disconnect from the rest of the weapon. It’s a power-move on a condition weapon. I’m not saying it’s useless, you can make it work with Sinister or Carrion gear, but it simply doesn’t feel right.

Even though the type and amount of conditions we apply is arguably weak. We mostly apply bleeds (probably the weakest damaging condition) and we don’t get all that much of it (Scepter #2 and dagger #5 only besides AA).
That is somewhat offset by our ability to corrupt and transfer condis. But I’d still say we fall short in the condition department, which for being (one of) the prime condition specialist in GW1 is remarkable at the least.

Lily.1935:

Knaifhogg.5964:

I think Lingering Curse should be changed because it feels like a “use scepter or else” trait, not a “hey my scepter is better” trait. It wants to keep me out of Shroud, stick to one weapon, and all it gives me is average condi damage.

Scepter 3 should apply conditions somehow, poison per x bleed stacks maybe, increase condi duration on target, bite twice to go through aegis, I don’t know. It could bite several times which can crit so you get bleeds from Barbed Precision. Doesn’t make sense as a power skill though

Scepter’s base condition duration needs to be raised to around the level that Lingering curse provides. One of the issues is that overall, the necromancer has lots 30% condition duration from the change. And having a trait that provides that is sorely needed for a condimancer set for PvE. Lingering curse is the perfect canidate for that. But havinging 70% of the duration from Lingering curse put into the scepter would at least strip much of the focus from this trait in all game modes. And a universal 30% while wielding a scepter would greatly improve everything else around the scepter. Or at least bring it close to par with what it used to be.

Another issue is terror competing with path of corruption. And the issues with trait placement in Soul Reaping. But people have been saying that for months now. And although it doesn’t directly effect the scepter itself, it has a major impact on the condimancer.

Some things need to change for Condimancer in my opinion. Such as they should have a trait to increase bleed damage as well as a trait that increases poison duration in an Adept slot. Dhuumfire also needs to last longer or have its burning trigger on other skills beside the auto.

I agree with most of this. And I like your idea for Lingering Curse (a few posts up).

I think as far as traits go though. It’s really hard to make a line of traits that where each of the options feel equally strong in their own right and yet don’t compete enough on the same level to make you feel kitten by not having either.
Buffing Lingering Curse is a nice idea and it probably won’t affect Weakening Shroud too much, as that trait is mostly aimed for non-condi build dipping into curse.
The other talent, Parasitic Contagion however would see no play whatsoever after the lingering curse change. So it’d need buffing too, or it needs to swap with another trait somewhere in the curse line.

Spite has a similar issue, where Spiteful Spirit simply doesn’t hold up to the other 2 GM traits. (Which may change if they handle axe correctly).
Death Magic on the other hand I feel is really well balanced with its GM traits. You have an option for stability, which is really strong as we lack that generally and opens up a lot of interesting tactics (e.g. DS stomp/rez)
You have +50% crit, which is really really strong. But can also be overkill and only available in DS limiting it’s uses for certain builds.
And you have dhuumfire, which atm isn’t seeing much play; but I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it becoming a good build with a condi-reaper playstyle.

I think it’s really hard to get every traitline at that level. But I do think it’s something to keep in mind.
A super strong lingering curse is great. But it pidgeonholes us into that trait, it’ll make condi necro very 1 dimensional.

I think it’s an improvement; mostly because you have way more control over the ability. And I think more control is (nearly) always a better option.

Personally I would have preferred if it just had impact detection of some sort; to prevent me from dashing into my target while running away. (I know it’s a l2p issue, but detargetting can be a kitten in combat at times and we all know we mess this up sometimes :P)

Wow great changes. Good to see that the feedback was taken into consideration.

I agree that the a lot of the talents should be seen first with the balance changes to GS / RS and Shouts. We don’t want to tip the scales so far to the point where we need nerfing again.

Thanks so much Robert. I hope we can get to see some changes to the Scepter and Axe soon

Rising Dusk.2408:

Let me just be forward here. You’re not going to see a full revamp of the weapon. If you want to theorycraft it, by all means do so, but it’s a naive venture. What you will see, however, is adjustments made to the weapon to keep it functionally near-identical to how it currently is but more useful.

Think of it this way. If you put a blast finisher on Axe 3, every single good Necro in PvE will carry one if not at all times, then at least in his inventory. If you give Axe a 10% damage boost either in raw power numbers or via increased attack speed and maybe expand the Unholy Fervor trait a bit so it isn’t terribad, then we’re talking about a ranged power option that isn’t horrifically outclassed by the likes of Life Blast.

+1

Dreaming doesn’t hurt. But lets be realistic, asking for sweeping changes is simply being naive and setting yourself up for disappointments.
There are small tweaks that can be done to make a lot of stuff more viable.

I found it best to just play around with all weapons and see which fit my playstyle best at that point.

To be frank though, while leveling I found power builds to generally be much more efficient. For necro I found dagger/warhorn to be very nice whilst leveling. Staff as your secondary weapon is generally a good idea, it gives you utility, some ranged power and a nice burst of aoe chill and weakness (staff #3 into staff #4) for the bigger packs you want to engage.

Alternatively the axe is a decent weapon for leveling, as it has the range. You can often down a mob with the axe before you’d get in range with a dagger. Personally though I preferred the dagger, mostly for the fast LF generation and the 2 target cleave.

As far as utilities go. I started out with death magic and minions on my last necro; they are pretty decent at earlier levels (assuming they actually attack).
But later switched to wells. Once you can get the CDR (Vampiric Rituals) in the blood traitline, they start to shine quite well. Especially Well of Suffering is a beast.

samulihei.1952:

Counter to meta is meta. There isn’t many viable counters out there but Cele signet counters two things well 1) boons & 2)condis and that is why I think it is more suited to gameplay at this point than any other Necro build. It also matters hugely who plays. Frae was playing cele signet for oRNG yesterday at Go4GW2 July finals against TCG and he looked he didn’t know what to do with the build.

Cele signet is good 1v1 and +1 but needs good team around it to make up the flaws. Much like Rampage warrior and many other builds. That is why it may not be the best build in soloq but in tPvP with good team and skilled player playing the cele sig it’s very viable.

To be frank. Even when it counters some builds to a degree, in tournaments necro’s still look weak.
The main reason to bring a necro seems to be that they can hold out long enough until reinforcements arrive, but this hinges heavily on teamwork; while at the same time (unlike say a full bunker guardian) being offensive enough to aid in retaking nodes.
And thirdly they counter some of the more popular and upcoming builds to a certain degree (Burn Guardian / Cele Ele / Bleed Engineer / etc)

If you focus on the necro though in the past few tournaments (Go4 / WTS), you see necro’s being in the downed state half the time. And at no point did a necro ever give me the feeling that they made a real difference for their team. Not to mention that Frae very quickly went back to his guardian on the second map Orng played.
Full respect to Nos, Frae and the others though.

Maybe I’m missing the real point why necro is so important though. But unlike mesmers, eles, thieves, guardians, engineers and warriors who are making the big plays; I don’t really see the big impact of a necromancer other than the reason I stated.
Rangers have it worse though I guess. But at least they have a bit more viability in competetive PvE.

Truefrost.6815:

I loved everything about it, however… It still doesn’t beat out dagger but It can! Increase the RS auto attacks damage and we could finally have an effective alternative to dagger builds.

These are not mutually exclusive though ?

Best setup in this case would be Dagger/WH + RS.

You can buff RS all you want, but it won’t make dagger any less viable as your “out of shroud”-weapon.
Also I think that we should be careful that Reaper shroud doesn’t invalidate Death Shroud. Once it starts doing that to a certain degree, we’re going to be semi-forced into reaper traitline just because of that.
(Not saying RS doesn’t need an AA buff; because DS’s Life Blast should get the cast time of Plague blast really)

Anchoku.8142:

Arenanet likes to be cautious on adjustments and will probably creep up on a satisfying balance rather than turning the amp up to eleven and making Necromancer better than Elementalist.

They must be playing the slow game to the extremes then.
Because we’ve been down here for 3 years now and we’ve yet to pull along other classes; let alone outshine them for once.

I really like scepter, but it needs some work.

I feel like the auto attack could use a little spicing up. The 1b/1b/1p chain is a bit dull. Either backload it a bit more with a double poison stack (1b/1b/2p); make some build up of conditions (1b/1p/1t) so we get gradually stronger conditions as the chain lasts; or maybe shorten the chain down to 2 swings (1b/1p) and speed it up a bit to make us stack it a bit faster.

The number 2 skill of scepter is actually amazing. I really like what it does and how it works. I might like it more if the skill was a bit more “bursty” with like 5 bleed stacks or a combination of conditions, but I think the #1 and #3 need more work. I think #2 is one of the better skills we have.

Skill #3 feels very misplaced on a condition weapon. It’s a power-move. It needs to be overhauled so that it fits the conditionmancer build more. Power users don’t need to dip in on scepter. And even though a Carrion/Sinister setup works for condimancer, it shouldn’t be a necessity to make your weapon work.
I like the suggestions of putting torment on it.

Since we don’t really have easy access to burn outside of Dhuumfire; we need to be compensated by having longer and more access to other damaging conditions. Other bleed classes (e.g. engineer) are much more proficient at applying such conditions. I think we should be able to have more available conditions; stack conditions higher and stack them faster.

Also fixing scepter is but one part of the puzzle for a well rounded condimancer build.

Jaxom.7310:

i only played reaper for about an hour, and i could face tank 6 vet spiders. i dont’ think my guard or revenant could have done this without a lot of work, dodging, running away, returning etc. i think i only dodged like once, and i screwed up the skills alot cause i dont’ know much about necro, basically button mashing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-slnYGH2l4

Reaper is great for solo PvE. And it was mostly the Reaper Shroud and GS #4 that made you able to face tank those spiders (also this is the ideal circumstance for the shouts as well, they don’t always work this great).

However that’s not really a hot topic. I love being able to solo PvE stuff on my necro; and frankly I think necro really is a very strong solo PvE class due to the shroud mechanic. But that’s not really where the competitive edge lies in a game like this.
Being a powerhouse in solo questing / roaming in PvE doesn’t weigh up against the lack of viability in PvE group content and PvP.

The definition of “meta” isn’t really set in stone (let alone the fact it’s the wrong term to use IMO, but that aside).

For me “meta” means that it’s a really popular build that you’ll see in nearly all matches.
Shatter mesmer, D/D ele, P/D thief, etc. You’ll see one of those in nearly every match.

To me Cele necro is a great build, but not really meta.
To be frank, In the tournaments it often felt like a relative weak link in the team composition. And I think the main motive to take a cele necro is twofold:
1) To have a bunker that can play a bit more offensive (than say a bunker guardian) if needed. Granted, other classes can do this too.
2a) Have a counter vs condition builds in general.
2b) Have a counter vs a lot of upcoming and standing meta builds (e.g. condi engi / burn guardian / etc)

This really doesn’t do much for me.
The only reason that a necro spec is meta is because an extremely good necro player is doing well with his team.

If you look at the overal picture Necro is still the second most shunned class after rangers.

Ele’s are by far top favorite picks often seeing 2 of them per side.
Mesmers and Engineers are seeing more and more play after their buffs (practically present in every match); and are pretty much top picks as well.
Warrior, Thief and Guardian have always been strong.
Necro and Ranger are both still rarely picked. As they don’t bring much that others don’t bring.

Necro’s only saving grace is that we can bunker decently with the right spec. And that we counter some of the meta builds that other professions roll with.

I’m talking mostly from a competitive PoV here. You rarely see necromancers in the tourrnaments. And the tournaments are (IMO) pretty much top skilled people.
That you can make necromancer work in unranked is pretty great; that you’re having a blast is great as well. But I doubt you could call necromancers very “meta” at the moment (or at any moment, other than our 10 minutes of fame with dhuumfire).

Lily.1935:

Nyth.3492:

The idea to make axe a hybrid condition/power weapon is nice as well. But my experience learns that these kind of hybrid weapons and hybrid skills tend to suffer because they’re inefficient for either. The “jack of all trades, master of none”-problem.

Grenade kit says “whats up”.

Grenade kit has seen it’s fair share of troubles as well due to this.

I’m not saying it’s not possible though. As you say, the distinction between hybrid weapon and a weapon with hybrid potential is huge.
Necro staff is actually a decent example of a weapon that thrives pretty well with both kind of builds.

I’m just worried that getting a weapon that works with both ends us up with skills that do neither really well, or a weapon where you’ll only use 1-2 skills depending on your setup.
In the same way that Scepter #3 is a bit of an odd thing, because it’s on a condition weapon but really doesn’t TOO well for a condition build that doesn’t use sinister.

Either way. I like the idea of a shotgun axe variation or something. But we’d still be without ranged power weapons and we could desperately use one. Either that or ANet suddenly sees the light about how necro’s aren’t really all that tanky as they believe we are. Because power necro really only has short range options and we lack both the defense as well as offensive powers that other classes do seem to have.

Lily.1935:

Staff, death shroud, dagger, warhorn, focus, axe, greatsword and reaper’s shroud are all useful to power and really good for power excluding Axe.

Off hand Dagger and scepter are the only condition weapons. Staff is decent as a hybrid weapon but its best for spacing which is useful to both power and condi.

out of 8 weapons and the 2 shrouds 7/10ths are power, 1/10th is both and 2/10ths are pure condition. Not including traits that attempt to make shrouds into a condi weapon that basically says yeah, its mostly power.

I agree that we need a condition weapon. But I don’t think axe should be that weapon. Axe would make a great ranged power weapon, which is another category that we miss.

Brokensunday.4098:

if you look what we have:
dagger=power
scepter=condi
axe= power wannabe
gs=power aoe
staff= condi utility

Staff is a universal weapon. It works nearly as well for power heavy builds as it does for condition builds. And that is fine, because we already got scepter as a (long) range condition damage weapon.

IMO the solution to condition damage doesn’t lie with axe though. That would make us end up with 2 ranged condi weapons and 2 melee power weapons.
I think a better distribution of the weapons would be if dagger got changed to be a condition weapon.
That way you end up with:

Dagger = Melee range condition applier (I’m sure we can think of fun ideas for this)
GS = Melee range power cleave weapon
Axe = Ranged power weapon
Scepter = Ranged Condi weapon
Staff = Universal / All-round / Utility weapon.

The idea to make axe a hybrid condition/power weapon is nice as well. But my experience learns that these kind of hybrid weapons and hybrid skills tend to suffer because they’re inefficient for either. The “jack of all trades, master of none”-problem.

I think we need to keep changes simple yet effective. Some have already stated this.
We can start making up really nice things and all, but they either completely miss the point or are over the top strong.

I think 900 range would put give it the distance where dps lower than dagger is an acceptable tradeoff. (It would still need a dps increase or rather speed increase, but not as large as people seem to think, you don’t want a ranged weapon to do more damage than a melee one).
That would mean that the #3 skill needs redesigning (or this skill would have to keep the shorter range), but IMO it needed that anyway.

I think what Rising Dusk has summed is a fair start. I don’t think you’d want to really put any kind of weird condition damage on it.

Another thing I’d might like is to swap the LF generation and Vulnerability between #1 and #2. The reason being that having LF generation on such an easy to counter skill is rough on the weapon, and I also think that Vuln would benefit from being applied as a burst skill (like ranger Rapid Fire), as it makes the weapon better in a weapon swap situation. E.g. While being kited: quickly swap to axe, burst the vulnerability on someone, cripple him and swap back to dagger.

Bhawb.7408:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

“We recognize that this change really hurts Necromancers and are looking into ways to compensate them.”

Compensation: reduced Chill uptime from initial preview by a massive amount. Increased pull recharge from preview.

While hilarious, those changes happened on June 23rd, and we know the beta we played on was locked at least a month before it went out, which means there was only a week or two at most to adjust for the chill changes. That just isn’t enough time.

This.

One of the big disclaimer notes was that the beta build we played was a pretty old one. Because they have to make sure that the build we test is one that is stable.

I’m tired of the “injustice” that necro’s face in certain aspects of the game as well. But we need to stay civil and honest.

In the end I enjoyed reaper a lot, and I’ll play the heck out of it no doubt. IMO the new reaper shroud is one of the most fluent and fun aspects the necro will have post-HoT. And the RS and GS have some of the best animations in the game, which is really awesome.

I think too many people hoped that reaper would be “our salvation” and are disappointed it’s just another (slightly above) average necro aspect.
On one hand that disappoints me as well; on the other, I would be quite annoyed if we had like 1 extremely strong aspect and the rest of the kit remained weak. If they can bring the rest of the kit up to the level of our best necro tools; and then apply a 20-30% global buff (seeing as we’re like 50% behind a lot of other professions at the moment), it would be better than reaper/GS being just super amaze-balls.

Foefaller.1082:

livlaender.8790:

actualy the excuse for shouts having casttime was, that they would be to strong without casttime

after testing reaper and shouts i cant imagine where reaper shouts would be to strong without a casttime

At the very least, having a 2sec cast time on “Chilled To The Bone!” is a bit silly in a game in which Jade Winds exists.

All the casttimes are silly, when you see the shouts Tempests get. And quite a lot of them are no less, if not more, offensive oriented than reaper shouts.

Bhawb.7408:

Death’s Charge – Needs to function like a targeted leap

Very bad idea. Coming from a WvW perspective i used that skill numerous times to escape or for general mobility, very useful, please not more targeted stuff.

Agreed on this. A better solution might be to keep it like it currently is, but if it impacts with a target you stop and blind. (Plus add a range indicator like on FGS)
That way you keep the full mobility, but get a bit more control over it as well.

I think jagged horrors themselves need a bit of an overhaul.

An idea I played with after doing the Karka Queen event the other day, was to make Horrors more like undead Karka hatchlings. That attach to your body and explode after a duration.

Nice post Bhawb. I agree with most parts, especially the shouts. They really need higher base values and lower scaling per target.
I can’t comment too much on the traits, as I didn’t have enough time to thoroughly test them (Weekend shifts ftl ), but your reasoning seems sound on most.

Bhawb.7408:

Greatsword
Dusk Strike/Fading Twilight/Chilling Scythe -

<snip>

Agreed with most things. I really like the comparison with Guardian hammer. Even though you can’t compare classes that easily in general; I think it shows that GS auto attack is lacking.

My biggest issue with the AA is the speed. Maybe it’s just having to get used to it or something, but between dodging, using skills and people simply stepping out of range; I hardly feel like I ever get to the heavily backloaded part of the GS AA.
Like you said, the reward at the end is currently insufficient.
I really like the ice field finisher, but I still think the AA needs some adjustment too. Simply getting the actual swingtimers that the tooltip states (0.75 -> 0.75 -> 1.0) would be a big upper.

Gravedigger – A strong damage skill in theory, the windup is equivalent to Executioner’s Strike, but the reward for hitting the skill is severely lacking comparatively. Also, the reset brings it to 1s CD, a really awkward timing. Essentially, even if you get the reset you can’t just cast it again, yet casting just about anything else also takes too long, so it doesn’t flow well. Just a full reset would work much nicer, allowing for “spam” in the rare situation it would be usable, and at least in PvE allowing for high DPS under 50%. This might require a longer base CD which I’d rather have, as it is extremely unlikely you’ll want to use it every 5s anyway.

This this this. I didn’t even snip this, because this is EXACTLY what I think about #2.
The reward for pressing it is insufficient.
The cast and aftercast are simply too long and the damage too low.
The 1s cooldown below 50% is extremely clunky because you simply can’t really get casts in between. So you’re either interrupting AA’s; or you’re pushing the cooldown back an extra 1-2 seconds making the reduction mostly irrelevant.

Death Spiral –
<snip>

I like this skill. But I do feel it’s rather easy to dodge and rather hard to hit all 5 targets unless they’re completely stacked.
The range is short, the cone is small (like 30 degrees or something), and it has a pretty long cast time. Those 3 together make it feel really clunky.
Either increase the range and cone a bit (300 range, 60 degrees) OR make the skill instant so it’s easier to land the hits when you see the mobs line up nicely.

Nightfall – Only change I’d like to see here is a QoL change so that the aftercast is removed, just let me cast and go.

This. Nothing more to add. I would like to see a range indicator or something too. Also does this effect slowly creep outwards like the animation, or does it instantly affect everyone in a 300 radius. If the former, that might prove to be a bit of a gameplay issue as we get some experience in.
Nightfall animation is seriously one of the best in the game though, together with RS animations.

Grasping Darkness – Another cool skill, only problem is it shoots straight out from your character which is an awful targetting mechanism for this type of skill. Just have it work like other skills. Otherwise its fine.

Agreed.

I think Bhawb’s post touched on a good few issues with this shout (and shouts in general).

The scaling needs to be adjusted. Instead of linear scaling, there has to be a higher base value, with smaller “per target” scaling.
On top of that the healing coefficient of YSIM seems to be wacky. Now most reapers won’t rock healing power, so the base healing value could still use a little upper; but the scaling needs a lookover as well.

GS needs some love, but so do scepter and axe (probably more so than GS).

3 days ago I was convinced that the extra cleave from GS would outweigh the lower dps. And that the slower attack speed being more difficult to deal with, would balance out a bit with the higher burst damage from the individual strikes (pvp wise mostly).

But after playing the reaper I feel that neither of those really hold up.
Dagger holds an exceptional good niche with the fact it builds LF super fast. IMO it should remain a very high dps auto attack weapon (wouldn’t mind if dagger AA > GS AA), but the great swords whole kit should outdps daggers AA.

The slower hits really really hurt. Like A LOT. It’s so easy to interrupt your own attacks right before they land (1 second cast time completely to waste), either by casting a skill, dodging, someone running out of range.
The chill on the 3rd strike is hard to keep up this way. (Let alone that even in a perfect situation it’s only up for like 50% of the time).

The extra target cleave is nice, but it’s only 1 extra target on your auto attack. And the burst from GS so far hasn’t impressed me, especially knowing what kind of burst other classes have. Classes who DO have team support, who DO have high mobility, and outdps us left and right.

On top of all that, the LF generation with GS is annoyingly low and tied to abilities that are quite clunky to use. There are ways you can circumvent that by taking the shout as a heal, and certain utilities like Spectral Grasp, but those are more band aids than an actual solution. After all, one shouldn’t NEED utility skills to patch defects in your weapon set.

Good post. Generally agree with everything. Not sure if all your solutions are the best, but at least most of them either make sense, or are mostly in the right direction.

AegisFLCL.7623:

Greatsword Auto Attack Chain:

<snip>

Agreed. A lot of people want to see more damage on the GS auto chain. I think that an attack speed increase (or a combination of dmg / speed) would be the best way to go at it. It would smooth out the feeling a lot more. I love a slow hitting, big number weapon as much as the next guy; but currently it’s SO slow that it brings a lot of nasty side effects.
I prefer LF gen on the AA chain as well, though I’m not sure if that would end up being too strong. (If we want GS to be on par, or even better than dagger damage wise, the sacrifice of lower LF regen will have to remain).

Gravedigger:

[/quote]

My thoughts exactly. The damage is quite fun, but considering the 1.25 second pre-cast and 0.75 second after cast, it really isn’t all that.
The cooldown reduction sub-50% is suppose to make this your big burst execute, but it ends up feeling clunky.

Besides fixing the cast time and range. I expected more “umph” from this ability. Maybe they could balance this out by making some tweaks and increasing the damage.
I mean, the cooldown reduction is quite strong, but I’d probably have less cooldown reduction and more damage, so it feels like a big hit and doesn’t feel like it interrupts/interferes with the rest of the GS kit.

Death Spiral:

<snip>

Again completely agree. Not much to add here. The cone feels too small. Even with 2 mobs standing right in front of me, I can often only hit one of them. I think the cone is somewhere between 15-30 degrees. Would love to see it go up to 60-90 degrees.
Big hindrance as well is the cast time, as you mentioned. Makes it really hard to pull off in a pvp setting.

Nightfall:

Personally, besides the area indicator (which I really miss). I would love to see 2 things:
1) Remove the aftercast. It feels like you’re one of those idiots that got his sword stuck in the dirt and you’re struggling to get it out while the enemy laughs at you.
2) I’m not 100% sure on this. But it felt like the skill didn’t instantly affect everyone in the entire radius, but slowly creeps outwards (just like the animation does). I love the animation, but gameplay wise that’s a small gripe I have with the skill.

Grasping Darkness (By far needs the most work especially for PvP):

- <snip>[/quote]

Agreed on pretty much everything.
I think the biggest issue is that it needs to go in the direction of your target. And have a range indicator (which can be made instant for people who prefer that), so you can time it better.

sniperman.1738:

idk why ppl say the reaper is bad honestly I haven’t had any issues with it, there is such a thing as you can’t learn how to play a class right away in just a couple of minutes or an hour, the reaper is a learning curve some catch on right away and know exactly how to use it and kick butt and have 0 issues with it. I know I don’t see any issue with the current Reaper to me it feels smooth and fine if you know how to use it right.

Reaper isn’t bad. The greatsword feels a bit clunky though. If you’ve played with other class’ greatsword the abilities generally either feel smooth, or they feel rewarding. For necro the GS seems to do neither.

1. leaving you static for like 2 seconds and doing ‘laughable’ damage (<- based on the fact this is suppose to be our big execution hit), was a letdown for me

I like the animations though, and not everything is bad about the GS. I do hope they polish it up.

Apolo.5942:

Actually you do, the dagger defining attribute is that it builds your shroud and is defensive through 2. GS and Dagger should be on par with single target damage.

I get what you’re saying. And I can understand that point. I might even agree.

I was maybe hoping that GS could be a bit more of a burst weapon. (Lower DPS, but higher burst in intervals) so it would have a different niche than dagger.
If the GS does more damage ST (and thus automatically against any bigger group size), dagger might be left in a TOO niche situation, where you only really want it for a shroud oriented build.

Reaper shroud is awesome. Really like it. Not sure yet how the balance is, but the cleave damage on the #1 is just sweet.

GS feels lacking.
IMO #4 and #5 look and feel quite good.

1. feels a bit mediocre either the attacks are too slow or the damage is too low.
   Gotta be careful to keep it balanced since it cleaves 3 people, but this feels “decent” in the cleave and “meh” vs 1 target.
   Also the big glow on the Chilling Scythe makes it really easy to avoid tbh.

1. is just poor. The damage is lacking. It has a huge cast time and aftercast. This ability needs to do MORE damage and a reduction to the cast/aftercast, because it feels extremely clunky atm. You’re very immobile when using it, especially below 50%. Also the 80% cooldown reduction feels a bit…. odd… as well, the GS is too slow to get an extra auto attack in in between gravediggers, and the cooldown of 1 sec is too long to make it flow well. Please look into this.

1. isn’t too bad. But I find the cone to be a bit small. Making it easy to sidestep.
   The damage on this is ok, given that it also gives LF and vuln.

I played with it a bit. It’s not bad bad, but it’s not very good to be frank.

1. skill is slow and really doesn’t do too much damage.
   The freezing is nice, but it’s really easy to dodge because the sword gets this IMPOSSIBLE TO MISS blue glow.

1. is a major let down to me so far. I had hoped this would be nice and bursty, but frankly it isn’t. And the precast/aftercast on it is a massive hindrance. I mean, I would probably be OK with it, if it wasn’t for the 1+ second cast time PLUS ANOTHER 1 second of aftercast. It’s massive for just a single big strike. It REALLY needs a reduction on cast times (both pre and after IMO).

1. Again with the MASSIVE cast time on a friggin melee ability. It just doesn’t flow well. The cone is quite long (which is good) but it’s really narrow. You can probably sidestep this once you know what to look for.
   Damage wise this ability feels solid though. Good damage, 12 stacks of vuln.

1. Pretty solid for what it does. Too bad again it takes forever to get this ability off. The cast time is only 1/4th of a second (great), but the effect itself takes time to spread out over the area.
   The animation is one of the best in the game though. Love it.

1. Not many issues with this ability. Bit of a long cooldown for our only gap closer on the weapon, but it’s ok. (Again great animation/visuals)

Frankly I think that #1 needs to just speed up slightly (only very little, you don’t want the GS to be doing more single target dps than the dagger, at best they should be equal.).

1. needs some work. I feel very locked in place when I’m casting it. Especially below 50% with the low cooldown.
   Also as far as the cooldown goes. I don’t really get the 80% reduction. The GS is so slow that the 1 second cooldown makes the rotation feel very clunky.

1. Cast time reduction would be nice. 3/4th or 1/2 of a second would be much better. The ability has a narrow cone so should be easy enough to get out of.

All that said. Reaper Shroud is great. It’s feels extremely good, because unlike GS it doesn’t have these massive cast times, making the flow feel great.

I’d pretty much agree with Thaddeus and Roachsrealm.

Generally everyone can do general questing pve and boss chains. Some classes might be a bit weaker at this (generally lack of range on bosses like Jormag), but nothing that prevents you from being useful at fights and obtaining gold medal and loot.
So the 4 elements you can focus on are: sPvE (dungeons/fractals) / sPvP / WvW zerg and WvW roam.

sPvE: I’d say that Warrior / Guardian / Thief / Elementalist / Mesmer are all solid picks for this at the moment. The Ele and Thief provide very high dps. Mesmer very useful utility (time warp / portals), warrior can stack might for the whole group easily and guardian is generally good as defensive utility.
Engineer and Ranger aren’t bad either and follows behind above ones. They don’t provide much that the others can’t do though, except maybe solid condi damage.
Necromancer is quite unwanted at the moment in Dungeons / Fractals, on all but certain niche fights.

sPvP: Guardian / Elemental / Thief / Mesmer are top picks currently. The first for it’s ability to hold a point really well. The latter 3 for their high burst and good mobility.
Warrior and Engineer are good picks after that.
Necro / Ranger are a bit lower again. Not really all that bad, but they don’t really bring anything that others don’t do better, which is their limitation really.

WvW zerg: Elementalist (Seeing) / Guardian (patterns) / Mesmer (yet?) / Necromancer / Warrior are generally top for this. Elementalists and Necromancers bring the big AoE nukes. Mesmers often provide utility (stealth/reflects) and burst (shatter). Guardians and Warriors hold the frontline.
Thief isn’t as useful in the actual zerg, as it lacks range and AoE; however you always want 1 or 2 around to act as scouts, ahead of the group and watching the flanks. Looking for enemy zergs.
Engineer and ranger are both ok, but doesn’t bring anything as good as the others, but they do have strong single target burst.

WvW roam:
You can make anything work here. But generally classes with high burst, high mobility and is possible stealth work really well for roaming.
Elementalists, Mesmers, Thieves, Engineers.
Rangers work especially with traps. Warriors and Guardians are a bit worse, but work well with some backup.
Necromancers are generally not as good, due to lack of mobility; but you can make it work.

Final note: Every class works everywhere, lets make that clear. But there is a definite bias towards certain classes.
Elementalists / Guardians / Mesmers / Warriors are great in just about anything.
Thief is great in nearly everything; lacks a good long range option to be great at everything, but it compensates that with some other niches.
Engineer is good at most things; it used to be really kittenty but it got a lot better, but it’s still hard to play to its max potential.
Ranger got some buffs to make it better. It’s not as shunned as it once was, but it still has a lot of situations where it doesn’t bring anything that other classes don’t bring.
Necromancer is mostly bottom of the barrel at the moment. But it’s really really strong in WvW zergs and sees some good uses in sPvP.

I’m not super experienced in WvW, but my view:

- I would probably invest a little bit more in berserker gear. Try to get that 45-50% crit. I feel like it gives you the edge and makes a slightly bigger difference than the extra health will. (As in the extra damage from your wells will probably have a bigger impact than the extra 1000-2000 health when you’re being focused).
You could run everything berzerker except for your gloves/boots/shoulders/back and sit at 48.5%

- Well of Blood is a nice heal, but with a good WvW zerg you’re often healing on the move. The choice between WoB and CC is a tricky one at this. WoB is excellent when you can get it down in a place where people can stand in it. But CC IMO gives the better personal heal. It will cure you from cripples/chills/immobilizes/etc the stuff that gets you killed.
I would probably go with CC in the end, but that this is totally up to player preference IMO.

Khristophoros.7194:

To be fair, it’s really hard to make a weapon do more damage than dagger 1 spam without making said weapon disgustingly OP. Necro dagger 1 has hilarious damage ratios.

Necro dagger 1 has a really high damage rotation. But it still falls hilariously far behind compared to other classes, because dagger has nothing BUT the #1 dps.
I mean that’s how silly Necro weapons are at the moment; you’re stuck to using AA spam, because none of the other skills really have enough “umph” or utility to be worth wasting time on.

However because dagger #1 is melee only and basically has no other damage abilities on it’s #2 and #3, it has to do a lot of damage to be worth it.
The only saving grace for dagger main hand, other than the high dps, is the high LF generation and the 2 target cleave. Are those two enough of a factor to keep it in play if the GS would do more DPS single/dual target? I’m not so sure.

Silverkey.2078:

Because it is situational. Dagger outclasses scepter or staff in PvE, right? The balance is for PvP because the roles are different, but for PvE where only damage matters (more or less) one is better. Currently necro is bottom tier in PvE, so ideally I would have loved it to be fixed in the main class, but if Reaper fixes it, so be it! The cleave is an improvement over dagger, but the damage (currently) is not.

Dagger outclasses scepter and staff for multiple reasons. A big reason is that it’s melee range. Range is a huge factor in whether or not a weapon should do more or less dps.

That said, assume the auto attack DPS of both the dagger and GS were exactly the same. What would be the benefit of each, and which would you choose?

Dagger:
+ Has higher LF generation
+ Has faster attack speed

GS:
+ Does more damage per hit (can be of importance)
+ Hits more targets (3-5)
+ Has slightly longer range (170 vs 130)
+ SHOULD (as per dev info) have a #2 that does enough damage to warrant using it on cooldown pretty much

I know that we want the necro’s to make a comeback for PvE (believe me I really want that too). But I’m not sure if the best solution would be to make the GS really powerful and eclipse every other weapon in our kitten nal by default.
I realize that it’s impossible to make every weapon viable for every game aspect. But I think it should be the aim of developers to get as close as possible.

Viking Jorun.5413:

I don’t get the “Necro has no damage” argument anymore. It competes solo with an ele’s combo (who can’t sustain damage after Fire Grab) and while stacking Vampiric Aura with other life siphon sources, your DPS and sustain skyrocket. On an average high tier Fractal comp, Vampiric Aura adds 45 damage to each hit each ally does – including all hits from Ice Bow, rapid attacks such as Hundred Blades, Life Transfer, Guardian Symbols, Wells (which should be trained to siphon already adding to the damage), fire fields, and all other damaging fields. My fractal group calculated that Vampriric Aura alone adds a 14% average full-party DPS boost, and the front loaded damage of wells combined with Signet of Vampirism (which adds nearly 8k damage by itself to a target) competes with that of an extra Ice Bow, and you can attack with 11.8k auto attack chains during that time (your wells combo should be doing upwards of 41k over 5 seconds).

Yet, every day I find elitists who write off necro as “unusable” in PvE, despite our damage being superior to Mesmer in PvE (though we lack the utility Mesmer brings).

I would love if this was the case.

But I’m putting more faith into the damage calculators, which show necromancers struggling doing roughly 40-60% the dps of the top DPS classes (Thief / Ele / Warrior). And even though we’re not too far behind say Rangers and Guardians, we still fall majorly short, because we bring very little to the group other than Vampiric Aura.

Also I’d love to see your calculators (or even just rough math) for VA adding 14% dps on top of your entire party.
Because that would practically mean VA doubles the necro’s dps in a party format.

Tim.6450:

That’s the point it doesn’t. reaper gravedigger spam (meaning using nothing but gravedigger all the time) is weaker then dagger 1 spam.

If this is really true, they dun goofed.

IMO the strength of dagger should be higher DPS (= sustained damage) on 1-2 targets and increased LF generation
The strength of GS will be the 3-5 man cleave, bigger hits per strike (this is also an advantage unlike what some here think) and the bigger burst from your other abilities.

striker.3704:

StAllerdyce.3941:

Honestly, I think there’s a fundamental issue with how slow the GS will be. If the damage is below dagger, you will rarely see it in PvP (and the focus on chill makes me think they were hoping reaper would be good at this…ignoring all the other problems with Chill and melee-reaper in an environment where enemies will, y’know, move), but if it’s higher than dagger, you will never see dagger in PvE…except maybe for building life force. We’ll get a better idea with the final numbers. Either way, one weapon will be blown out of the water.

Reaper greatsword should be higher damage than dagger because it has a greater risk-reward.

Dagger has one thing the GS won’t be able to replace, and that is a secondary healing skill on 2. Dagger will always be king when it comes to a siphoning focused style of build.

The term “damage” is a bit ambiguous. You could talk about damage per hit, or damage over time, or burst damage. I think the term “DPS” is a better term if we talk about sustained damage.

IMO the siphoning from dagger #2 does not warrant lower dps in the slightest.
The only argument (IMO) that validates dagger as being stronger than GS, is that it generates LF really fast. That is a factor that has to be taken into account.
Other than that the dagger hits fewer people and has less damage moves on its non-#1 skills.

The way I hope the weapons to work out, is that GS gets the superior burst (mostly through it’s other abilities hopefully) and the bigger cleaves.
Dagger keeps the higher DPS on 1-2 targets with auto attack only and increased LF generation. That way I think they both have a very valid place.
In PvE you will prefer GS for trash and sub-50% maybe on bigger guys. In PvP there is also a very valid place for GS as it should hopefully bring some burst that dagger lacks.

That is just what I hope though. I wouldn’t be surprised if the GS turns out rubbish other than PvE cleaving.

Oslaf Beinir.5842:

Personally..The condi weapons are just bad for the job of condi application and also still nerfed for no reason. the damage comes, transferred condis, DS and corrupting boons. its not the actual weapons doing an amazing job.

This. I don’t hate condimancer myself. But it feels incomplete. It feels far too reliant on the opponent stacking boons massively, so you can counter with corruptions; or the opponent applying a lot of conditions on you, so you can counter with condi-return.
I miss the weapons having a good enough impact to apply conditions ourselves.
Grasping Hands and Enfeebling Blood are decent, but other than that you’re relying a lot on signets and corruption.

Also nearlight made some really good points. I don’t think the condimancer is far off from being great in sPvP though.

StAllerdyce.3941:

I’d disagree that GS shouldn’t have higher DPS. Because of it’s longer cast times, it certainly should have higher DPS, because a single miss/block/dodge will cost you to miss out on more damage than that missed attack on a dagger.

This is up for debate to some point.

A dodge means you can dodge multiple dagger attacks vs 1 GS attack. Sure you miss out on the big GS damage, but if you roll with daggers you might miss out on a few hits leveling the damage out.
Blocking generally works with charges, so there is a point there. Though there are a lot of blocks that come with a ramification if you make the hit. Which would also be easier to negate if you roll with GS.

I’m not convinced that slower hits should automatically mean you need to do more dps, especially not from a weapon that hits 3-5 targets with all its attacks PLUS having executes that can bring some serious burst sub-50%.

7. What OP said, shout and utilities don’t matter if we are going to be stuck taking (weak) stun breaks for utility.
Depends. There are some decently accessible stunbreaks through traits. (e.g. FitG). Most shouts frankly don’t interest me until they become on par with elementalist shouts. It’s simply kittened that all but 1-2 of their shouts are instant cast, and even those have only 1/3rd of the cast time of our shortest cast time shouts. How the kitten did ANet thought it viable to give shouts a 2 second cast time is beyond me.

8. The traits look very weak & boring, here’s what every Pvp & WvW reaper will take: (1) immobilize duration reduction (2) more life force to make up for greatsword life force sucking and (3) more life force to make up for greatsword life force sucking. That is very boring, even if the particular numbers turn out make the traits strong.
I doubt it to be frank. Because even the traits really don’t give that much LF. And even if they did. That’s hardly different from some other trait lines or traits from other professions. If you build around PvP it’s quite logical that certain traits always come back, simply because they’re the best. I think for a Reaper PvE build you might easily see different traits though.
On top of that don’t forget that the GS is 1 of 2 weapons. If you go with say Dagger/Warhorn as your offset weapons, you can stack LF back quite quickly.

9. No scaling defenses for team fights & no team utility for team fights.
This will never change as long as ANet is convinced the necromancer should be a selfish/self sustaining class.
I wouldn’t even be annoyed with that, if it wasn’t for the fact we get nothing in return for that weakness. We don’t have higher dps than other classes WITH a ton of utility. We don’t bring unique factors to the table (other than maybe life steal). And we frankly aren’t even more self sufficient than those classes; even though ANet claims we are.

Again agreeing with a lot of points. But I also think we’ll have to see it in action really. Because the whole LF flow (especially considering your 2nd set of weapons besides GS), uptime on target and the tankiness are really up for debate until we get to play around with it.