Tactics:
Generally this is a roamer style and is best served hovering between mid and rear cap, as the weight you can lend to a teamfight is pretty great and you are no slouch in 1v1. You can move fast enough with warhorn out of combat and teleport.
From most beginning matches you will have DS charged from your first down state player that you charged up on daggers with..or perhaps the trebuchet, or chieftan, or svanir that you went for right off the bat. You can usually solo trebuchet under even three players worth of pressure in this build and get away alive so it’s one of the best places to get your first DS charges. Swipe downed players down anytime a speed stomp is not needed so as to keep DS charged.
After leading in with staff and a set of marks on the approach and locust swarm to set up properly…DS-teleport in and get behind them (helps keep them from starting their opener as they have to turn around) with a immobilization -well 1 – warhorn daze – well 2 – Golem charge – Fear, dagger spam – Back into DS life transfer, step out staff switch and repeat the marks/dagger siphon as they mount their offense on you and you fear them back while waiting for wells. That’s pretty much the basic rotation, and you will change it as you fake out classes to waste their invulnerability etc.
This is for solo kills. For teamfighting you have a great potential to reverse the course of a cap point battle by poisoning it with wells followed by a life transfer. If you have people that have learned what a threat you are (or they just know the Necro is the easiest lockdown and kill or some combination of that tactical math) and they are targeting you hard in a teamfight then be conservative with your point assault and instead of hanging around for the full combo + life transfer and eating damage, bolt through, drop a well or a few marks from the outside of the cap point, move to the outside if needed, check for the thief that saw you running and slay them on the edge, switch to marks, repeat the rotation into the point etc.
This will also tempt bad spvpers into chasing you just because you ran which will net you a lot of easy kills as you just pin them in your well combo outside the point if you have a determined one. Or if they are tougher, just pin and slow them outside the point while you get back in there to focus on a weaker player still fighting on the cap.
Versus thief: Land as much CC as possible while backing up remaining facing them at all times and never stop dagger swiping no matter what else you are doing if you have dagger out. You will win if you can autoattack them in the face everytime they are out of stealth and can drop at least one well under them. Get distance and damage on them with marks between you and the point of stealth entry anytime they stealth. Mark of fear them out of shadow refuge asap. Watch for your dagger animation to change on third hit so you know when you are landing stealth hits. Also, if you have them targeted when they go into stealth and you swipe air, you can see a miss where they are located if they are behind a wall. Consider an early well combo or reposition the fight if they pop thieve’s guild. If you get basilisk’d your hps/DS will see you through but try to build a lot of distance right after with marks or fear them early because you’re about to eat their 3 second fear and the better they are the smaller window you’ll have to prepare for it.
Versus mesmer: Set NPC names off, keep the player targeted and constantly be moving to the back of the clone army which will kite the clones and keep you in damage range of the mesmer. If he does a juke switch which would make you have to run through the army again, consider a DS teleport directly to the rear of the army or staff switch and kite off blowing up the clones with marks as you move out to reset. Hit 5 to zoom off when you are moa’d. The glassy ones are cake, the tanking versions can be difficult but still winnable.
Versus guardian: Your WoC combo ensures you will rip most guardians apart as long as you don’t forget to swipe or locust hit the aegis off first before locking them down. Tougher guardians may have you speeding up the rotation cycle as you go back to staff to kite them more often, generally one of the easiest fights.
Versus ele: A serious pain in the kitten and ten minute battle usually vs. any good one. Mediocre ones you can destroy with the usual rotation, the elite ones I’m not sure necros can beat them with a power build really. Save those dodges for RTL knockdowns as that’s the start of their combo chain. Save fears for water form.
Versus engie: These fights generally go similar to an elite guardian or KD spam warrior just be ready to dagger down/life transfer net turret or reposition the fight elsewhere when they use supply drop.
I see a lot of threads with this and that well build, and I have been complimented on ‘how well I play Khalfia’s build’ in spvp. However I have never run that build but my own that I developed over a month of testing. It is a siphon/wells build with maximum survivability and enough burst to down pretty much any class in spvp. I’m nobody special, just a rank 33 hotjoin fool at the moment but I plan to take these concepts into W3 if I can stomach enough PVE leveling at some point.
I name it Rasputin in honor of the legendary Russian mystic who was also rumored to be a vampire as he was so hard to kill. http://vampires.monstrous.com/Rasputin.htm
We’re talking about Necro survivability here so you won’t be anywhere near an elementalist, but I feel this is as close as they can get if you like power builds as I do.
Here is the build: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;04-_;1kHFJ0D4FJ-K0;9;69TT;41;014B18AJR14;2JF04JF048RQ
Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V paste the link into the browser address bar to get around Bad Link
This build utilizes maximum precision with eagle runes and precision stacking sigil along with leech on critical sigils. This along with maximum blood and soul reaping traits, and on crit siphon sigils give you great burst potential at 38% crit damage and 45% crit chance which provides more than adequate damage even without power gear or traits, and maximized life, siphon hits, and DS which I feel are some of the Necro’s greatest defensive strengths most especially the all-important access to stability in DS for stability stomping.
Personally it’s the lack of our traits even working inside DS like siphon traits that make me insane. If Necro has to sit there and take it with no CC dodging ability at all, at least let us heal inside our ghetto self CC’d pale shadow of an invulnerability mode.
We should have some advantage for being the class that sits there and face tanks it out rather than cutting and running all the time, much less be begging for scraps for parity with classes than can
1) Block or dodge CC, 1a) Remove all CC at once through Invulnerability 2) Have the mobility to get away if they don’t like how the fight is going, and 3) Overheal incoming damage.
Our ‘invulnerability mode’ self-cripples us, and disables a whole trait line practically (Siphon)…great kittening design.
I need to stop typing now, I feel the aneurism coming on again.
Imagine exploding both bone minions, then also getting death nova to proc more damage off of each minion…little too op, putrid explosion already hit hard and lowering the damage on a death nova explosion would make it pointless anyway. It’s ok as it sits although I think a grandmaster trait might be a bit excessive for it
Exploding minions only do roughly 2k damage each. There are plenty of skills in this game that do even more than that. It wouldn’t really be OP at all in the face of shatter/hundred blades/heartseeker/eviscerate/fire grab/etc.
This. I don’t know why people keep saying stuff like “X would be OP” when clone shatters and auto attacks pump out 1.5-3k every few seconds without any input from the Mesmer. Exploding bone minions that generally sit afk and you have to hope the enemy is dumb enough to stand on both of them for 1.5-2K each are a complete joke TBH. A lot of players have a sense of entitlement on their class, but Necros are funny in that they have a sense of …detitlement? XD
The thing with LoL is there are what, 40+ classes to balance? So it’s a good and bad thing that the meta can shift a lot, people can find a lot of OP combos but same as in GW1 at least people have more options to find a new counter meta. Here we’re kind of locked in without a lot of permutations.
I agree that Necro is a little above warrior and they’re both the bottom end classes right now, either the simultaneous survival + damage gods need to be nerfed down to the median or the low liers need to be boosted up to actually achieve balance.
I think if every class were like Necro or Guardian (in terms of relative survivability _ damage level) the game would be a lot more balanced.
That said I don’t really care too much about a balanced game but the idea of an attrition class just doesn’t work unless you’re one of the ‘burst classes’ like thief, mes, ele, right now…which is just…yeah…
So that means you can trigger a lifesteal-on-crit-sigil with marks?
Yeah, but it’s only going to hit one target because of the internal sigil CD.
I keep lifesteal on crit on my staff anyway because I want consistency/maximum lifesteal when I swap off lifesteal on crit on dagger (crit and swap sigils even of differing types share internal CD).
If this class gets another condition or more boon hate without more survivability or a way to disengage it will be a real waste TBH.
It needs help with it’s 300 percent of glaring weaknesses rather than buffing its strengths by 3 percent.
Ok while I agree some minions in wvw really freaking suck, a few things:
Your bone fiend was attacking the whole time, I watched your video at least a dozen times to see which ones were attacking and which weren’t. All of your minions did execute their minion skills on command, the only time your flesh golem didn’t was when you got interrupted, which put it on the 5 second CD, had it failed to respond entirely the CD would have been a normal one, but it wasn’t/ The shadow fiend….well yeah, while one of the coolest looking and (in theory) a useful minion, he’s worthless in all aspects of the game most of the time. His minion skill is slow, his damage abysmal and his hp/defense horrible. Don’t ever bring him, you should have used flesh wurm. Your bone minons, yeah I saw a few commenting on the local flora in the background. They do that, but you can always kite your opponent to where they are currently going afk for the entire fight and explode them there (they WILL explode, never once has their minion skills been questioned for response- now their activating of combo fields….that’s another story). So I’d say 50% of your complaint was user error, we all know the minion pathing is bugged, but it’s not a gamebreaker like you displayed. There are workarounds that honestly do not require much extra effort. I’m sorry if this comes off condescending, it’s not meant to be at all. it’s just the cold hard facts I have learned the hard way and other more hard core minion masters before me have shared as well. Before you set me to the torches, try the things i have suggested, yes not every fight will it work perfectly but it largely depends on the classes you’re against. We all know some of them are just too OP right now but I sincerely hope the meta will shift to more balance with the future updates. And no, I don’t want a report on whether or not what I suggested worked. I just want to impart what I have learned from playing necro.
People write whole paragraphs like this to justify crappy minions but then you compare them to the heat seeking ICBMs called mesmer clones and ranger pets and you wonder why Necros want to stay like this.
Lowered cast times on all our skills (Really tired of dying with skills up that could save me due to chain interrupts…especially marks…come on) and cooldowns on insane things like Spectral walk…(really? not only does it suck hard for the CD but compare the range and time that the TP stays out there to Thief spammable sword #2…a weapon on like a 10sec CD if memory serves and 1200 range and a TP mark that lasts forever.) 90 second junk TP…what a joke. I slot it for underwater getaways but that’s it.
Do we actually have the slowest cast times on top of all the other nec handicaps? My only alt is a thief but it sure feels like it sometimes.
Once again anet, necromancers are kitten you can get knocked down with stability? in lich form, and in in DS with stability elementalists using air 5 knocked me to the ground. So the weak kitten stability we have is useless. GOOD JOB ANET you are continuing to just lose my patience with your game.
so sick of this clear love for mesmers and ele aoe and knockdowns while giving them so much kitten stability. It is so clear that they dislike necros and are in kitten love with eles, mesmers, and thieves.
play your own kitten game anet.
What a sensational pile of trash.
I like how you toss Mesmers (who get nerfed every patch) in there, who have 1 ability that gives them stability, and it’s hardly ever used. Thieves only get stability from Dagger Storm, which is used much more often but still only 1 ability.
Perhaps if you’re so in love with what the other classes can do, you should just re-roll?
Mesmers have pretty good access to Invulnerability….just a bit better than stability XD
Thieves can disengage and heal to full easily, so while it’s not stability, I can understand the OP’s frustrations.
Meanwhile the Necro gets to eat any form of CC and full burst combos from other classes because we have the almighty extra hitpoints mode.
You do have to have a love of doing things on hard mode to PVP with this class…
Necro doesn’t need more anti-boon, it needs survival and the ability to win a true war of attrition with an ele or thief or mes darting into RTL or stealth/clones, healing to full and returning.
With this in mind, an interesting new condition may be some kind of dot that allows the necro to regain hp when it is in Death Shroud by e.g. healing itself for X% of damage done to the target of the dot. Dispelling the dot would heal the necro for a set, large amount and trigger the dd component. If the condition is not removed, the dd triggers by itself at the end of the dot. There are therefore three scaling parts which make it suitable for all builds and universally useful:
1. condition damage of the dot itself
2. direct damage at the end/upon dispel
3. healing power for the healing componentThis would be extremely powerful so would have to be on a long CD. Somewhere between 40-60 seconds?
I like it in theory but I think the problem is still going to be invulnerability forms. They are still one of the things putting some classes way out of the reach of a necro’s attack style and they can still negate a dot like this. If the damage is large enough it could force an early use of the invulnerability form but I doubt it can get to that point since they can still generally ‘run off and heal/invuln/stealth to remove condi’ I think to be balanced, even if the damage misses, when someone goes into an invuln form, the heal still goes off if the condition is removed.
It sucks is what’s up with it.
Here’s how to make it useful anyway:
1) When closing with an enemy in the first engagement (I am a D/W power build w/staff on switch) after the staff bombing, use it to chill and disorient the enemy at the same time while instantly getting behind them for immobilize/well.
2) When the enemy HP is getting low and it is a class that you know is going to cut and run, such as a thief or ele, begin moving in the direction they will run to and fire it ahead of time.
3) When running away yourself and there is a corpse, pve mob or unengaged enemy ahead of you in the distance use it to TP out of there, or with lack of those use it as a ghetto spectral walk juke and TP to the last person chasing you in the pack as he may be the only one that realizes you changed direction if you 180 fast enough and continue running forward.
You are right about it being a wasted trait in the death line, but if you want to play with some boons, Flesh Golem and Runes of Lyssa can be fun, and fits into the Death/Minions build. Full set of 5 second boons and full condition removal on summoning the golem and making it charge every 45 seconds basse.
Thief benefits more with fury and quickness in a basilisk build with this trick IMO but shhh. Basilisk base is 40 seconds I believe.
Necro doesn’t need more anti-boon, it needs survival and the ability to win a true war of attrition with an ele or thief or mes darting into RTL or stealth/clones, healing to full and returning.
I don’t want to be forced to bring an anti-boon abilities when I can bring two already if I want, or even three if I trait minions. I want help dealing with necro’s real problem: survival so I can do attrition in the first place.
Thief is getting one anti boon trait, warrior is getting one anti-boon trait. Necros have Corrupt Boon, Well of Corruption, and the Minion removal of boon trait already.
We will be countering Aegis through corrupting it because corrupt boon and epidemic will be made unblockable, although they didn’t mention well of corruption would also be unblockable, which makes me sad because I am a power necro, but I figure that’s because it does damage too. We already are decent at dealing with Aegis through traited marks.
Great video, props to you. I laughed equally at the intro music and the flesh golem running in place/staring at nothing…sadly most of these W3’rs are less intelligent than that golem.
Life drain dot that heals HP while in death shroud and can be stacked similar to bleed.
-It will help power and condi, (I play power myself)…condition a little more, but power is already ahead in terms of DS.
-Helps the attrition concept immensely.
-Helps vs. high evasion and mobility builds as an instant similar to scepter swipes that’s spammable.
I heard most of the video and the heal on removal portion is interesting, this suggestion is really similar to what I’ve been saying.
I think there’s a tradeoff of reliability vs. a straight life drain depending on whether the condi gets removed or not with Nemesis’ suggestion but I could see it being more useful vs. a burst scenario.
Some kind of life drain dot that can heal us through DS.
Necro’s major weakness is still survivability…too susceptible to CC, no mobility, weak healing…still the easiest kill on the board.
Pretty funny from a mesmer to call you cheap.
It’s a rank 40+ Mesmer and you’re on a 19 Necro.
Frame this quote from him, and email it to anyone you know that is playing with him, and urge them to tell him to quit the game for his own good because being self-delusional is quite harmful.
It sure is cheap to land some 1-3k fears sometimes on 20-30 NPCs being spammed at you that each deal 1.5-3k damage without any input from the player. XD
Yeah glad I’m not the only one, I run DS-Stability all the time and it does seem to fail on a lot of stuff. I’ve gotten killed through vamp rune mist form too…
Honestly (haven’t read the entire thread) but I think it would be more fitting to have a Weapon Dependant DS skill reflected in Life Blast. I love the idea, and I think it would make people view Death Shroud as something more than just an ‘OH kitten’ button but attempt to use it strategically.
As for that 5 skill, I feel like with all the ‘boon hate’ changes that the necro may start lagging behind and a Condition that punishes Boon Spam would actually fit nicely in the current meta.
A Condition that Shortens the Duration of Active Boons or even one that pings damage every time a boon is applied.
Thief is getting one(1) boon stealing mechanic, and warrior is getting one(1) boon hate mechanic. Necro still has corrupt boon and well of corruption, so as pioneers of boon hating I think we’re ok on this arguably niche area. It’s survivability necro still needs the most to actually be an attrition class.
Hopefully, it means less fotm players playing faceroll spec.
Don’t play FOTM faceroll builds and you don’t have to worry about this stuff.
Signed,
Dagger Necromancer.
I like the tied to weapon idea for more flexibility. If I had to pick one thing though it would definitely be a lifestealing DOT that is stackable similar to bleed and can actually heal our HP pool through DS. Something to actually make Necro an attrition class…
Condi build…tends to be weaker in LF generation so doesn’t have as much LF to spam the DOT anyway.
Power build…weaker in condi damage but can spam the DOT more with superior LF generation…
So both types should see benefit…
So if we must just ignore these “SUPER” build, what happens when every player on the server will play those?
If one ranger, thief or ele is not worth the time, imagine a group of them, hell a zerg of them. The answer will still be to run away from it? Builds like these becomes popular quickly in WvW, and for a reason: They’re borderline OP (Most peoples love the feeling of been OP, even more in a game, while necro are the opposite, we’re masochist). If there’s no answer to it, a fix is needed.
I think that every class should have a least a chance to beat them, equal skill and all that.
This. So much this.
The whole ‘1v1 doesn’t matter because this is a team game argument’ is a crock. 1v1 absolutely matters in every MMO I’ve played because if a class is worth 1.5-3x your class as demonstrated by not only their ability to dominate 1v1 but also their ability to 1vX then the game is going to devolve into battles between those classes, and they angle to get the most kills off the weaker classes like necro as we see happening in w3 and s/t primarily with ratios like 3:1 ele:nec, 3:1 mes:nec, 3:1 thief:nec.
That said, there are necro builds that can beat most thieves easily 1v1. However these thieves aren’t masters of their class. A master thief is going to kill any necro build 1v1 in most cases. Assuming equal skill and build knowledge on both participants the necro is going to get wiped. Go find necros dueling in S if you don’t believe me. After the half a day searching just to find one dueling in the first place that is…lol.
Boon stacking beats boon stripping by a mile.
You’re getting caught up in the details. That was just one example. My point is just that that group found it to be a good idea to run with a Necro rather than another Ele.
So don’t lose heart! I’m not saying the 8 professions are all balanced and such, just that it’s ok for some to be better at certain things than others as long as those others have other useful things they can contribute. Everyone being able to do the exact same things at the exact same level in the exact same way would make for a boring RPG because we’d all just be playing the same characters all the time. They have FPSs for that sort of thing, but I like that the Guild Wars 2 professions are reasonably diverse while still having areas of crossover, depending on how you spec.
I definitely agree with the build variety arguments, but Eles beat Nec by a mile. Another ele means that much more AoE and kd’s to lock down an opponent. Immense amounts of CC and AoE on one class is just like the Bright Wizard days of Warhammer, which was a large part of why that game failed. You can add a Necro to an Ele battle but it will be like bringing a knife to a gunfight. The boon stripping the Necro provides is going to be severely outclassed by their mobility, constant spam of CC, invulnerability, and healing.
Details make or break fights…so yes I am very detail oriented
Absolutely all Ele is boring, and when you log into S you see about 4:1 Ele/nec ratios. There’s a reason for this. You can shoot me, but I’m just the messenger.
Elementalist is far better in S/T pound for pound than Necro.
Myrmidion has it right.
Necro takes skill just to live any length of time much less be successful because they are comparatively a much weaker class than Ele.
What’s this about Ele nerfs? Do you have a link to a quote?
While that video is impressive, you seem to be skimming over that the defending group had a Necro in there. On purpose. So maybe Necros can’t do what that Ele can, but there are clearly other things they can offer. Eles have absolutely no way of stripping boons, for example, and they don’t have any sources of Fear. To be clear, I’m not saying that that’s all Necros have over Eles. I’m just saying, they are different.
Boon stacking beats boon stripping by a mile.
Boon stacking: gives mobility, stability, healing, swiftness things you can use to mount an offensive and block/evade/mitigate things like….a boon stripping attack.
Boon stacking is a buff so you will never waste your application of it. Buffs don’t get blocked, evaded, etc.
Combined with invulnerability even if the boons are corrupted you can switch into invulnerability to cleanse conditions.
Generally the rate at which boons can be applied far outstrips the cd on boon stripping.
A character built around boon stripping is only useful against a boon stacker. A character built around boon stacking is useful anywhere.
Necro fear is at best an interrupt, and an Ele knockdown of which they have many, are better than fears as the time you spend knocked down inside an aoe is better than a one second run out of a well for instance. As a side note, thief and warrior fears are longer than necro fears at base.
Terrible ideas in the OP. The problem isn’t access to DS, it’s extremely easy to build life force and have it always. The problem is actual HP, once necro is behind in HP their weak life drains as their major healing trait beyond basic heal means that we can never reset our HP to full versus any good opponent that can such as Ele, BM ranger, engie, mesmer that can CC lock us and get a lot of HP back. Thieves that are smart about staying in stealth and avoiding lockdowns can heal up on us too.
Beyond being too weak in the first place, life drains can be blocked, evaded etc. like any other attack so we are putting ourselves at risk of a 2k-8k attack in general anytime we want our tiny tick of heal or a complete waste of time when it gets dodged.
That combined with the worst mobility, evades, and stunbreaks means certain death even though we can stretch our hp out by repeated DS. If fear were a better CC inside DS we might have something but it’s generally just an interrupt.
I’m talking from spvp perspective since that’s mainly what I play. To me if it can’t 1v1 in S, at the core of its gear and build versus equal gear, wrapping it in PVE gear in W3 isn’t going to change things in the end.
Stretching out HP won’t give us much advantage unless we can get ahead of the enemy in HP, which we can’t do. DS is not a very threatening set of moves either so we’re generally just a punching bag when in it, which is a lot. Inside of DS all our life siphon traits don’t even work so our class works against itself in this way. I don’t know of any other class where almost an entire trait line (siphons) is fully negated by use of their special. Any other class can heal inside a true invulnerability mode.
When out of DS, we can build a decent amount of CC, but without real healing access we can chip away at the real attrition classes like boon stacking ele, engie and ranger all day, even with corrupt boon and well of corruption these classes have invulnerabilities to perform a full wipe of conditions and/or strong enough healing to heal to full. (Little iffy in the case of BM ranger but all of them are more survivable than necro builds.)
Between being in a self-cc’d (movement speed is reduced in DS) punching bag mode, and no healing inside DS, those extra ‘bonus hps’ from DS are generally pretty worthless as the enemy is getting near free attacks and only having to dodge or shutdown 1 life transfer and a few life blasts while in this mode and the necro is not gaining any advantage in HP in general. In fact I’d prefer it if DS were harder to get into and more powerful, so seeing a necro in DS would make enemies feel like ‘time to run’ instead of ‘time for free hits’. When you see a thief go into stealth or a ranger camp healing fountain or an engie drop a net turret or a warr stand up in invuln mode, or an ele RTL in and start spamming kds, you have to take notice and change your attack plans. When a necro goes into DS you just turn up the heat on them.
The burst is not good enough to burst like a thief and the conditions are too slow and too easily cleansed. We can give up all survivability and burst about like a 100b warrior with boon breaking on top of that but if one link in the chain is missed we wasted two wells. Condition build can lurk in the background, and pop bad eles with corrupt boon (good ones will mist, heal and start all over again) and spread conditions with a high toughness and low hps due to rabid/carrion and no health trait but as soon as someone wants a corruption build gone, it’s gone because it doesn’t have much survivability from toughness alone.
This class is really only good for being carried by a group or tagging from behind a keep wall. It needs help to play at the level people would like it to play at, which is where you could 1v1 a good ele/mes/engie etc.
Not to mention the goody two shoes storyline where you help your good friends Petra and Whathisface from the Tavern. (Human :P) Rescuing kittens from trees with the reanimated corpse of someone’s mother and being hailed all over the city for it etc.
Cooking is great after handling dead things all day.
Eles, thieves, guardians and mesmers can 1vX in Spvp so that invalidates the wvw versus undergeared opponents concerns. Necros really can’t.
I believe the skill level in S is a lot higher too as people chain pvp there all day and aren’t in that PVE mentality.
I’ve gotten some 1v2s in S but it is very rare, opponent 2 has to be pretty clueless too.
I’m talking a real 1v2 also, not “I dropped the other guy just as he killed someone else and had no life or cooldowns”."
I’m running 0/0/10/30/30, d/w vamp runes, knight ammy, bloodlust/force main, endurance restore on swap. Suffering/Corrupt wells, sig locust, golem elite (although I do love lich form, the golem is just better to keep people in wells not to mention kding a chasing zerg)
I intend to build this way for WvW eventually when I can stomach that much pve again. (Not that the pve here is bad, it’s awesome; I’m just not in the mood for it.)
I believe vitality. as well as traiting defensively and gearing offensively is our main key to 1vX because of a few things:
1. We double dip vit/hp in the case of DS.
2. Life drains in blood, although weak they are our only extra access to healing to stretch out longevity.
3. Defensive traits are much better and actually shore up some weaknesses that we cannot stat for in most cases whereas offensive traits can be made up for by more damage on gear. Compare DS stability to Power trait line 20 percent extra damage for instance. (Then compare mesmers who can chain two invulnerabilities or ele/engi invulnerability form stomp, har har).
The drawback to this approach is (mostly) wasted healing power….except dagger 2.
Kravick some points…Well recharge is in the Blood line, also 3s protection is in toughness line it would be the best one to call Blood ‘The Well Line’ although that is a meaningless title.
Dagger #2 siphon is affected by healing power so really blood does go well with daggers. The heal component is listed as ‘Pulse Heal’ and you can watch it go up in the tooltip and I checked in the mist as well. No other siphon is though that I know of which really should get fixed….it would clear up a lot of the weakness of necro and put them on par with other classes healing when you factor in boon stacking and massive ele/bm regens (even though you can still block, evade, whatever against our “healing”) AND let siphons heal us inside DS since other classes have true invuln and we just get to get locked down every 60 seconds with no escapes. Our main defense, DS is a self cripple even…come on now.
If we’re going to be the undead brick of HP that just eats all the CC in this game, let us really be the brick of HP and give us a way to come back when we’re behind as we can’t generally just hit a button and RTL out or go into stealth.
(edited by Otaking.4675)
Glad to see someone telling the truth about this class Leeto.
Also, if anything on the necro is something another class complains about at any time, that would mean it’s an actual strength of the class.
I bet you if I statistically compiled all the pvp complaints it would look something like this.
#$
# Stealth
#$
Heartseeker Spam
#$
# RTL
#$
# Mistform
#$#
Mesmer Retargeting
#$
# What killed me (Hint: time warp!)
#$
# Engie Knockdowns
#$
# Engie Invulns
#$#
Moa
#$#
Ranger Conditions
#
#$ Ranger Pet
#$
# P/D thief conditions
And so on and so forth…gee when do we get to anything Necro…
I am signing on to Camp Kravick, and wish to know if there are pre-printed flyers I can hand out.
Necro right now is style >>>> substance. I like the style a lot though, and my ez-mode thief is still shelved in S in favor of bringing teh darknezz.
Ah, the trolls are strong in this one. I opened it up expected complaints was met with it, when Andele attempts to help, the Dredlord raises his sarcastic head from the grave to help his minions :P.
I am going to make one comment and the disappear from this den of horrors.
Fear is the Number one most complained about Condition in the entire game by every class not named Necromancer. We want it stronger, every other class wants it gone. Take a listen to the Mesmer Podcast coming out on Monday. The top Mesmers, hate fear, they absolutely despise it almost as much as we despise thief invisibility.
So…thief and warrior fear needs a nerf is what you’re saying….? I don’t understand your point here.
Why would top mesmers care about a 1 sec single target interrupt anyway. If you spend that much time picking out mesmer and retargeting, retargeting, retargeting again (you did say top mesmers) just to go into DS to put down a fear, you’re generally already dead to shatter. Most of their attacks are too fast to interrupt with our fear anyway. KDs are much more accessible and chainable than fear too. So really? “Number one ohnoes CC”? I don’t believe you.
I don’t really think mesmers care much about necro fear in particular TBH. War and thief fear have a much better duration. I think this ‘top mesmer’ card is thrown about a bit too much in necro posts to lend credibility to a discreditable idea for the purposes of …I don’t know. Keeping necro weak? Self aggrandisement?
Elementalists
Over Powered Like Mesmer
Please Nerf Really Fast
I have run 0/0/10/30/30 with berserker amulet and divinity runes in S, d/d or d/w wells, locust, & lich form and had some fun with it. I feel a thief can perfom this role better in general but you can reverse a point you’re losing on it.
I would never not run locust signet on a dagger spec, (except MM). Otherwise you will have trouble walking out of ele fields and catching anyone moving away from you with dagger hits. You can live by kiting off with a staff switch and dropping marks behind you also.
Mark of evasion kitten es me off since it doesn’t fire every time. Every other classes dodge trait does…
" if we could put chill vulnerability weakness blind and bleeds etc etc on a target witth no cast times to slow that all down, we would be godlike. I"
Statements like these sound like every time I read an underpowered class forum. It draws the players that like to try to win on underdogs and it is a form of masochistic self delusion. The last time I heard things like this it was Merc in TOR. Then before this it was Shadow Warrior in WAR.
No, you would not be godlike with stronger debuffs because of blocks, invulnerability, and stability on other classes. This already negates a lot of debuffs, then evades, then condi removal. Debuffs just do not compare to boons that do not miss. At all. Debuffs by themselves do not kill anything even a 25 stack bleed. You will have to land something else with it like a CC. If Necros had stronger debuffs they would still be underneath top tiers like Ele.
Necro has a niche in antiboon play but it’s nowhere near the capabilities of an ele.
If we could be healed inside DS I think it would be fair and also go a long way to fix a lot of the weaknesses of this class. Then siphon needs to scale with heals. That only fixes one trait line but still…
Minion cast times are kind of whack to me since they also are utilities, sometimes you want to summon and KD or summon and explode and you’re waiting for cast time, then rendering, then AI engagement already…the moment will have usually passed or you’re dead 10 seconds ago in PVP.
Problem for us is DS is nothing like invuln unless fully traited, which kills DS. Same problem with any of our split trait lines, you can’t focus on anything.
The scaling from vit line gives more to raw DS potential than the DS line does.
Then you pick up crit damage, which is wasted unless you pick up precision, which goes further away from survival.
I’ve been trying to make a survivable necro for a few weeks now, and it just can’t be done really.
MM with life siphon on minion hits is probably the best necro bunker, but it is a poor bunker compared to any boon stacking class with easy access to stability, protection (a simple protection buff gives most if not more of the function of DS to other classes by knocking countless damage from multiple sources off by 1/3rd instead of extending a single life bar by 1/2…even at 30k health) Plenty of other classes have this and true invuln and not the shoddy excuse DS is. Your MM bunker can be completely shut down by one moa, or anyone with AoE to wipe your minions quickly.
I can live in S for quite a while on a PVT build, but I spend most of that time kiting 3-5 ppl through marks at 1/5th life. Which while fun in a trollish way, I could be on an ele or thief and actually get far enough away to reset and come back in for another pass.
Necro is just a badly designed class for S anyway. Other classes can do survival, burst, and conditions much better.
I will say I already feel like the facerolling burst meta getting hurt by quickness and stealth nerfs is making my necro feel stronger in SPVP today. I know that guardian/ele bunker-ish builds are going to be proportionally stronger as well though and probably better than necro. Boon hate is going to hurt them more than us though.
Since our minions are slow, or unreliable targeting that makes their utilities unreliable which to me is just a death sentence in a timing based combat. In WoW the pet was were you sent it unless it was specifically countered by enemy cc, which is fair. You could reliably have the pet execute an attack and know it would land. GW2 they’re either too slow or too poor targeting. Reliability is why I don’t use minions even though the paper builds are decent and life siphon MM is an ok bunker..until you get turned into a moa and lose all the pets in one shot. Or one well placed AoE knocks them out since they just hover in a tight cloud all the time. If they would track better/faster it would solve a lot of that, so I think AI or speed is still the problem with them.
“Minion AI is exactly the same as every single pet AI in the game. "
If this is true, why can I find myself having changed elevation three times and broken LOS four times and find a mesmer and a ranger pet exploding on me for 3k or chewing on me for 1k bites on the back of a tower when the player has forgotten about me 60 seconds earlier? I never see a necro pet do this but just hover in a cloud around the necro.
I don’t know I think the new staff sound is less irritating and more subtle shadow magic…kind of like it. Maybe it’s a copy of underwater sound but I generally avoid water so I’m not that used to it either.
So now I am the flush-o-mancer? Can I get a minion that looks like the Tidy Bowl Man? Believe it or not, that would be an improvement over our current underwater options.
We’re still better than thieves underwater at least.
25b-theta. Pep Talk: The minions, upon seeing how well the mesmer and ranger pets can fight and track you all over the map, sit you down and try to teach you to fight more like them with an inspiring speech.
“Resilience didn’t kill WoW, wth are you talking about. Now this patch people will have a 65% baseline damage reduction in PvP. "
Wait..what?
Necros are great at open world PVE.
Whenever you see positive threads or videos about necro it’s about PVE or WvW where they have the protection of a zerg and can fight underlevelled/geared/skilled opponents. Videos like this, while not reflecting upon the skill of the producer don’t mean much to me in the grand scheme.
Rarely do you see necros owning in S/T and even then are carried by a team (I believe it’s one of Nemesis’ videos that talks extensively about how he doesn’t need might/swiftness since he gets it from guardian on the team…sorry but running a dagger build without locust signet is loco without guaranteed team comp) and are there for boon strip and undead signet to res three people. I’ve been playing a lot of S and while I have the most fun on my tankish mediocre bursting well/dagger build, I felt the most useful in a condition single target sniping boon stripper to snipe bunkers down.
However in that build 1v1 is a tragedy due to glassiness so I felt like a fragile antitank weapon that needed to be protected by the team..just a very niche function and not well rounded to win duels or anything…if my opponent doesn’t boon stack I can’t do a lot. Some opponents are so good at boon stacking they can just reapply 6-8 boons after the corrupt boon.
2v1s are rarely possible with necro but everyone has seen videos of 4v1 thief 3v1 guard 3v1 mesmer by now.
Boons beat anti boon because:
The situations in which boons are useful are all situations. The situations where anti boons are usefull are where the opponent has stacked a lot of boons.
Longer duration for less opportunity cost on boons.
Boons aren’t going to miss, your anti boon combo can miss any part of one of the usually three hit components or you get interrupted out of it.
You can disengage with boons easier and reset (hello swiftness) than you can with anti-boon stuff.
Recast times on boon stuff are pretty accessible when you factor in sigils, runes, all the ways you can get boons on the boon producing classes.
“I cannot believe they seriously think the necro is that diverse.”
It’s very diverse if you want a lot of variety of terrible. :/
Shroudstomping is not even intentionally added to the class and I have trouble believing people with any reasonable latency can consistently pull it off. Other classes have stealth stomp, quickness stomp, stability stomp without breaking a sweat.
My first 80 is a thief, I want to finish a necro, but it’s really awful in my spvp testing, I’ve read every video and tried most every build out there but they are the first to be targeted and killed for a reason: easy pickings.
This game is based around evasion and timing and necro has nonexistent evasion. A brick of extra HP that self cripples plus a 1 second untraited interrupt doesn’t make up for how much dodging, mobility avoidance and boon stacking is going on out there. I won’t even mention burst.
I want to build full glass now and just bomb points from outside so I can have a useful pve/lol pvp character but I have a hard time doing that even since I have to go toughness for staff traits.
I just came off a PVT dagger/well/ds build where I got to bounce off guardians, saw thieves slipping away at %5 without even panicking and even rangers with our terrible easily evaded damage in a 3k+++ power build trying to utilize our awful access to might stacking since it involves self ccing in DS.
Every single skill that might make us an actual threat has something counterproductive about it.
SG has a slow projectile, easily dodged.
DS teleport the same.
DS itself is a self stun and self cripple. A terrible tradeoff for the HP usually.
Wells and staff get a lovely red ring to telegraph the move and can be dodged through.
What if wells came with a default suction like guardian GS? They’re using a utility slot even where Guardian GS is not.
If DS didn’t have any cooldowns or much, much shorter ones, and the default slow was removed necro might have a chance. Fear should be lengthened and AOE to boot. Necros have the worst down state abilities on top of everything else. Single target fear for 1s? Really?
Thieves stealing the necro fear have 3 seconds whereas necro fear is 1 second untraited…really?
I agree with the OP, no attrition on the necro because to have attrition you have to live first. Necros can barely survive 1s let alone 2v1s, meanwhile we have eles, guardians, thieves and mesmers proving they can handle 3v1s daily. L2P will be the next post but Necro may have a high skill ceiling but you can put that skill on another class and be godly.