Guild Wars 2

I ask this because two of my characters are Charr; one a light armor user and one a medium armor user. Unfortunately a large majority of armors in both categories do not mesh well with that particular race, and while I could pitch a fit and ask that the existing armors be redesigned with Charr physique in mind…

This option would only benefit Charr, and understandably could be seen as a non cost effective solution.

So I ask that more light and medium [COMBAT] armors be added that do not utilize a skirt on the chest or legs; such as vests and jackets which not only helps avoid the irritation of Charr tails and legs clipping through robes and trench-coats, but also adds extra variety to the visual options that non-Charr races have too.

So who do we have to bribe/blackmail/beg for this to happen?

Rox’s eyes are disturbingly large even for something domestic cat themed, and they plain look like they do not fit in her skull.

Adding variety is great and all, but she just looks incredibly out of place because the art theme she seems to use is a huge departure from almost any other Charr facial design. She looks like some creepy over exaggerated doll compared to other Charr.

It’s good as an anti-res mechanic to not have them trigger as has already been said.

It’s far more annoying to not have them trigger on frickin DRAGONS.

Makes staff far less useful in fights where just maybe one does not want to be within a certain range.

Staff/marks/wells. Take the greater marks trait and the reduced well cool-down trait, and then decide which of either ranged wells, wells that give protection, or life leeching wells traits that you want most.

Just keep in mind a lot of your support is not by giving boons out directly, but more often by either condition manipulation on allies and enemies.

You won’t necessarily be topping dps charts but you can take a hit and whittle things down pretty decently with the right gear as well.

Also, you’ll need to learn to use Death Shroud in context to the build and situation…on condition builds it is often best to flicker in and out of it just to use one of the abilities or to ablate a large incoming hit from an enemy. (especially since you have no inherent method of generating a vigor buff other than transforming the right incoming condition.)

Bhawb.7408:

Staff marks can do a lot of damage to a burrow, and give quite a bit of help since they will CC the first few things out. If you put them right on top of the burrow they will damage the burrow itself, once things come out and trigger the mark.

This. Staff is great for general purpose use anyways, and you can get around the marks not triggering on objects like Bhawb said or by kiting a mob over to the marks to hit them all at once with the power based AE component of the marks.

Main issue I found was making sure not to stand still at all due to the graveling knockdown spam. Necros just don’t get access to enough stability to make face tanking those a remotely good idea.

I’ll echo a suggestion I’ve seen earlier that if upgrading the AI/abilities of pets to dodge is not workable….

Re-balance the pets so that they are not intended to be permanently out; but instead they are selectable f1-f4 abilities that the Ranger can summon at need to perform a task, then they go poof.

An enemy can still CC/kill them if summoned at the wrong time; but the Ranger is not constantly burdened with the headache of the AI as it currently stands, as now the micromanagement comes from choosing the right pets to have loaded up and when to deploy them.

Just make sure they are powerful enough of an effect on the fight to make up for the Ranger technically not always having them as a constant DPS source anymore.

Might even be far simpler to just do it that way, and for the people that dislike pets, well, it’ll make them a tad happier too as they can choose not to use it even though they are losing out on the pet damage and abilities if they don’t.

Adding more buttons that the player has to fire off with perfect timing to make the pet useful would not help. And increasing their stats runs the risk of god-mode.

So what’s left? AI and abilities.

AI upgrades can be tricky, as minor increases can tax server resources exponentially. It might be better to simulate good AI with abilities that involve no real decision making for the AI or player.

Example: Give them an endurance bar. If you can’t upgrade the AI to allow them to perceive an incoming attack and then dodge it like a player can, just give them a passive ability to ablate incoming damage while they still have endurance left. Ablating damage of course drains endurance. It does not have to be a perfect and faithful reproduction of the dodge mechanic in order to give the same end effect in game play. (maybe an invisible and non-corruptible version of the Aegis boon that has a 1 second recharge that also removes pet endurance when it applies initially on the pet, and does not reapply if there is not endurance to fuel it?)

As far as melee pets not being able to reliably melee; give them a pounce/charge/swoop attack that shares the same DPS as the regular auto-attack, but put a cool down on it to keep a comfortable balance between perfect tracking and pointless. No decision making on the part of the AI need be done at that point either if it is just on the rotation list.

Leash range settings: allow the player to input an integer value that controls the maximum distance a pet will wander from the player before auto sprinting back to them.

Setting it short enough might allow a player to basically yank a pet out of a potential AE a mob is doing if they dodge early enough and the leash range is short enough.

Give pets an inherent evade ability that auto fires with 100% perfect timing, but put a cool down timer (3-5 secs maybe fore starters) on it so that if you leave a pet in the hot zone too long it’ll get still get killed, just not as fast.

Or just just give them auto evade, but an actual endurance stat to cap their dodges to the same end effect; and it makes vigor finally useful to them too.\

The AI does not really need to be smart in implementation, just in the emergence of design. If the player knows the pet has a full end bar and will auto dodge the first two attacks, that can be planned around but does not grant immortality to the pet either.

Coffietire.2783:

I think we need the torch. Necromancers use fear and fire is scary, makes sense.

Torch would be nice as an offhand with a necrotic green fire effect and access to Burn and maybe an extra Fear.

Bleed is the red headed step child really. You’d hear a lot less complaints about condition damage being low if you doubled the base damage coefficient but halved the base duration.

You’d have bleeds that were far more dangerous because they’d get in far more DPS before getting cleansed, and more effective DPS in 25 stacks.

Burns do pretty nasty damage as is, and poisons…well, you don’t really use those for the damage.

Softspoken.2410:

Mostly it’s visual changes for me. EDIT- Actually I should come clean on this. It’s visual changes as well as allowing for utilities and elites to still be available, and the hope of healing going to your regular life bar. I’ve seen enough remakes of Death Shroud that I’m burned out on the idea of trying to re-imagine its skills. Frankly at this point of the game’s life, I don’t think I’d change its actual functionality much as a dev.

Hitting DS now alters your skillbar, instead of replacing it with a Downed-style UI. You could possibly add ghostly green effects, as inspired by how a guardian’s virtue of justice causes those blue fire effects.

• Since everything else is in place, all boons / buffs / debuffs / conditions / control effects are still visible in the standard places.
• Functionality change: You can receive healing while in Death Shroud. This is a strict buff, but I’m tired of feeling like Regeneration and other constant heal effects are wasted on me.
• Instead of the single long bar for life force, your health circle is covered in a translucent green coating that fills / empties similarly to regular health. It also shows a static life force total. Your regular health level would still be visible behind it, (possibly darkened) but the exact total is then hidden for the sake of UI space.
• When not activated, your life force total would still be shown as a bar above your 1-5 skills. It fits with the general location of class mechanics, and keeps it easy to read.
• Your first five skills are replaced with the current death shroud skills. You could add a fifth, I guess, but frankly I don’t want to go there.
• Your heal skill is visible, and usable, whether or not you are able to regain health. If the skill won’t regain health, the 6 skill should have a heavy, obscuring green/black border while in Death Shroud. The timer should still be visible though.
• Functionality change: Utility skills and elite skills are visible and usable. Any skill that would normally be cancelled by entering death shroud (Spirit Walk, Lich Form, etc) will now cancel death shroud on use, placing death shroud on full recharge. These skills might also get a unique UI effect to symbolize that they’d cancel it, but this doesn’t seem as necessary as for the heal skill.

My major worry is that these changes would make it too much like an Elementalist attunement visually, and personally I’d like to distance it from that comparison a bit.

This. About the only thing I’d suggest on top is allowing the life blast to transfer a condition like the underwater version does. This would help make it more useful for condition builds.

Just give Lifesteal a crap coefficient like Bleed has and base the damage/health return off of Healing Power. This will help keep it in check because if you stack the hell out of Healing Power to bump up Lifesteal, you had to sacrifice increasing another stat that could have helped your offense or defense.

You could even pre-nerf a little by making the Bloodthirst trait only improve the base value of the siphons.

The xp bonus is the great thing about going to zones with a low population; sure you may not get events firing nearly as often but frequently if you go off the beaten path you can get a kitten amount of xp in the same or less time that an event would have taken up.

It’s the one big failing of the crafting system is that it is not made more obvious to newbies that discovering recipes is far better for craft xp than making an item you already know the recipe for.

Though for some people you might need a bright flashing neon sign to clue them in.

Khalifahaze.6045:

DS is fine and probably the best mechanic in the game imo (2nd health bar so nice). Only changes I could see that would make it more useful to condi necros:

1. Life Blast transfers a condi -like underwater version
2. Life Transfer also either transfers condis to enemies or takes them off allies (something along those lines).

This.

+ Allow us to use the DS abilities without having to go into 2nd HP bar mode if we wish, maybe at the cost of slightly more life-force used for the benefit of not being locked out of our utilities and important combat information.

You can get away with using Staff to level all the way to 80 if you want. The utility it provides is good for almost any build you care to try.

or more ways to apply chill and cripple at least- enough that even if the enemy has a cleanse ready we can have a chance at keeping them in range.

Or a chance to get vigor when struck maybe?

Lore mainly; Risen are products of Zhaitan’s corruption.

Necro minions are assembled from life force and raw materials present nearby. Similar results, but far less “ebil” than directly enslaving a corpse.

Dark Path is unreliable enough that I’d say a large number of Necromancer players don’t bother using it as a pursuit skill; the conclusion being that if it doesn’t get used as such, then it effectively does not count as such.

Edit:

Now if the chill duration was longer or (preferably) the base recharge shorter, it might see more use as a gap closer/pursuit skill.

edit: This of course does not address the issue that many Necromancer players may not want to close to melee range. So it gets relegated to niche use.

Raincrow.1840:

Overkillengine.6084:

The time some people spent agonizing over trying to get every single use out of a tool would often have been better spent just buying the max possible tool they can equip and getting jiggy with it. Time = money.

And I say that as the kind of skinflint that will pay attention to material costs and calculate out if it is cheaper to buy gear from the AH to salvage for mats instead.

So doesn’t this sort of show how annoying the system really is?

I mean if you’re willing to pay six times the price for a tool, whether you need that level or not, because you don’t want to bother with the system in place, what does that tell you about the system itself?

I would not be surprised if the tradeoff between time and maximum non time-input resource efficiency happened to be a deliberate part of the current design.

Either you get to maximize your time potential by just buying the best tool you can use, or you spend time instead obtaining swapping out the lowest usable tools for a node tier.

Either way, a gold sink.

Edit: and before someone starts getting upset about a gold sink, these can be good things, as they help curb inflation, since there is no actual practical limit on production sources other than time spent.

Putrid Mark from staff is another option for moving self inflicted conditions to enemies.

Because it sucks.

And it will always suck; unless the hamstrung AI most mobs are stuck with are revamped into something more reactive and lifelike, and the very mechanics of the ability and the spawned minion itself are revised.

Add in that it also foists aspects of a particular play style (minion master) that some will hate with a rabid passion no matter what (see also: Ranger and complaints about being stuck with a pet.) and you have a wonderful recipe for the steaming pile of discontent this ability generates.

The time some people spent agonizing over trying to get every single use out of a tool would often have been better spent just buying the max possible tool they can equip and getting jiggy with it. Time = money.

And I say that as the kind of skinflint that will pay attention to material costs and calculate out if it is cheaper to buy gear from the AH to salvage for mats instead.

I’d be happiest with Longbow; fits the type of archaic martial theme Guardian has, the class already has a longbow summons. (Ideally it would have some of the same options – ally condition removal and healing arrows, maybe foe-fire burns).

I just want a ranged option that isn’t some pansy caster weapon. I’ve got alts for when I’m in a mood to run around in cloth waving fancy sticks.

….I know I’m probably beating a dead horse, but I’d really like a non magic themed ranged weapon, like longbow or shortbow. I’d even take rifle if I had to. My Norn Guardian really doesn’t fit the whole finger wiggling at the enemy thing.

change Reanimator – > “whenever a minion dies, a Jagged Horror spawns at that location. Jagged Horrors have retaliation.”

Then swap it out with something like Dark Armor, making it an optional trait.

Minion masters get something good to take that helps make minions useful even when they kitten and get splattered.

Non-Minion masters aren’t shoehorned into a minion trait.

Win-win.

For that example to really hold water, condition damage would have to be able to crit; power damage would have to have an arbitrary dps cap that any single target can receive; and there would have to be a plethora of invincibility skills that only affects power based damage that every class has access to.

exact same broken stealth + burst mechanics

/hijack
It is disappointing to see the step backwards in this regard from GW1 to GW2. Every game I’ve played that has tried that has had major pvp balance issues as well as pve balance problems for the classes given that combo. They either faceroll or suck butt.

I love how furious Necromancers get about minor traits. Several classes have useless minor traits they ignore to get Major traits or stat points. Why is Necromancer special?

People get so furious they have minion skills at all; but reanimator is not broken, not useless, and the only downside to it is that it triggers character voiceovers.

Oh the delicious ignorance. Educate yourself before opening your mouth and making yourself flame-bait please. We’re already full up on things to be irritated about in this sub-forum without someone coming in and spouting off nonsense.

I don’t want Reanimator disabled, I want it moved to an optional slot so that those wanting to run an effective and/or non MM build are not forced to deal with the vagaries of short bus AI and content designed to punish having pets.

I want that trait left in the game as a glaring example so that they and no one else ever forgets about it and repeats the same mistake again.

• Condition Damage vs Direct Damage
  Power/Precision reliant damage frequently outclasses condition DoT by a large margin in practice. This is not Necromancer specific, but it does seem to affect this profession by a disproportionate amount thanks to how many Necromancer skills rely on conditions in some manner.

• Non functional traits and/or traits that have barely perceptible effects.
  The disappointingly huge thread list of Necromancer bugs has a pretty detailed list of these.

• Death Shroud
  This ability interferes greatly with many builds thanks to it locking you out of your normal skill bar when in use, and does not even come close to benefiting the various functioning builds in any sort of equivalent manner. I’m not sure any other profession gains the same degree of benefit from using their class mechanic as little as possible.

copypasta AI from the regular pve mobs = necro minions and ranger pets should have a special ed helmet pasted on them as a warning.

digiowl.9620:

When single direct damage attacks can land in the neighborhood of 15k, i am not so sure. A landed condition is potential damage, not realized damage like a direct damage blow is. To get 15k out of a bleed stack it would need to run for several seconds.

Also remember that condition damage do not translate 1:1 into actual damage done. Bleed get only 5% of condition damage as a increase, or about 5 for every 100 (exotic gear tops out at about 101 pr item so a full set of 6 would give about 30 extra damage). Fire and poison do not stack in intensity, and while confusion is 3 times as effective as bleed in PVE, it gets cut in half in PVP.

Never mind that direct damage increases for each extra toon, while conditions top out once the stacks are filled.

This. Condition damage has a hellacious amount of limiters present in the game compared to regular damage. Condition gear is cheap on the TP for a reason.

It’s possibly the worst trait in ALL games.

Ever.

Edit: and just so anyone reading what I said, Dev or otherwise, does not interpret what I said as hyperbole, let me clarify- You could replace this trait with a trait from another class that does not trigger off anything a Necro could possibly ever do, or just left as a blank spot with nothing in it, and right now as things stand, it would be an overall improvement.

Yes, I came back just to lambaste this trait. I hate it that much. It’s crud.

No sub fee. Just roll something else. Maybe Anet will start fixing the glaring imbalance issues and bugs, maybe they won’t and they’ll end up with a game where basically only 3-4 classes get any real playtime amongst the population.

Meh.

-Adjustable Leash range: Allow the player to set a max range the pet will stray from their master. This would help with keeping the pets out of AoE’s by forcing them to follow the Ranger and mainly only hit targets within the immediate vicinity of said Ranger, thus helping them stay alive.

-Inherent stat scaling: on top of BM bonuses, implement a scaling bonus to an individual pet’s stat scheme based on the overall power of the Ranger’s gear. For example, a bear would become even far more durable than a canine, or feline, etc. (This would also help pets become like most other skills in that increasing your stats helps make them more effective in some way.)

If a Ranger is forced to have pets and be dependent upon pets, then they need to actually be powerful enough to compensate for the crap default AI foisted upon them.

In general this whole area just needs more things to do to progress the heart because if the spirits start bugging out, there is very little left to do other than compete for whatever portals spawn.

Hieronymus.2146:

Good evening, my fellow Minion Masters.

Allow me first to apologize for stating a possibility, a potential fix, that may be, but alas, may be not, just as well become to be.
I do, like many of you, appreciate the the crazy AI of our minions every day routine, like watching our Minions decide that they are OUR masters; the security of the familiar, like when our Golem claps happily to the mobs beating on their masters, the tranquility of repetition, like watching our minions watching us as WE attack.
I enjoy them as much as any bloke.

But in the spirit of commemoration, thereby those important events of the past usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful bloody struggle, a celebration of a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 15th, a day that is sadly not given any credit as a day of possibility, and think and hope about it, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are of course those who do not want us to speak. I suspect even now, orders are being shouted into telephones, and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.

Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with our Minions, isn’t there?

Cruelty the injustice in pretending we don’t exist by forum monitors, the intolerance and oppression, when our threads where we write our words are deleted.

And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.
How did this happen?

Who’s to blame?

Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it.

I know you were afraid.

Who wouldn’t be?

You’re outnumbered by them.

Bone minions, Flesh Golems, Jagged Horrors, working as intended.

There were a myriad of coding problems which conspired to corrupt the reason and rob your minions of their functioning AI. And make them the Master and you the minion.

Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you fogot that you are the master.

So in the end, they have never promised you order, never promised you peace, and all you needed to do is be silent, and give your obedient consent, that this is not a bug, that this is working as intended.

Last night I sought to end that silence. Last night I destroyed my Golem, to remind myself of what I had forgotten. I had him charge various mobs and placed copper wagers on his victory or defeat.

So now, for more than a few days a great DEV wished to embed the 15th of November with a NEW HOPE.
His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives.
So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of our minion’s AI remain unknown to you then I would suggest you allow the 15th of November to pass unmarked.

But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me one week and a half-ish from tonight, outside the fountain of Lions Arch, and together we shall give them a 15th of November that shall never, ever be forgot.

But will we get Guy kittenes masks in the BL store?

Edit: Seriously? F A W K E S is censored on this forum?

Damage taken while up doesn’t bleed over into downed.

Death Shroud used to be a special downed state for Necromancers.

This makes it not surprising to me that Death Shroud can ablate a larger hit than it has points left.

…so unless the Devs decided to change it; working as intended most likely.

+1 on the please replace/remove.

It has so many drawbacks right now that it is a net negative trait to have.

Just to belabor it for any Developers reading this thread:

1) Not everyone wanting to spec for more defense wants to run a minion build.
2) The minion on its own merits is sub par (and that is being nice) thanks to summon time, damage output, and life expectancy.
3) Minion AI in general can be interpreted as Artificial Idiocy right now.
4) Not being able to control when you have a minion out ranges from annoying to basically griefing your team in certain dungeons.

Actually, with a decent toughness and vitality, I can often flicker in and out of DS to soak damage and not need the heal for every single fight.

Almost like gear matters there.

Fights ‘harder’ than that are usually only hard due to CC or massive spike damage flying around, but good luck using anything much less a heal then as a necro.

Vitality isn’t as overrated as healing power is from my experience. Having enough HP to survive a fight without putting a heal on cool down seems to work out better.

Though I would not mind condition/toughness/healing gear either…..at least toughness and healing power seem to have a better synergy than condition/precision does.

Another facet to the issue….

Most conditions take time to deal their damage, which is a double whammy on top of most good condition stat gear having a large defensive hole of some sort, which further reinforces condition damage as being sub-par compared to direct damage in practice.

Outside of jagged horror none of the minions have a self bleed/degen.

Outside of the Golem, none of the minions seem to regen either.

4) Additionally, nobody likes to go from 80% > dead simply because they got condition focused in pvp, even while managing to escape.

If people actually had a good reason to take more condition removal, there might be less omgwtf levels of burst dps flying around thanks to reassigned utility slots.

The stack limit is arbitrary and unfair. Why should it not be OK to die from a condition focus given that method gives you more time to react and address it, while a burst dps focus usually ends up with you being splattered before you can react?

One can get Power/Toughness/Vitality gear…..

But there is no Condition Damage/Toughness/Vitality gear.

Seems rather unfair. My ideal build uses as little Precision or Healing Power as possible given the low returns on my abilities for those stats, but if I want to emphasize Condition Damage, I’m stuck taking gear with stats that are sub par at best.

striker.3704

That would make the necromancer too much like the mesmer and really take away from the class. It’s also an easy cop out solution.

A real solution to fixing the problem is to:
1. fix AI
2. make the minion master trait actually decrease the minion active cooldown
3. undo the “transformations kill all minions” crap (at least for elites and moa form)

I’d like Necromancer minions to work properly myself, but honestly given how long it will likely take to make the right fixes……..I’ll take “working reliably” over “unique and distinct”.

They could still have an activated ability that could be fired after summons which would still distinguish them from mesmer illusions.

I honestly don’t know how they are going to fix minions dying instantly upon mode/form change…as I can see why they should die in order to prevent someone from effectively having 15 skills active instead of the 10 we are supposed to be limited to along with everyone else.

Edit: Which means that any other mode or form change will cause this as a consequence….

So either we get stuck with long recharge permanent minions that croak the moment we get Moa’d or otherwise have our skillbar replaced, and then have to wait out a long recharge.

Or we ask for a shorter recharge to bypass the random uselessness periods and give up something to compensate.

drop group and restart dungeon.

Marks, Wells, and a decent amount of toughness and knowing when to DS dance to either soak a burst or apply extra conditions/cc tend to counter most of the fotm thief builds fairly well.