Guild Wars 2

Bhawb.7408:

Sandra Martino.3870:

Why would they Samhayn? They can still leap/teleport/stealth/charge away when they realise they are in danger. We would still have no ways to finish the job which i think would be fair in light of the devs vision.

Because we are the only ones that think we can’t stick to targets. A lot of other players I’ve talked to mention how they feel its almost impossible to disengage from a Necro in the middle of a fight.

Thieves with SB and stealth, and Mesmers with portals are the only ones that get a guaranteed disengage. Everyone else has to work for it, and it can be made very difficult.

Maybe if they aren’t taking their anti-condition tools and no mobility skills. Trying to catch someone running a decent level of condi clearing /-condi duration is an exercise in frustration for about any class dependent on conditions to keep someone engaged.

Actually what it would do is tighten the ridiculously vast performance gap between the two extremes.

The other issue with the food is how binary it makes the performance on condition reliant builds….you are either king of the world or stuff on a rock depending on whether or not you and you opponent are using the current +40/-40 duration foods. If there is no variety it may as well just be baseline, or changed so that there actually is some variety.

This makes me wonder that with how much stability spamming goes on, and the odious ever-presence of defiance on bosses, and how detrimental to pretty much all flavors of Necro builds this is….

Might the game be better off splitting Stability into two different boons?

Example:

Stability: Immune to knockback/down, launch, immobilize, float/sink
Steadfast: Immune to stun/daze/fear

This might allow more selective application of immunities without totally negating the majority of the toolbox of the Necro.

This is what happens when you make a transformation a class mechanic. The only way to fix it I fear is to make it no longer a transformation.

Umut.5471:

robot fetish, lubricated metal.

Dem Gears.

The AOE indicators are a massive improvement over the thin lines that get missed easily in a fight that tends to have a lot of pretty effects spammed all over.

The event pop timer is better, and using a meter that fills based on how well/poor your zone is doing is an improvement over a pure dps check.

Any chance the NPC’s could shout out more tips during the fights though? Getting people to self educate ahead of time is almost impossible and in something as fast paced as this game trying to tell people what they need to know is even more impossible mid-fight.

Latency is cruel and unusual punishment..

Both the global +duration and -duration foods need a savage beating with a nerf stick; either enable outlier builds to reach unbalanced performance levels. Setting them down to +/- 10% would bring them back in line with all the other options.

The only right we have is the most important one; and that is whether or not we choose to continue to fork over money.

If you are not satisfied; then don’t. They are not going to care what you have to say after they already have your cash, so don’t bother. This is Corporate Behavior 101 folks.

It’s not the end of all things yet.

It still has decent power damage compared to the other marks that they can nerf into oblivion too.

Moving precision out of the primary slot and swapping in either power or condition would go a long way on this array.

Hell, split it into two variants; one power/cond/pre, the other cond/power/pre. Either is better than the current.

Gulesave.5073:

To make one thing clear: they cannot simply remove the condition cap.

It’s reason for being there has less to do with balance, and is much more of a technological limitation. This has been pointed out repeatedly by the devs in the past.

Conditions and boons are much more complicated code than they appear, and running too many stacks at one time across a map would bog the servers down and make the game nigh unplayable.

Removing the condition cap altogether just isn’t feasible. What they might be able to do is scale the cap according to unit.

Trash mobs can make do with a very low cap, since they don’t survive long enough to accrue many conditions in the first place. Replace their per-condition caps entirely with a single cap such as “25 stacks total, between all conditions,” and players shouldn’t even notice the change. Veterans would have a bit more, and upward from there. On higher tier foes, the per-condition cap can remain in place to encourage a balanced spread of multiple conditions.

This shift would leave room for plenty of stacks on champions and world bosses.

Another way to help make the cap less an issue is to tweak the stack amounts either by duration or magnitude; but pare down either the duration or number of stacks handed out accordingly.

For example; instead of dealing 5 bleed stacks at .05 coefficient, instead deal one bleed stack at .25.

Or, instead of a 10 second bleed stack at .05, replace with a 5 second one at .10.

Fewer stacks output to get the same damage means more latitude for multiple condition users in a group, as does shorter duration but more intense bleeds, since it becomes harder to max out the cap of 25 as often.

The base difficulty even for zerker players has to be upped because the current pve content gets faceroll easy after you learn it; which means anything other than pure damage is a waste.

Which means there may as well not BE non-zerk gear in PvE. Which is silly, and not a defensible position.

What should be happening is running higher damage setups grants an increase in completion speed in exchange for an increase in the plausible risk of failure/delays.

But that’s not what is happening even in halfway coordinated groups. The base difficulty is so low for everyone post learning a dungeon that even a couple points in survival stats are usually wasted because less damage almost always means slower completion.

This is not healthy for the long term future of a game. The ’zerker stat array itself does not inherently need to be changed, but rather the nature of the challenges a player faces in PvE. There is a reason glass cannons do not completely dominate in the other two main game modes (yet still have very good uses; and can function in non-favored environments given the right skill/mentality).

Amusingly addressing the Berserker meta with the proper content changes would actually fix a lot of Necro issues in PvE indirectly as well.

Just not perma reflection on ALL the mobs within a given area; having to basically afk through a fight blows if you don’t have enough non projectile typed skills to make an attack chain.

It’s just as irritating as making fights always permanently non melee.

Zerk or go home is only a problem in PvE.

And that is because of the nature of the opponent one faces in PvE.

If you truly want to fix it, an overhaul of the mobs is going to be required, and no going for the low hanging fruit nonsense, because the Devs will just end up hanging themselves.

Pull at least some of the people off the festival distraction teams and dedicate them to overhauling the current content so that more stat arrays are viable/desired than pure Zerk.

Some but not all the mobs are going to need their target dps output to be rebalanced to be more attrition based, whether via rapid auto attack chains or condition damage.

Some but not all the mobs will need a re-balance in their effective hit-points by reducing vitality and increasing toughness, so that power damage does not unconditionally (har!) reign supreme.

The current shortbus mob aggro rules need to be brought back closer to the old ruthless GW1 calculations where mobs by and large favored attacking close by players at low health, much like how players in pvp react to juicy targets.

And make sure that in “harder” content they start factoring in special things like immunities and rezzing the fallen for determining current targets.

Defiance in its current stat is horribad for multiple reasons and needs to go. Give the bosses and lower tier mobs abilities more akin to players; such as stun breaks and condition clears and non instant reapplication boon spam.

And if this ends up making a single boss too easy to ping pong stunlock, redesign the encounters so that there is more to it than burning down a single drooling meatsack of hitpoints to win, such as reinforcements, and encounter based on multiple hard targets, etc.

This will have the side effect of making some people relearn how to play. Soften the sting a bit by adding in an earn-able and in game trade-able token currency that allows players to swap out the stat array on a piece of their Ascended gear per token spent. Make sure you give out at least one free set of these when implementing the content redesign or you are going to have a bad time.

Fixing the problem virtually requires bring PvE design closer to PvP design; and trying to skimp on this in any way will court disaster.

If you aren’t running a dedicated wells build…

….and need defensive help Darkness or Power are good depending on what you are facing.

If you are running with a team and they are supporting you well (heh) enough that you don’t need defense of are built for sheer offense; then the Well of Suffering is good for extra AE power damage and vuln. Or Well of Corruption for boon bunker breaking.

Shadow Phage.9084:

Overkillengine.6084:

…how about putting in +pet move speed as one of the stat bonuses of BM?

Anyone wanting to make much use of the melee pets is likely to have at least some points there anyways.

Move speed isn’t really the issue. It’s that pets root themselves for their attack animations. You could make the pet move 30% faster by default, but it’d still miss most of its attacks. All it would do is get back to the target faster. Not saying that they shouldn’t have an inherent move speed advantage, just I don’t think it would actually do much for them at this point in time.

Adding either a small lunge to their attacks, as others have suggested, or removing the animation root altogether is what will probably do the most towards fixing the issue.

True, the animation rooting is pretty heinous. One can experience it by doing certain renown hearts in the Norn starting area that involve getting transformed into animals. Horribad even with a human at the helm.

…how about putting in +pet move speed as one of the stat bonuses of BM?

Anyone wanting to make much use of the melee pets is likely to have at least some points there anyways.

Something like reworking the f1-f4 slots to be low cool down summons of fragile pets whom perform a scripted set of abilities until either killed or dismissed (to reduce cool down even more). One gets killed? No biggie, summon the next. Then rework the pet traits to account for the more disposable pets.

You’d end up with something like a cross between Pokemon and a Phantasm Mesmer, and it would likely work better than reliance on a more static pet system in the current game mechanics.

digiowl.9620:

Or just drop the whole idea of siphons doing damage independent of skill damage, and just have it heal us as a percentage of damage (pretty much like the new guardian skill, but permanent).

Basically what I meant with the second option. I could see them handing out a base 2% of damage dealt siphon that scales with stats to keep it on par with 5% damage traits, and have it behave far more predictably than what they have now.

It’s been over a year of two steps forward, one step back, or in a lot of cases a sidestep and snide “l2p”.

A year of fluff events and content that seem mainly engineered to distract rather than progress.

A year of seeing sPvP focused on to the detriment of other play modes…modes that arguably have a greater population base and thus potential income.

A year of waiting on core issues for several classes to get addressed…not just this one.

A year of seeing an attrition class get its sustain/defenses gutted, and its offense buffed, then “shaving” offense and even then further reducing effective defenses. Stealth nerfs; tooltip fixes.

A year of playing it and seeing what we think.

Have there been beneficial changes? Yes; issue is not that nothing was done, it is that nowhere near enough was done while prioritizing things a large number of us could give two bowel movements about. For over a year.

A year of hype and parades.

What the hell else kind of reaction do they expect from us after this long?

No point in telling them that, they’re the sort that think they should not have to carry stunbreaks or cleanses because then they can’t carry as many damage boosting skills….

The true solution is to not give them any more money until they stop with that sort of asinine behavior.

Balekai.6083:

Overkillengine.6084:

Which is sad because the lifesteal BM gives to non MM builds are barely “decent” in pve…..but you are still better off going full offense.

I would argue against them being barely decent unless you’re constantly hitting with AoE attacks against multiple targets. The Lifesteal just isn’t there if you’re not using staff, wells with vampiric rituals and scepter/dagger. Because then when you’re hitting 5 targets, marks should be healing at least 150ish damage per cast and Wells about 400 per pulse. That’s part of the problem since siphons are balanced with AoE and multiple hit attacks in mind.

The best way to balance and make siphons effective would be to get away from a universal siphon number on traits. Instead Anet should figure out how much life and damage they want Necromancers to steal over time with varying weapons, skills and traits. Then balance each skill and attack individually with higher and lower siphon numbers per hit, taking into account their unique mechanics, attack speeds etc. That would be the most intelligent way to tackle this.

That’s exactly the situation I was alluding to; Staff+Wells vamp spec.

They need to take one of two paths; either a set amount per second regardless of how many hit, or the lifeleech needs to scale based upon the attack it rides on (if the attack is properly balanced, then the siphon is basically equivalent to a +% damage trait in effect).

Any other combo is probably too kitten easy to abuse to surpass the immortality threshold so we get stuck with the craptacular base we have now.

It’s not HP it’s life force.

HP refills upon the end of combat.

Life force…does not, and thus should not be balanced as having the same effectiveness as HP.

Don’t pop the clones at close range, and don’t attack when they have their arm up.

There, you just negated a large portion of their damage and debuffs. Feel free to /laugh at them now.

Which is sad because the lifesteal BM gives to non MM builds are barely “decent” in pve…..but you are still better off going full offense.

Ok, random thought: abandon the boon hate mechanic and just use the Necro’s decreasing HP as an inverse multiplier to the siphon amount.

The lower on health you are, the harder you siphon.

Every enemy is a threat/potential target, so yes. No reason not to count all.

Assuming an increase in the base siphon and better scaling off stats due to that; this would leave us better off against multiple non boon carrying enemies than we are now.

Just not as big a bonus as if they did have some boons.

But if you can manage to find multiple player enemies within the radius of an AE attack whom are running absolutely no boons at all; that’s like, a unicorn man. Take a picture of that kitten.

Normally yes. Unless they corrected it recently Torment sigils ignore the shared cool-down rule.

Yes my intent was to use the attack the siphon is riding on to gauge the highest possible boon count; a single target on counts the target hit, while a 5 target AE would look for the highest possible boon count and apply the siphon there, ending up with the siphon always firing on the most buffed up target hit (per second).

Keep in mind one of the reasons I suggested capping the multiplier is that it also logically applies to all other non-gear or item based siphons a Necro has access to:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Signet_of_the_Locust
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Deadly_Feast
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_Siphon
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_Leech

Combo Field: Dark × Physical Projectile < lol Staff auto. Disregard.
Combo Field: Dark × Whirl < I don’t think Necros can pull this one off.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

Overkillengine.6084:

If we were to remove the unique boon type requirement; we’d have to go with a lower scaling on the proposed Bloodthirst trait.

Because without that; 5 opponents running Lyssa/or Guardian boon spam = 5*9 bonus; resulting in a total 5.5 multiplier to the base vampiric siphon. ~176 HP/sec as long as you are attacking and hitting all 5.

It would be hilarious; but yeah probably not going to happen.

Better off asking for a higher base around 70-80 and just getting a lower multiplier per boon.

What I meant was use total number of boons but cap it using your suggestion of 9 (corresponding with the total number of boons in the game). So 5 opponents with 9 unique boons apiece still caps out at a 0.9 multiplier for the necro.

Depending on whether or not Bloodthirst would retain a base improvement to life siphoning (even in the absence of enemy boons), this would result in the following max multipliers:

Bloodthirst retains its current multiplier of 20%: max multiplier = 2.1

Bloodthirst has its multiplier reduced to 10%: max multiplier = 2.0

Bloodthirst has no base multiplier: max multiplier = 1.9

Ah OK I see what you mean; have it still count up all boons on all hit targets but the highest additional multiplier cap is +90%. (1.9 or 2.1 if we still assume a flat 20% Bloodthirst siphon increase even without boons)

Could be workable.

Well, depending on how the math works out, the removal and transfer of minion based siphon potential to the summoner would actually help minion masters stay alive even when all their minions get nuked and are at their most vulnerable.

So they get a more stable performance curve in that regard; instead of a binary suck/awesome state they have now.
————-

If we were to remove the unique boon type requirement; we’d have to go with a lower scaling on the proposed Bloodthirst trait.

Because without that; 5 opponents running Lyssa/or Guardian boon spam = 5*9 bonus; resulting in a total 5.5 multiplier to the base vampiric siphon. ~176 HP/sec as long as you are attacking and hitting all 5.

It would be hilarious; but yeah probably not going to happen.

Better off asking for a higher base around 70-80 and just getting a lower multiplier per boon.

It sounds far more complex than it really is; it’s just putting a cap on the multipliers and frequency to create much more predictable performance min and max values.

Probably the best way to get something with a baseline that isn’t pure crap without all related traits possible taken.

Or they could just tone down the amount spammable cc available to everyone else; or just make it so stuns and other cc do not duration stack.

Yeah it was towards the beginning of the year; some wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued, most of us just shrugged and went on since it was a change to make it more consistent with the rest of the game.

What I mean is you launch an AE attack; 5 targets hit, siphon calc determines there were say 6 unique boon types amongst all targets hit, applies 1.6 as the multiplier to the siphon effect, once per second.

The reason I propose a targeting limiter is to keep AE and rapid single target builds from being the default best options always; and allows the base siphon amount to finally get scaled to an amount useful to all builds regardless of delivery method.

One of the issues facing vampiric builds is the fact that the total payload is spread across 5 traits; two of which are antagonistic because they require different utilities equipped to reach peak power.

We’d be better off if they were condensed and reformed into something a bit more cohesive; like maybe 3 traits:

Vampiric (blood siphon on hit; ICD, an actual decent base value)
Bloodthirst (1.X multiplier on blood siphons based on enemy boons; applies to weapon, downed, and utility skills; does not affect food/gear/item siphons)
Vampiric Master (heal nearby allies every time you blood siphon; shout {600} range, based on amount siphoned)

Give it a cool-down; put it in their melee auto skill rotation, and if feeling frisky make a training trait that upgrades the gap closer to be similar to either:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bull%27s_Charge
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Savage_Leap

Just be sure to re-balance the damage per activation to not exceed the default auto-attack.

I can dream, kitten.

I’m amazed they have been this way as long as they have.

Hmm an another way to do a “simple” limiter is 1 siphon stack per unique boon type on enemies hit; since there are 9 boon types it when would cap out at 9 siphons per second if it had a 1 sec ICD, regardless of how many are hit by the base attack.

More people is basically a greater probability of the conditions for a maximum 9x proc to equal “yes”.

Another boon hate/sustain trait option: Remove 1 boon per hit, 1 sec ICD. Heal x hitpoints for each boon removed this way.

Thus why I suggested a siphon that scales with boons on target hit; something that should be much easier to calculate and balance while still hopefully being useful.

I know some worry that being dependent on the boons your enemy has might be an issue, but honestly in any sort of pvp format those that have them spam them as often as possible usually. It’s taken to the point that even the builds with dedicated boon stripping/corruption can’t keep up with the reapplication due to either skill cool-downs or the pulses do not happen fast enough.

So a soft counter that does not care about thwarting reapplication would be very nice.

See, if they’d just build more bosses with lower stats but with boon and condi spamming, certain builds and classes would actually be desired more often.

You know instead of the usual Warrior zerker heavy teams.

Honestly just tweaking ability cool downs would help tremendously with the whole fight reset issue. Better cool downs also technically means better life force generation as well.

It’s kind of stupid that a class touted as being about sustain has such glaring down times in their abilities. That’s about as anti-sustain as you can get.

MM sustain works by having enough personal mitigation to make the siphons and heals/regens matter without gutting your damage, since you can gear tanky and your minion damage does not suffer.

Plus minion are also always out and dealing damage (assuming no stupid AI stunts) once summoned unless you or someone else kills it; other damage utilities do not have that behavior (identified as an enemy abusing the fact that our cooldowns are long to reset a fight.)

The closest we could get to what MM’s pull off in vampiric builds is to go AE heavy as possible and/or have some way of having the rest of our team life steal for us. Right now the AE option blows goats and…..

I’m a bit against Necros becoming any more team dependent than they already are. We need something workable without having the perfect build or a team babysitting us, and I’m tired of the usual bypassing the sustain issue by zerker or condi bombing an enemy before they can react…the game is rife with this one dimensional crap as is.

So….how the hell are we supposed to apply something more than a bit unique to MM builds when it comes to lifesteal and sustain then? About the only way I could see it happening is to dramatically lower the cool downs on a lot of our abilities…..so that we can proc lifesteal more often.

Or we could be given better mitigation.

But then they couldn’t sell palette swapped skins in the gemstore!

How about giving confusion and retaliation better damage scaling but some sort of ICD on how often they can proc? Then both would be a lot better because it brings up the bottom end performance without allowing top end performance to go bonkers.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

Just throwing out a brainstorm idea here. What about a mechanic that allows us to leech the healing of others?

This would be distinct from life siphoning. Siphons would remain the active healing they are now; hit target to heal for X amount.

Life leeching , on the other hand, would be a passive skill or trait or a completely new mechanic built into the profession somehow. It could take different forms. One version may be we passively heal based on the number of boons an enemy has on them. Another option is we are healed for a percentage of the healing of an opponent.

Obviously, the numbers have to be tested and tweaked to make it balanced. For example, maybe we heal for 20% of what an opponent heals or we gain ~15 health/second for each boon on an opponent. What’s more is, this addresses the issue of scaling our attrition/sustain based on the number of opponents we’re surrounded by. One opponent, and we heal for 20% of their healing; two opponents, and we heal for 20% of the healing from each of them, etc.

Cap it at five opponents max from whom we can life leech, if necessary. Another limiter could be it only applies to opponents within X radius of the necro; further reinforcing the idea that the necro has a “kill zone” around them of which other professions must remain cognizant. Yet another limiter could be scaling the life leeching based on distance to an opponent. For example, going the “life-leech-enemy-healing” route, an opponent beyond 1200 range we don’t leech, 900 to 1200 range we leech 10% of their healing, 600 to 900 range we leech 15% of their healing, less than 600 range we leech 20% of their healing.

This addresses the issues identified above of every class being able to heal (making attrition difficult if you can’t out-damage over time the self-healing of other classes) and/or classes running away, resetting a fight, then re-engaging while we’re on cooldown and out of life force (when they return to the fight, they now inadvertently sustain us until we’re off cooldown).

This would also fit with the devs’ previous statements of necro being a class you don’t lock horns with unless you’re prepared to see the fight through to the end. We now gain sustain as a result of the battle being joined; by being in proximity to those who are directing aggression towards us.

What’s more, it’s not without counter-play. Opponents can use positioning to cut off or diminish our leeching or they can make cost:benefit choices of (a) heal now/buff up now, knowing that I’m also going to heal the necro a little bit, too or (b) keep pouring on the DPS and try to down the necro without healing myself and/or applying boons to myself.

This contrasts with the current situation in which other professions can reset a fight with a necro at will and without consequence. In the scenario I’m presenting, they can still reset the fight; that legitimate defensive counter is not removed from play. What it does, though, is impose a consequence on that course of action where currently there is none. If a player seeking to reset the fight doesn’t get fully out of range of the necro when they use a self-heal and/or returns to the fight with a bunch of boons or passive healing such as Soothing Mist, then their boons and/or passive healing benefits the necro, too.

This, in turn, puts an onus on the necro profession to increase build diversity a bit; slotting stun breakers, Well of Power, Flesh Wurm, Putrid Mark, saving Dark Path in reserve, etc. to help break stuns, cleanse CC conditions, and close gaps in an effort to stick close to an opponent so as to benefit from their self-heals, passive heals, and/or boon stacks.

Hmm, could do something a tad simpler like replace/upgrade a current vampiric trait with a trait that has siphon scaling per boon with an internal cooldown to make it once per attack/ae pulse. (Just make sure with AE’s to have it look for the max possible boon stacks in the list of targets hit to scale off of.)

Kind of a pseudo boon hate mechanic that grants more sustain the more boons an enemy is running.

Necro’s have stability. One on a well, and one on a trait.

Now whether they are practical is another story entirely.