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Sigil of Fire only has a 150 AOE radius though that’s not going to hit even as much as a traited mark.
No dedicated healer is what contributes to this I think. As with more healing coming in toughness would become far more valuable, and even vitality too in terms of a bigger cushion.
Dodging is also too good, and mobs attacks too obvious. It’s understood they wanted fights to be dynamic and for you to react to monster’s attacks, but most are too slow and far too predictable. Many more faster attacking creatures, but doing less per hit, would make less of an all or nothing aspect to defensive combat, and up the value of toughness and vitality.
Can someone explain to me how conditions are relevant at all at the moment?
I mean, almost any class has removal that clears basicly every condition let alone allows a condition to be applied longer then a second or two.
And the more people that get together the worse it gets. Necro is heralded as being good in zergs, but in zergs conditions don’t last for squat.
Here’s just a typical WvW vid someone put in a matchup thread the other day, but the thing I paid attention to is how rapidly conditions fall off the guardian here, just about every single one is cleansed within 3 seconds during the Keep Lord fight (around 10 minute mark). You don’t see one bleed last 5 seconds even. Anet should wake up and realize the sad state of effectiveness of conditions in this game and how quickly they become a non-factor in group play.
All these suggestions about burning being activated by rather random passive stuff… not really a help to us in the manner of being able to help cover other conditions when we need them.
Something like the way chilling darkness works, where the burning is attached as a rider to a specific skill, that would be far more useful.
When you Poison a foe, you also burn them for 3 seconds, etc. Or whenever you use a specific skill, flash Death Shroud, you burn them. Something in our control, not at the mercy of RNG, or based on when an enemy decides to do something to us.
The big problem with facetank defense is it lack skill variability.
If a Necromancer’s primary defense is just a big fat health pool, then more pseudo health in the from of Death Shroud, what separates a great Necro from a poor Necro?
Positioning can help a lot, but still, you are going to eat damage at similar rates regardless of skill when focus fired, to a far greater degree than other classes. And it really caps the ceiling at which skilled play can extend how effective you are as a player.
Other classes that get more active ‘anti-burst’ defenses, which are on cooldowns, and allow for mobility escapes, or outright damage avoidance: Invuln, blocking, lots of Endurance, will increase the skill cap, because great players can, with good timing, mitigate or avoid enormous amounts of damage more than poor players, who use their skills sub optimally. Necro is too based on the idea of just eating the damage.
Our defense needs to not just be a bigger bucket, but rather a bucket that can refill itself better.
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If we could heal normal health while in DS it would help a lot on attrition. Right now DS is a very poor team skill, because you lose not only any of your own regen or life stealing, but any healing fields your team does.
Necro has to build up his regular life as well as his life force again every time he exits DS, its a lot of upkeep within a specific window.
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When KN and YB moved down and still had good fights with CD, and now looks like with EB as well, it started to look like Mag is just an odd duck in strength/population.
A little too big for the old T3, which puffed up their points, but not really strong enough to compete with the big boys in T1, T2. Yet it seems that is where the new system is most likely to shuffle them.
Every server gets stuck in these tough situation ruts. Should try to depopulate a little and sink back down to the great cluster around T4 which has about 6 similar strength teams. Otherwise, might be in for more humble pie.
Another good match. I think it could have been even closer, but seemed like KN went for 2nd this morning, choosing to zerg YB BL after CD’s prime already did it a few hours earlier, instead of going for CD, which just might have created a 3 way photo finish.
Should be interesting to see if Anet pairs us again now.
Don’t see the value in Celestial at all. Not only is healing power weak for Necro’s, but our base damage on attacks is too low for +Critical Damage to be worth much of anything. If you are Carrion based its even worse because your Crit % will be so low. By far the worst damaging stat for us outside melee builds, even if you are getting better ratios on trinkets. The precision isn’t that great either without full Rabid/Earth Sigil setup.
This matchup has been so close and I’m loving it. I even looked back through the history of various matches and I honestly couldn’t find one this close.
We on Yaks had one this close before, vs SoR and NS, week 40. Looked like a great Tier, then a half dozen guilds from T1 piled on to Sanctum and ruined everything the next week.
YB 206 780
SoR 210 125
NS 206 044
Just too bad these are the aberration weeks instead of the norm.
The sweet spot for Sigil of Earth is very likely under 50% crit due to lost procs from the sigil being on cooldown. The more precision you get, the more diminishing returns you will see on how much bleeding is returned from the sigil. Instead could have Power that benefits all the time.
Another problem I had with the Earth Sigil, it screws you up from running an on-swap sigil on your other weapon set, because very frequently when you swap the Earth Sigil cooldown is going and your swap sigil does nothing.
The bleeding in BiP is more of a long duration pressure and utility.
There is no such thing as 30 second pressure in PVP though, not one profession in the game is going to let a condition sit on them that long. And in reality its run time may be anywhere up to 60 seconds depending on duration increases.
In PvE that works fine, PvP you are never just attacking, which is why these comparisons of DPS are nice, but not as helpful. Carrion players use their own sigil that procs on swap, and you use a full rotation including swapping, DS, and if the enemy doesn’t cleanse fear; epidemic. The only tests you can really compare (for PvP, PvE has quite a bit of auto attacking) is using full combos against golems for “perfect case” testing and seeing who kills faster.
I like to test on the veteran sPVP mobs, because the Golems can’t even survive a full rotation of both weapons. At least with terror, you can kill Svanir and Chieftan without being hit giving you clean kill time. In my tests carrions vs rabid, they both routinely died within one or two total attacks of each other, depending on random crits. It’s just about a complete rotation with every single skill used one time, except maybe scepter poison.
Comment on Geomancy vs Earth (for Rabid), I would use Geomancy in sPVP, but Earth in WvW, since the battles are so much larger on balance, being in the thick of melee is extremely dangerous for necro. Even roaming 1v1 vs close classes like ele and thief, it will frequently miss due to how they bob in and out of range, without regard to a cap circle.
That’s asking for an uber burning. But 30 seconds is a bit ridiculous. 4 stacks base at 15 seconds would be more reasonable. Even 3 it would still be a better skill in practicality.
The main point of it right now is mostly the might.
However carrion makes most of that back in white damage, and once you are off a critical build, you can put on a different sigil that, while not as good as Earth in damage added, still adds quite a lot, and in total, puts you even or ahead of Rabid, but without jeopardy of a lot of it being cleansed.
Your white damage is going to be very in question if there is weakness going around, and that is worth keeping in mind as well. The numbers tilting towards rabid are a little surprising, I wouldn’t have expected it to pull ahead, but I can believe it, (plus it supports my position).
We don’t have trouble getting conditions (like weakness) off of us though. We can deal with that. What we can’t deal with or counter is our conditions being cleansed and neutering our DPS, which rabid is much more susceptible to than Carrion.
In damage dealing tests in PVE using a more realistic rotation of skills, I could not notice any discernible difference in kill time between Rabid and Carrion. But in fighting live players, what percent time of our condition damage is cleansed every fight, that is the hard thing to theory craft, 25%, 40%? It’s surely a big factor. And far more relevant than a Scepter 1 spam test which at least for me, is something I never did in PVP, but is going to produce about the most optimal outcome for Rabid on paper, since its one of our faster attacks, meaning more bleeds.
If you are using Scepter far more often than Staff and not up against a strong cleansing build, Rabid might be ideal though.
However, it always bothered me with Rabid that so many of our traits and utilities are set up to help power, even in a condition build. I.e. Target the Weak, Strength of Undeath, and of course all our Death Shroud Skills beside Dark Path. Since going to Carrion I actually can use Feast of Corruption on the Scepter and it can hit pretty hard. I think it plays a lot more balanced.
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Mesmer was the last class released in production. Either its a case of power creep, or they just had a much more solid handle on the combat and mechanics of the game at that point and built a profession that was truly complete and self sustaining.
But it rates over favorably with some others with more obvious flaws and weaknesses.
Sure you’re not going to start hitting a target with fear nobody’s arguing that (I hope), but that 15% coupled with 20% from runes means you can get 2 ticks of fear reliably in a normal rotation without the master of terror trait, so you get the option to use that slot for something else.
From what I can tell Sigil of Paralyzation not only effects Fear, but can even take it over the +100% threshold which is normally a ceiling for duration bonus.
This can be tested by going into the mists and fearing the class NPC’s and measuring how far they run from you. They take about 2 more steps with the Sigil, as opposed to without, even when having 100% extra fear duration prior to the Sigil.
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More effective healing… pfff, please. If I heal 6k on a 20k or 26k health pool is not a game changer. Necro heals just aren’t effective in general and full rabid isn’t going to change that…
Right, not unless you are in a long team fight or zerg situation getting tons of healing from other teammates.
Just the Necro’s main heal alone, assume Consume Conditions, if you heal once in a fight, the mitigation difference between carrion and rabid is only about 800 more EHP.
However you also have over 6k more real buffer health in carrion to deal with condition damage.
Carrion amulet
82 non-critical hits doing 16,400 damage
18 critical hits doing 6,480 damage
100 bleed hits doing 67,700 damage
11.88 barbed precision doing 8,042.76 damageTotal damage: 98,622.76
Average damage: 986Rabid amulet
51 non-critical hits doing 6,018 damage
49 critical hits doing 10,407.6 damage
100 bleed hits doing 67,700 damage
32.34 barbed precision doing 21,894.18 damageTotal damage: 106019.78
Average damage: 1060To sum up, Rabid would actually out-damage Carrion’s Scepter 1 by 7.5% through Barbed Precision assuming every proc lasted the full 1 second plus the additional 13,851.42 bleed damage dealt by Barbed Precision would not be reduced by enemy armour were as the 6454.4 direct damage from carrion’s power would be subject to armour reduction.
Note: This comparison in damage is only on the Scepter 1
Hard to make a very context specific comparison like that, because in a Rabid setup you should be running Earth Sigil, or even 2 of them, and that is where Scepter 1 gains tremendous DPS for Rabid. When I was running Rabid, I figured nearly half of my damage added from precision was coming from those sigils procing.
However carrion makes most of that back in white damage, and once you are off a critical build, you can put on a different sigil that, while not as good as Earth in damage added, still adds quite a lot, and in total, puts you even or ahead of Rabid, but without jeopardy of a lot of it being cleansed.
Also wouldn’t the toughness effect on your DS HP give you more EHP from DS, thus an equivalent return similar to vitality in DS? I am not arguing VIT<TOUGH, I think for all EHP purposes, including DS, they are equal.
Toughness affects DS and therefore is equal to Vitality in DS, but only for your initial LF bar in a fight. Once you start regenerating life force, every skill regenerates at a fixed percentage, and that is where vitality pulls ahead of toughness for DS, because you get free extra life force to eat conditions, where compared to normal heals, you heal in fixed amounts which makes toughness gets better and better due to it giving back more EHP, in DS it does not.
They have suggested they are looking at our cast times, doubt these would become instant, but maybe a reduction.
You can say one thing though, it’s a real challenge. Pretty much for any player not playing Mesmer, Thief, or still Ele is pretty good. Anyone playing those 3 who boast of roaming in WvW are on easy-mode and its pretty amusing they think they are accomplishing something hard.
You forgot BM Ranger.
I know they are beastly, but actually don’t see many in WvW. Think most are in sPVP? I did run into a great one once and it was very unpleasant, before the empathetic bond nerf which was even more nightmare vs condi.
Burning looks like a single target or 1v1 aid mostly, which we need, its not going to do much to increase our already potent AoE damage, because it runs so fast on most all skills, it is unlikely to be spread via epidemic more than a second or so. Nor are we likely to get a version that hits everyone on any single ability.
We need more conditions to cover our bleeds that’s a definite. But we need lower cast times on what we already have, and more escape/mobility/sustain even more.
So perhaps they should work on those points first. I suspect all these necro changes will be phased in over a couple patches though, and not dumped on all at once. This will give them time to tweak the later ones in a way to fill up remaining gaps in our design.
It’s not really a case where Necro only needs help on one side, offense or defense, we need help on both sides. So burning is a start, but not the end solution by itself for sure.
As primarily a WvW player, I feel wells shine in one place and one place only. And that is zerg portal bombing, or where two sides commit to a clash on one point, either forced terrain, like in a lords room, or open field head on engage sort of like you see in setup GvG events. This is the only place they are really guaranteed to hit a lot of people who aren’t obviously aware to get out of them quickly.
But its just too situational for that to take up 4 of our utilities spots, and generally you are only going to get one use out of them in such a fight. So even if cooldowns were cut down by say 33%, wells would not get more powerful even in these ideal circumstances, because their prime effect would still be on the initial engage or clash, and they would not likely be relevant the same way 25 or 30 seconds later, just like they aren’t now at 45 or 60.
At their current cooldowns, they should last probably 8-10 seconds. However the whole idea of one-off fight style skills on a sustain/attrition class is kind of oxymoronic in the first place.
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I roam occasionally, more seeking out lone camps and such than for solely fighting players, but that comes with it. It’s a tough life, with massive odds stacked against a Necro roamer. The great thing though is that probably 50-75% of roamers are pretty bad, relying on class mechanics of the top 2 or 3 roaming classes to win fights for them, and when they run into someone that doesn’t go down in a few seconds, they often over engage and can’t get out before being killed.
The better ones run away if they start to lose, and the best ones will beat you simply based on superior class mechanics and ability to reset fights endlessly. GW2 will never have a healthy roaming scene unless Anet cleans up class balance.
You can say one thing though, it’s a real challenge. Pretty much for any player not playing Mesmer, Thief, or still Ele is pretty good. Anyone playing those 3 who boast of roaming in WvW are on easy-mode and its pretty amusing they think they are accomplishing something hard.
We’ve got potential for massive regen uptime as condition spec but it’s incredibly awkward compared to how easily other classes get their defensive utility.
Main problem with regen is that without proper burst avoidance, which other classes have, its a drop in the bucket to the massive damage you are forced to eat.
What does Necro do to handle burst? Jump into death shroud, then boom, your regen is useless.
Other professions, while they are stealthing, blinking, blocking, invuln, zipping away on RTL, they are still getting those regen upticks.
Our defense mechanism actually works against normal sustain mechanics.
Our access to burning better not be crit-based, hitting like a wet noodle is not worth it.
I find mesmers far worse than thieves or ele’s even. Haven’t fought many alone since going over more to carrion but as a rabid condi necro you have no direct damage or burst to kill any of their illusions, which makes fighting them at a distance or kiting a big pain. Hoping with beefier Life Transfer and Marks it will matchup better.
There’s been a lot of people trying hard in CD.
This is why Anets rating system is really pretty poor. A server’s true strength gets derailed based on that every server probably has a sizeable population of fair-weathers that only come out when things are going well. And if you lose several weeks in a row, or get locked into matchups that look over after a couple days, maybe 30% of your WvW population stops playing that week and deflates your rating. Where if they were just in a competitive match, they would keep playing.
WXP was supposed to be an incentive to keep people coming out regardless I’m sure, but I think there might need to be more rewards still.
This week has been very good and competitive, but who knows what will happen now for next week. In the long run the randomization should help get the ratings more correct though.
Personally I only see an advantage in taking Carrion if you plan to avoid Undead runes. Undead runes a very compelling reason to run full rabid.
The percentage of condition damage from toughness on the runes is so low, I’m not sure it’s that decisive of a factor. 5%, so that’s only 5 extra condition per 100 toughness. I don’t use Undead either way, but even if you did, switching full Rabid to Carrion, you are only talking losing 20 or 30 condition damage, which is like 1 or 2 at most ticks of damage on bleeds.
Zerker thieves can hit me for 7-8k on a backstab, with 1800 toughness. With base toughness in Carrion its going to hit a lot harder, and my heals are not going to make up for that with my very poor sustain.
I recently went from Rabid to Carrion (not full, about 75%), and you can definitely notice the difference, but you also have a lot more health to absorb such hits. Your initial health pool will handle the damage exactly the same in the long run.
Healing is where Rabid excels but it may not be as much as some think. In figuring for a fight where you heal one time, as well a few regen’s, let’s say 8000 total health healed, the difference in mitigation saved from Rabid is only about 1000 more health. Which will of course start getting negated by condition damage. Necro’s can get a lot of conditions off them, but quick ones like burning and confusion will often get through no matter what, and burning is pretty painful.
Carrion is giving you a bit more sustainability in Death Shroud as well since it refills on fixed percentage.
On the balance, I don’t find a big difference in survivability between the sets, I think Carrion vs Rabid is far more about the Power vs Precision.
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More skills hard to balance because of the stupid conquest only sPVP mode.
Everywhere else they are gimpy, or even more gimpy. One easy change might be to make the durations last longer, say 50% longer, in PVE and WvW.
When they first made the changes to low level zones, where you could go back to lower areas and still get drops at your level, it sounded great. And seemed to work well at the start. Go anywhere, do anything, explore the world, and have a chance for fairly consistent income and resource acquisition.
Then slowly more and more nerfs, to the point now it doesn’t even pay to do the max level events and zones. Its feeling more like work just to maintain basic upkeep on your character.
Very simple, right now running any content that isn’t first time doesn’t feel rewarding due to lack of loot and treasure.
Considering new content only comes out maybe once a month, and is short-lived, its not good enough.
You kill 5 enemies, very typical only one drops loot. And you very rarely ever see a rare or exotic anymore. Even after doing 4-6 events and killing 100 of enemies.
Feels like your time is being wasted. The loot system is de-incentivizing you to just play the game normally, and explore the world. It’s a shame.
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Pretty sure Putrid Mark moves all conditions, regardless of how many allies, only to one opponent. Otherwise be like a little ally based epidemic, I wish.
Reanimator and Protection of the Horde both need to go. Hopefully they are two of the traits getting axed in the new changes.
They do seem to work for fear, but only really worth it if you are going warhorn as well. It’s not enough on its own unless to ditch dagger unless you already like that basically melee range style fighting the warhorn is setup for.
Do any Necro’s run these, or have experimented with them?
I just threw them on in the mists, and notice I get 7 ticks of burning with the 6 pc bonus at 50% condition duration. Not sure how this adds up as the tooltip says only 3 seconds base of burning applied in aoe around you upon every heal, but its definitely 7 ticks.
That adds up to about 4400 burning damage every 25 seconds at ~1200 condition damage. Seems very competitive with other runes, and might be especially good with a bleed bombing close in build that using stuff like weakening shroud and geomancy runes.
When we get our new access to burning trait mentioned by the devs, the 15% burn duration in these runes could be further symbiotic, depending on how long our burning will actually last.
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I suspect YB, KN, CD and SoS are all pretty close in terms of population and strength. So any of these servers thrown together should produce pretty good matches, but others moving up or down have more trouble making a good match.
Mag was a little too big for T3, but not near strong enough for T2, so just an outlier server that doesn’t really fit with others at the moment.
Earth sigils do not stack so i guess that when you say often seeing 3 stacks of bleed on one hit,you mean the bleed from the scepter attack+the bleed from the sigil+the bleed from the trait ?
2 earth sigils bring 84 % chance to proc a bleed instead of 60% if you have just one.
Isn’t there a Cod4 player called Pendragon ?(i’ve already seen your name somewhere ^^).
I’m sure its a common name, don’t play cod. Yes, on the 3 stacks being from the scepter/barbed precision/sigil.
This was a bug before with runes, hopefully its not back. I’ll do a test on my setup.
They are working for me. Both in my normal setup, 10% Lyssa, 40% Food, 50% Master of Terror, and then I switched out my Lyssa runes for Necromancer x6 in the Mists and still working there. 2 seconds Fear, 2 Terror ticks.
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Their philosophy for us is to be dangerous once we are engaged and to lock people down. But we can’t lock people down or prevent them escaping if we don’t have anti-CC options ourselves. They can just punt us around, and escape or control a fight.
So yes either more stability or better stun breakers are really required to make the philosophy not a joke.
Rabid can do as much as Carrion in damage, but the problem is, its mostly more condition damage and you have to wait for it. Usually 7-8 seconds for bleed proc to run from Earth. It can be cleansed or the fight can just end before you get the damage.
With a condi build already so dependent on condi damage, the direct damage from power is a better balancer I have come to feel.
Also on staff, which is used a lot in WvW, carrion is better because of all the aoe, the extra power helps every single target damaged. While the earth sigil goes on cooldown as soon as it procs on one person within the 5 aoe limit on your marks.
And about half your precision damage is dependent on those bleed procs. Unless you are running like 100% bleed duration, then you are getting a nice boost from Barbed Precision which has no cooldown and usually no fear to cleanse since it does all its damage in 2 seconds. But I find 100% bleed overkill because most of your other bleeds will never run their distance in pvp.
Where Rabid wins out is on your Scepter auto-attack, it is really quite good with 2 Earth Sigils, often proccing 3 bleeds in one hit. It’s low base attack makes power not do much for it. But I found not that many situations where I’m just sitting having to spam Scepter 1 on an enemy, other than lazy PvE. With Death Shroud, and 2 weapon sets, a Necro usually always has something better to do.
If you run carrion there is still a way to pseudo create rabid, and that is flash DS for the Fury proc. Risky to do, but if you are popping off a doom anyway, will give you that precision back for a few seconds for your regular attacks.
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The way they did stealth was one of the worst design decisions Anet made. Not just because its hard to balance, but because without detections skills, there is no counter play or skill based preemption to it. It’s just all reacting to the thief dictating the fight. Very uninteresting and unfun mechanic to fight against.
If you are aren’t going to have detection for stealth, it should act as no more than an opener or maybe one extra stealth to escape a fight, but not constant spamming in and out a whole fight.
Conquest as the only game mode kind of hides some of these flaws, because to compete for points the thief must be contest a very small area. But everywhere else in the game the flaws show. And if they ever introduce more modes of sPVP, which they should as conquest is dull and repetitive, it will stand out as an issue even more.
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Now that burning is no longer off limits to us, they really need to add it to Signet of Spite, which is way too gimpy for its long cooldown.
You are significantly underestimating terror with enough duration to do 2 ticks on top of having 9 bleed stacks. That deals 4 k damage in 2 seconds, add another thousand on top of that with burning. This is not mentioning some of the direct damage from your abilities during that time.
Fear can be both cleansed and removed with stun break, so often doesn’t even run its course.
Anyhow unless they are actually removing terror as a trait, which would be crazy, there’s no reason to think they expect us to choose.
Class needs more robust condition damage not to be worried about things overlapping.
Our problems are not build diversity. We don’t need another build option that is simply a choice no better than we already have. We already have some of the best build diversity in the game. Our problem is our top builds are not as desirable for roles as other class builds (say Engi condi over Necro condi). So they need to be made stronger, rather than some kind of give and take away tradeoff.
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It’s not going to replace Terror, which means we will be able to have that and Burning. No big deal, the burst on Terror even with 100% duration is not even close to approaching what Thieves, Warriors and Mesmers can put out.
A couple seconds of burning is not going to make us death dealers. I have pretty high condi and I think burning only does high 600 something damage per tick.
DS 5 is supposed to be a ‘new’ condition though, doubt it would also do burning, prob be OP then.
with my engi I use it a lot and its my prime condition, but it somehow doesnt fit with necro as a class.
Flames from hell ? or something like that…
Yeah Dark Fire, they can think of any fluff thing that fits.
Burning is great, fast ramp up damage. I’m liking this.
Where is that trait gonna be I wonder though, if its far down a line then it might be too build defining to get easily
Look at all those cool an skillful things you can do with those neat classes!
Combo fields mean literally nothing to Necros, as all their fields are undesirable, and all their finishers are awkward and unusable/impractical ; ~ ;.
I just wait for a warrior to drop a banner, then steal it and combo blast!