Guild Wars 2

MarauderKing.4572:

Not quite sure why Agg is getting crap for wanting to only do a 20v20

They appear to be a guild that focuses a lot on group synergies (they don’t even recruit rangers which hurts my feelings as a Ranger Commander) and probably need that number to execute their battlefield strategies.

Wouldn’t people want to fight a guild at their full strength and capability?

Maybe some guilds have bads they don’t want to bring? But WvW is much more decided on large group capability than small strike team style fighting.

I like the idea in principle but I don’t want to see 10 little green ticks on my character every single second, if they could find a way to stack all the bleed heals per second into one siphon number, that would be peachy.

What sigils are you running. If you don’t have at least 2 Earth sigils, then I would definitely consider adding in some power instead of precision. Precision is adding split damage between direct and condi, but with full condition damage already, your damage is leveraged dangerously high into conditions, which mean in fights with high cleansing or any 1v1 build high on cleansing, it can really neuter your DPS.

Full C/P/T is also next to worthless vs siege, which can be annoying.

Thanks but, suggested this months ago.

3 way has never worked in this game as intended as a balancer. In fact more often than not, its two winning teams ganging up on the easy prey to make it even more lopsided.

Or, a lot of the matches are 2 relatively even teams fighting either a team much stronger team than them, or much weaker, which throws the week, and would be much better just with the 2 even teams fighting. 3 way is a lazy, and in this case, failed, balancing mechanic.

They want the Necromancer to not be highly mobile, but to be a class that uses conditions to prevent any mobile class from escaping.

There is too much condition cleanse in this game for this ever to become a reality. All it takes is one condition wipe and then most classes can use their disengage and are gone. Even if our cooldowns were cut in half I don’t see how this would be solved.

They need to be careful on making DS 4 too much of our sustain, because you can be interrupted out of it so easily before it finishes. Short of going 30 into SR as a staple for stability, and even then would only matter if you popped it first thing on entering DS, which is probably not ideal if its going to get stronger.

I’ve been trying Carrion for Condi after being Rabid for the longest time, damage isn’t noticeably different, though its more up front and less susceptible to cleanse. I feel more squishy without my max toughness though, heals aren’t as good.

I think either works though, perhaps even a mix, if you want to retain some crit for bleed procs. Also the perfect EHP point would be with a hybrid of the two.

Pixels.6532:

Vial of Condensed Mists Essence should be a drop from WvW. It can be rare, but it should be in there… we are fighting in the Mists after all…

Could be a random chest reward for WXP ranks as well.

Nah, your examples are still helpful I think to illustrate the math and for anyone else reading.

Necro can be complicated to figure out. Just ask Anet!

Thanks, I think I worked it out on my own after some thought, but it only opened up more brain camps as far as what you want in total, not just considering DS.

Due to the above, where DS should really shine having more vitality than toughness is in absorbing conditions, as its giving you more sustain vs them via vitality than toughness, due to the % heal.

But the weird counter point to that is DS is used almost exclusively to absorb direct damage bursts, where the normal mitigation of toughness is virtually equal if not better than vitality at helping you survive.

So the free HP gap your gaining via LF regen with higher vitality is very rarely going to be put to use where it has its biggest advantage, because you simply rarely sit in DS for long periods while conditions tick. For burning or confusion perhaps somewhat, less so for bleeds the most prevalent condi damage.

In practice it probably comes out very close to a wash. As you still have to balance your sustain time in normal form, where you want toughness for longer fights where you will be healing a lot via real health.

I would agree that build would play a big role. Power builds have more reason to want to sustain inside DS as they still do good damage in it, and then might want to consider vitality more. Condi builds don’t want DS other than a sponge for burst, and flash offense, and thus would prefer to sustain in normal form where they maintain pressure, and where toughness is going to help them more vs direct damage, and where they have plenty of means to shed conditions. Also because there is no stat gear that gives Vit/Prc/Cond, and power is wanted less than precision, which you are forced to take on if you want Vitality.

Last two posts don’t make sense to me, it doesn’t matter if 3% LF is 500 or 600 HP you still lose 3% per second regardless, or 4% untraited. And when you actually get hit in DS, your 500 DS HP with more toughness will go just as far as your 600 DS HP with less toughness, just like it does for normal HP.

Say you have more Vit, therefore 3% LF skill just gave you 630 effective DS health, well when you get hit for an attack that does 630 damage, its only going to hit my DS health for 500 or whatever the normal mitigation ratio is because I have more toughness. The LF you are generating is not better because it mitigates worse.

It’s just a second green life bar with the same mechanics of a normal life bar as far as Vit and Toughness are concerned.

Only lucid argument I can see for Vitality in DS, is it will absorb conditions even better than normal health, since you can’t clean conditions in DS. But generally if you are flashing DS that shouldn’t be a problem, just come out and clear conditions with a normal skill. If you are getting bursted to a degree that you actually have to use all your DS at once, chances are its dropping so fast that a couple condition ticks are irrelevant.

spoj.9672:

Quite a few players have necro alts, they just dont use them. Which is pretty much how its going to be for me soon.

What worries me is that when Anet looks at internal numbers they see these alts and think Necros are doing fine just because they were once created.

I think Colin once referenced something like this, that because class creation was pretty evenly split (this was a few months ago) it seemed to indicate balance was going good.

But how many are still playing them, even 80 Necro’s sitting untouched that were re rolled. How many are running dungeons with them, high level PVP, WVW – I rarely see any there.

The place I see Necros most, is casually strolling around the outside world PVE. The easiest carefree content in the game. Where someone that probably never reads this forum, nor cares about competition or balance, just like the aesthetic of running around with an army of little ugly critters. And sure, the Necro works for that, but you can’t be using numbers boosted by those type of players to say a profession is fine everywhere else, and in fact, in the places where it truly matters. In casual PVE it doesn’t matter if one prof is slightly better, at farming, at finishing an event, no one is competing for those things.

Interpret Interrupt.3824:

We all know the self poison is not an argument as that increases the necro healing power.

When you need to use your 25 second heal is not usually when the opportunity arises to Corrupt Boon. Usually its a detriment that just eats a transfer for one measly condition, or gives you about 1000 self damage.

Self corruptions are pretty close to a failed mechanic, I could live without them.

Put in the back piece Anet.

Why can’t they just do something correctly all the way ever? Always has to be a reason to try and force you into a mode you may not care for.

kailin.4905:

What it simply comes down to is how long are people at the bottom of the meta going to wait before they quit or reroll? Wack-a-mole sucks sure, when you are doing it all the time and the meta is shifting every month. But for some classes sitting at the bottom of the meta for 9 months straight sucks a lot more. Especially now that there are good tourneys and streams trying to break out balance is going to make or break weather this game gains traction as something to watch or falls off the grid. I personally would be embarrassed as a dev attending these evens and seeing that barely half of the classes included in the game are represented due to severe balance issues.

As a Necro that might consider watching a tourney to try and learn something to make me better at my class, even though I don’t do highly competitive sPVP, definitely no incentive for me if my class is never featured by the best players.

Waiting on the meta to shift, which it may never do to an acceptable level, due to inherent weaknesses in a class, is way too lazy and time taking strategy by Anet. They better wake up.

Andele.1306:

What i mean is (example only) warrior manages to get on you and you dodge after the third hit of his 100b, in that case you managed to migrate a nice bit of the damage youd have to absorb and in general can tank stray shots easier since you have to heal up for less to get to 100%, on carrion the 3 hits would do full damage, but since you are on a higher hp pool resetting fights/wasting enemy resources gives you a edge.
So going for long fights- rabid, going for skirmishes – carrion.

Ok I’m getting your point now better. Longer fights definitely favor the toughness due to more healing expected to receive.

Andele.1306:

Carrion is more hybrid and pvp survival (with how many fights get a reset), rabid is condition carry and kinda better protection vs most bursts (since it comes in multi hit abilites pretty much all the time).

Not getting the difference you are seeing between ‘survival’ and ‘burst’ sounds like the same thing. Mitigation is a percentage, so it doesn’t matter if its many hits or one big hit, you reduce the same amount.

I.e. let’s say my mitigation is 50%

One enemy hits me for 2000 damage one time, it becomes 1000 damage total.

A 2nd enemy hits for 500 four times, each hit is mitigated to 250 damage x 4, still 1000 damage total.

The major factor in deciding what helps you live longer between vitality and toughness should be how much condition damage you expect to take in a fight against how much healing you expect to receive. If you receive more healing, toughness is better because it makes your heals go farther, giving you more EHP. If you are taking way more condition damage, then vitality is better, since toughness is worthless against it.

Also, if for whatever reason, a player finds themselves frequently being spiked down before they are able to use a heal or defensive measure that is still available (say DS) then they should add Vit instead of Toughness. But this should be extremely rare.

Never didn’t work that I know of. Tested it months ago in the mists and its pretty easy to see in the logs that toughness affected DS.

Which is why I never get why a lot of people say Carrion is more survivable than Rabid gear, both are giving you just one defensive stat and both affect both your health pools. If anything toughness would be better due to scaling with life regained and our numerous ways to deal with conditions make having tons of vit less important.

Boon stacking is the basis for some of (if not the) most powerful builds in the game. It is too strong as is and needs a counter. This is one. Necromancer is a weak class that would probably be utterly dead without Corrupt Boon and Epidemic.

Most (or at least well designed) MMO’s have stealth detection skills, which introduce skill and counter play into a fight vs a stealth character. And that is what is missing here in GW2, considering the extremely high fight uptime and reapplication of stealth.

In this game, fighting stealth is all about reaction, there is not enough preemptive action, to dictate a fight back in your favor, and turn the tables back on a thief to disrupt the same silly repetitive patterns used over and over.

If you have no stealth detection (don’t say seige trap, lol), then stealth should be limited to a make or break mechanic to open the fight, or to get away.

Like I said its a crappy mechanic to fight against (without detection), and that should drive design, over balance in fact.

The reason why this problem is so prevalent and apparent in WvW, is because the game was built balance wise around sPVP. And in sPVP, disengage is not a winning tactic, if you disengage the point, you might live but the other team is winning the match. If the thief wants to win, he has to contest a very small point, where it is easy to put damage on him, if he wants to keep that point contested, regardless whether you can see him or not.

These dynamics do not apply in WvW, where objectives are reached and won while including a lot of open field figthing between. This where they need to take advantage of their split mechanics for different game modes, in tweaking various abilities to balance within each particular mode.

Necro’s don’t have problems with bad players, the ‘run and put marks behind you’ escape really only works vs bad players.

Most of the time if you are running, its from more than one person, and the marks will just keep you in combat while the other enemies catch up.

Yes vs bads, sometimes they will chase you too long and get depleted so far, you can turn around and gank them. But not sure why someone is running from a bad in the first place.

Not saying I have never had this strategy work, but as far as being some big life saver, or common thing vs someone actually skilled, no.

The best escape is usually just leaving a fight as soon as you can predict its outcome, while more foolish players stay and die buying you time. It may seem cruel, but its smart, and the exact same thing higher mobility classes do. Only they can hang around a lot longer. Otherwise jumping off cliffs with DS and SW are your best bets for escapes , of course not always feasible. Likewise, always having a convenient safety location in mind if you can help it. A tower, keep, camp, bigger friendly zerg, or even a sentry as last resort.

Hit and run need not be dependent on stealth. DD Ele’s, especially prior the last few patches, were amazing at hit and run, and had no stealth.

It’s simply lack of creativity to claim that this is the only way to skin the cat for a thief type character.

But yes, moving the reveal timer back down to 3s for WvW was a mistake.

People can argue about balancing thief DPS with stealth, and how much burst is too much, but I actually think the greater reason for change is simply the vast majority of the playerbase hates fighting this mechanic. It just makes for a worse game, worse gameplay, to fight another character that is not there, can’t be seen over 50% of the fight. Swinging at the air is not fun. Casting AOE at random locations or where you last saw, or think a thief went, is not engaging, or skill based.

When Anet was developing this game they talked about not wanting to overdue CC because losing control of your character wasn’t fun, not because CC couldn’t be balanced. Massive re-steath should be viewed the same way, simply a poor frustrating mechanic, except for the 1 out of 8 characters playing them, and even plenty of thieves agree its just too much of a crutch mechanic.

Stealth as an opening gambit to do initial burst would be fine. Or even one more used for an escape perhaps. But the constant in battle appearing and disappearing, especially without any counters or stealth detection, is just garbage design, even beside the difficulty to balance issue.

The thief class should be slowly tweaked over time to have less stealth, but more health and more survivability when visible.

Glenn.3417:

When a post about warrior is made they jump right on it.

When it’s necro, we can all go screw ourselfs.

Warrior is usually the top played class in any game. Have to tend to the highest pop.

Necro is just like an awkward niche class that they confusedly changed right up till release, and never quite figured out what to do with it, or how to fix it for a meaningful role.

The hilarious thing is if you have been doing your dailies and monthlies since the start, in lieu of crappy dungeon farming, and then buying ascended in the least expensive order, all you needed was accessories at this point, which actually became no cheaper. And still no backpack. Therefore you actually got ripped off as now all the things you bought are cheaper, but not what you don’t have yet. Somehow very predictable.

Outside of zergs, all you see are thieves and mesmers. All over the place. Used to be DD ele’s too, now suspiciously after last couple patches, not so many of those.

Could it be a lot of those ele players… are now on thieves and mesmers! No!

Follow the population it will tell you the classes than need toned down.

There is (or should be) a lot more to WvW than running in a blob with 50 people. But for the majority of professions in this game, that is what they are reduced to, unless they want to face up to incredible imbalanced odds.

JonathanSharp.7094:

We think that Warriors need more sustain in sPvP. You’ll see this reflected in upcoming balance changes.

I can see this, and be fine with it. But NECROS need more sustain too. Apparently Anet doesn’t think so. As last dev podcast, they seemed to think we just need the ‘meta to shift’.

Hanzo.9624:

The majority of my damage is coming from bleeds, so the 20% increase in duration is helping me 100% of the time during combat.

It’s only helping you for the bleeds that actually run their entire course. Most of ours are so long off the bat, that this will will be very few in PvP. Maybe scepter 1 spam at 5 seconds is likely to get some ticks from Hemo, but I find myself not spamming scepter 1 that often, usually something better to do.

The only sure bleed it is extending is Barbed Precision (20 more damage on average per proc). Mark of Blood is already 8 seconds, Grasping Dead 7 seconds, Enfeebling is 10 seconds, BiP is 30 seconds, that will never get a benefit. That’s without duration from runes, spite, or anywhere else. In WvW of course you could get 40% on food then Hemo and Lingering Curses become totally redundant wasteful.

I wonder about the average length a bleed stack is on competent players in PVP, I can’t imagine more than 5 or 6 seconds, which means most of these bleeds are getting cleansed before Hemo does anything.

I’ll point out another situation where per tick is highly inferior to burst healing or siphoning.

Say you are fighting another attrition class, DD ele, Thief, even Mesmer who is good at dancing in and out of a fight. They come in do burst damage to you, then they back out as their skills go on cooldown. Trouble with you as a Necro needing to siphon per hit, you aren’t hitting as soon as they disengage. The DD ele is off healing to full 50 yards away after RTL, and you can’t heal in turn because you can’t hit him to siphon. Same with thief stealth or mesmer blink.

But if you had a bursty siphon, beside only Dagger 3, you could attempt to match their mobility healing with your in fight healing, it would be a fair counter play, as well as match Anet’s supposed Necro strength of making enemies fear the Necro’s immediate area control. Then when they come in for those quick attacks, you are able to heal a lot of it back up and sort of negate their ability to kite you around and slowly sap you to death, which is how a Necro usually loses these matchups.

Bhawb.7408:

I agree they need to be able to be stronger, but being bursty isn’t the way to go.

It is if you want real attrition though. Because that is how you get dealt damage in this game in bursts. That is how guardians and ele’s heal up so fast with bursty skills, not just dripping 30 regen through a whole fight.

The Blood Magic siphon skills are actually I think a bit under appreciated for PVE and zerg situations, people think they are only good for melee power builds. But the secret is that they tick on every single hit of AOE. So each staff mark, with both traits in Blood Magic, you are looking at adding maybe 300 damage and healing with high crit rate. It adds up to some nice boosts if you are just farming or blasting from a tower top. Trouble is soon as you get into a direct head to head with someone, or multiple people, your HP starts dropping way too fast for those 38 health ticks to mean anything. And you are hitting way less due to our slow cast skills, and ease to be interrupted and kicked around with cc.

So adding some kind of bursty cooldown siphon would kind of eliminate any fear of these traits becoming too good in aoe situations. If you make every normal hit heal 60 and every crit 80 (50% improvement), which would probably be fine for 1v1 suddenly you are way too sustainable in AoE farming builds or large fights.

Bhawb.7408:

Pendragon.8735:

We need a more bursty siphon skill, that is what pays off in fights, not 30 or even 50 ticks per hit. Especially if you aren’t using MH dagger, its just really weak.

Reducing signet of the locust cooldown might be a good start.

If you want bursty siphons, go for the sigils/runes for it. We aren’t going to get much bursty anything, especially not siphons which are for attrition.

I’ve been using 4 Vampire runes which are not bad at all, but would work a lot better as a build, if the core class siphons were stronger to supplement.

We need a more bursty siphon skill, that is what pays off in fights, not 30 or even 50 ticks per hit. Especially if you aren’t using MH dagger, its just really weak.

Reducing signet of the locust cooldown might be a good start. And it should actually do the same damage, afaik it just heals despite saying lifesteal.

Tharjax.9068:

Yes I can see where Wells would be horrible since it’s a stationary AOE spell which requires a mob or player to be in its range to damage. It’s almost as if there are are PvE specs and spells and also PvP specs and spells.

I know from playing a little bit of WoW that some trees were just best used as a PvP tree and not PvE and vice versa.

I believe they should add a new mode to sPVP beside just conquest. Not only would this massively change up the meta, esp if teams couldn’t change roster or builds between the maps, but it would greatly help them not be so restricted in balancing as it applies only to Conquest game mode, which as you suggested, does not really in any way closely resemble the other parts of the game, or how the classes interact or balance in those different modes (PVE, Dungeons, WvW, etc).

Whether this was team deathmatch, king of the hill, capture the flag style, could be anything, but would really bust up the stale meta of bunkers, roamers, etc. that is unfortunately driving every other decision they make about classes right now.

They have sort of tried to add in elements of other modes via secondary objectives, but they are just aren’t crucial enough to override the basic conquest mechanics.

What would be great is a keybind system that with one stroke, would give a prebuilt message, and then automatically would show your position in italics next to it.

In other words, something like team FPS games or modes like CTF would often use.

So you might hit a key and get:

TankyDude (Longview Tower): Attackers incoming at this position, please respond.

TankyDude (Green World Border): Large enemy force spotted here.

TankyDude (Astralhome Mill): Area clear of enemies.

You might have a dozen or half dozen fairly generic messages, but that at least could convey some basic info while you are in the middle of a combat, or moving, when you can’t stop and type something out longer or more detailed.

I advanced this idea months ago. At the very least SM and each major garrison should offer a bonus chest with a rare, on par with world event bosses.

WvW players are usually losing income just playing the mode as intended. I doubt a change like that would cause anything drastic, like constant castle/keep flipping. Not as if that kind of doesn’t already happen due to Wxp being a disincentive to defend.

They need to close those gaps above the doors, wth kind of keep design is that.

Tharjax.9068:

Has ANet acknowledged any of these necro issues? Are they aware of these flaws and are working on something to fix it?

Outside of the new DS 5 skill coming, pretty much no. They have brushed them aside, in lieu of just ‘hoping the meta changes’. As if teams will ever start doing dumb things, like stopping to target a Necro first since he is such an easy focus target.

And they don’t seem too concerned about balancing other parts of the game like WvW, where outside of zergs, mobility owns everything, even more than sPVP, due to objectives aren’t fought merely over tiny fixed circles that strong area defenders can sit in and win by merely getting the other guy to back off.

A class mechanic that would be even more broken than Death Shroud? No thanks.

Minions are optional, thank god.

Sounds like an improvement. The current ratings have become too locked into place and stale. Even if the scoreboard says they are relatively close matches, or the closest we can get, the repetition of fighting the same guilds, the same high/low population periods, its like you get stuck in a bad recurring dream.

I.e. in T3 right now, its semi competitive overall, but very exhausting knowing that at the same time two times a day, every day, the zerguuma hordes are going to run over your BL with 3x the population. Rinse repeat every 24 hours for 3 straight weeks. A change up would be refreshing.

With random variation in the mix, sure you might win easier one week, or lose badly in another, but tactics will have to change at least. One week you might be doing more hit and running guerilla warfare just to get points, others you will be guarding more of a dominant lead across all maps. As long as every now and then it stabilizes back and gives you what would be the expected match as per current scores, it shouldn’t get too imbalanced.

Arcane Thievery removes 3 boons, gives them to you, and gives 3 of your conditions to the enemy. Definitely better, but it does have a 45 second cooldown, a bit over twice as long.

That’s fair so far, but here’s what’s not, it has a 1/4 second cast time, while we are stuck with the usual Necro ponderously long 1 1/4 second cast time. Ridiculous.

Blaine Tog.8304:

GW2 is still in its infancy, as far as the metagame goes.

It may not make it out of its infancy if they don’t get solid balance and more unique match dynamics. You can’t compare GW2 to LoL, the biggest eSport type game going. Compared to what Anet dreamed and hoped for this game, the sPVP is practically on life support. And of course the issues of class balance extend far beyond just that mode of the game.

The comment just made by the dev over in the sPVP forum, that Necro is not going to be touched for over a month because the next patch is a bug fix one, just isn’t nearly good enough. Not combined with their snail crawl pace attitude toward tweaking. The Necro was given a sledgehammer nerf in beta, so putting one piece of scotch tape on it every 2 months isn’t going to get the profession back up to snuff in any acceptable time. Not everyone wants to roll up a thief or mesmer, or whatever, to 80 till it gets fixed either. Though far too many have already done that.

Whatever the new skill/condition is, it direly needs to not be a long cooldown one hit wonder. We already have way too much stuff like that, our wells, utilities, etc, that are 30+ seconds. That isn’t going to help much as our biggest issue is sustaining and attrition that we are advertised as.

It needs to be something that is going to go into our regular rotation, several times a fight. Of course will be limited already for most to the 10 sec DS cooldown. But shouldn’t be too much longer than that.

To explore this idea of theorist vs pro then, as it relates to the topic, it seems obvious the profession is either lacking these great theorists or more likely lacking the great theories to be discovered. Otherwise, they would be getting plastered on this board, with others going, ‘woah I never thought of that, I’m going to go try it out’. But there are only so many combinations, this game isn’t rocket science, and most any build posted is a deviation of something already existing, and can quickly be broken down at a glance where its strengths and weaknesses lie. There are certain hard truths about the Necro, about lack of mobility, stability, deception in combat, the strength of cleansing vs condition application, that simply cannot be discovered into irrelevance, because all their avenues are well known and why they do not solve the problems they are associated with. Some of these things are game mechanics issues, far beyond being easily fixed with a simple rearranging of gear or traits.

The speed at which a mesmer can recreate their burst is troubling for Nerco’s, well for anyone. When you compare it to say how long we have to wait between well bombs… huge difference.

Bhawb.7408:

Blaine isn’t trying to prove that Necromancers have secret builds, he’s putting forth that possibility. The reality is that people at the top are at the top for being great players, not for being great theorists. Think of the difference between athletes and sports scientists.

That isn’t to say that top players aren’t great, and knowledgeable, but their skill at the class does not qualify them as the be all end all of knowledge. The reality is that, as Blaine said, top players often have no idea about the new “big thing”. Look at LoL, there are more people taking that game more seriously than anyone takes GW2, and there are still “sleeper” champions that rise up from absolutely nowhere because someone found out they were underappreciated.

The top players often are the best theorists though, because they devote the most time and thinking to exploring new builds, since winning is their end objective, and not just finding something ‘fun’ such as a casual player might do. They are also the most likely to be able to take any existing build ever thought up by other players, great or small, and quickly put them through their paces to see if they have merit as being effective.

Regardless of this possibility though, of secret builds, it’s not a reason for Anet to hold up on active balancing, especially when such things have yet to be discovered in 9 months, and when one class is not stacking up in certain parts of the game. If Anet were to use that logic, then there would not have been a single balance tweak made to any profession since release, since any flaw could be explained away by simply pretending players haven’t figured out how to get balance out of them yet.

If any player is happy with their playstyle or performance of the class in the parts of the game they play, that’s fine, but don’t troll down the concerns of others, if you haven’t walked in their shoes. And/or if someone is going to continually argue a position that works to hold back enjoyment and an even playing field from their fellow players in the profession, the least they could do is offer up some solutions or counters to the very legitimate arguments being made. Rather than very vapid hand waving comments, based on the idea of, ’I’m sure there is something everyone is missing to make all their complaints invalid, but I have no clue what that something is’.

The Nightmare and Lich sets both used to give +20% condi duration upon having the 4pc bonus. I have really no idea why they changed it back to 10%. If you look at comparisons of other runes, these two sets are totally underpowered. You can get +10% duration from only 2 pieces of Mad King or Lyssa.

There are two ginormous threads detailing Necro shortcomings in both the sPVP forum and this one. I have plenty of posts in both, in addition to the dozens of other contributors. I would suggest starting there.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Pendragon.8735:

But when you get into competitive PVP, or even PVE, speed run dungeons and such, suddenly no one wants Necros and their flaws stand out.

No one wanted Eles for the first few months either. I tend to be skeptical of what the current Groupthink is.

If you think there are secret builds out there that are awesome – that somehow the top players in the game obviously haven’t discovered (look at the teams with no necros) – then bring it forward. The burden of proof is on such a claim.

Until such as a time as that would be proved, all evidence now points to the class needing positive tweaks and revision.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck…

Battle Sigil on your scepter or dagger will put any other proc sigil on a 10 second cooldown. So it only makes sense with a stacking sigil. But doesn’t come out to the damage of Earth Sigils.

I like Sigil of Battle on my staff, because you are only on staff usually for a few seconds, and Earth Sigil there is wasteful (I also find it is bugged and stops working). Because its only going to have 4 chances (4 marks) to proc, before you likely switch. But the 20 second Might stack from the Battle Sigil is going to carry over to your Scepter/Dagger even after you swap and you get that 105 power and malice over your entire rotation, it ends up adding a lot of damage. Also the might stacks will affect every single target hit with your Staff AoE, while a bleed proc will only hit one person and then go on cooldown.

For roaming around alone I like leeching sigil for a little quick burst of damage and health.

Danger with any on swap sigil on staff though, you might lose the effect some of the time if your earth sigil(s) on scepter/dagger have just procced immediately prior to swapping. Which case some might just stick a stacking sigil there like corruption or w/e.