Guild Wars 2

Casual PVE any class is fine, because there is no competition. They could make a new class only 80% as powerful as any existing one, and it would be fine for casual PVE if enough players liked the asethetic. No one is really racing each other to complete world dynamic events, or in a casual dungeon runs if one player is doing 10% less DPS or whatever. Some people wear all Magic Find and are contributing way less.

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.

It’s true that it seems Necro was designed as a hybrid type class, the problem is that this doesn’t pay in GW2 because of that stat distribution. Necro needs all stats, since so many of his abilities and just general design are split in half between direct and condition damage.

While other clasess that can just max straight power or straight conditions builds and take all stats that benefit those builds and exponentially increase their effectiveness. Necro can’t do this because max condition damage still isn’t helping his direct damage portion of abilities, especially death shroud, and max power/crit/crit damage is still not helping his many conditions be more powerful or last longer.

You can sort of avoid conditions more than avoiding direct damage, if you build just around your melee weapons, but the problem with that is that the devs see the class as defensive attrition via facetank, they expected us to rely on our conditions to some degree, and drag fights out, and thus pure damage builds lack the mobility and evasiveness in their utilities and other defenses to actually survive in heavy focus situations, or to escape out of them when things go bad.

If you cast fear while they already have a damaging condition on them, (i.e. bleed) you will get 2 ticks of damage 96% of the time.

If you cast fear with no conditions on them, you will never get it.

The actually length of the fear will be 1.96 seconds, or whatever it rounds down to, but very close.

akjb.8372:

I know not a lot of Necros try not to use pets, but I do think you should look at the AI.

You don’t see many Wurms, Bone/shadow fiends or Minions, because they usually prefer to watch the fighting rather than help their Master.

In WvW, they are still worthless as they’re still getting blown up by AOE , even after the patch. Once the pets get hit and eventually decide to fight…. Their dead.

None of our passive traits should effect minions IMO. Not only because its an optional play style and not our class mechanic, but also for how continually buggy they are and seemingly always will be. Traits like Reanimator and Protection of the Horde should be axed, or remerged and redesigned into active choices, and replaced with passives useful to all builds. Not everyone going into Death Magic is using minions.

Kravick.4906:

woeye.2753:

And as others said condition damage is pointless with all the condition removal.

I can’t believe I forgot about this. Yes, this is also something that desperately needs to be addressed. The amount of condition removals in this game is absurd, to be frank. This might not be such a problem if necromancers didn’t have an “eggs in one basket” design when it comes to dealing condition damage. Bleeding, thats primarily the only source of damage that condition builds have on a necromancer. What is the first thing that gets removed when someone uses a condition cleanse? The bleed stack.

It’s ridiculous that none of our traits add poison, but rather just more and more bleeding. Or even give us some burning.

Barbed Precison = Bleeding
Mark of Evasion = Bleeding
Weakening Shroud = Bleeding
Hemophilia = Longer Bleeding (usually nothing since most of our bleeds are already long and cleansed before the final 20% this adds)
Lingering Curse = More Bleeding (adds very briefly to our short poison)

All these trait avenues to increase our DPS, are actually helping far less than you’d expect because any damage they add is fractionally reduced when our bleed stack goes. Some of these should be adding Poison, since we are not close to having permanent poison coverage on an enemy. You don’t want too much, since it won’t stack in intensity, but we could definitely use one or two more application methods, both for diversity of damage, and cover protection.

I’ve tested it as well. Obviously its difficult to count individual stacks over a set time period to average them out, but there are two very easy methods to test. Put two different short cooldown proc signets on, such as Earth and Life Steal, you’ll see that either one can proc, but the one on the 2nd weapon will proc far less, due to it only checking if the first one fails.

More simply just go out and beat on a mob with high HP something like a vet, using only auto attack, and compare one sigil with two sigils, after a few fights it quickly becomes apparent you are sustaining 1-3 more stacks of bleeds while using two sigils. Best tested with long condi duration.

Elochai.1280:

Pendragon.8735:

Elochai.1280:

GuardianOMS.8067:

I feel that that was supposed to hurt my feelings but I’m just more perplexed as to why you ever would know who I am or care.

Nope wasn’t meant for either and I don’t care so you don’t need to be perplexed.

Some reason I’m associating that name with DB? But we can always use more bodies.

Who’s name?

Weren’t you on DB, seem to remember that name from our matchup threads few weeks back.

That Necro minions are more complex than Illusions is true, but why is it relevant. One does its job and one frequently doesn’t, which is the point of the comparison. Is it suppose to be an excuse for shoddy A.I because it shouldn’t be. I don’t want to get into other games, but suffice to say other games are out there where pets and minions perform very reliably and less bug ridden than this one.

Iceflame.5024:

On the topic of build diversity and traits it would be nice to have the greater marks trait as well as soul marks be made baseline for staff. People tend to only mention greater marks but soul marks is a must have lot’s of times too. So in the end we have pretty much staff as a must have weapon in most situations then we have greater marks as well as soul marks being quite essential.

Ayup, LF generation is too poor on condition builds without this, but if you take it you give up Master of Terror, or have to go full 30 points into SR, but then also give up stability. More LF alone, aka facetank, is not enough of a defense to live without longer fears or no stability.

Elochai.1280:

GuardianOMS.8067:

I feel that that was supposed to hurt my feelings but I’m just more perplexed as to why you ever would know who I am or care.

Nope wasn’t meant for either and I don’t care so you don’t need to be perplexed.

Some reason I’m associating that name with DB? But we can always use more bodies.

Gryph.8237:

HOly crap, those old traits really make me support the Dev’s description of our class as an attrition class – those traits totally supported that definition

People say those traits were OP and maybe there were, but it looks like they might have built something similar to what was already in the game, and let stand for the last 3 or 4 months – the D/D Ele.

We should have a poll and vote out our worst 3 traits, let Anet kick them off the island and make 3 better ones. Better limit to one vote though or I will cheat to get rid of reanimator.

Shade Soul Reaping Minor: Prevent knocked back, knocked down, launched, slowed or stunned while in Death Shroud.

Dang.

I wouldn’t downplay dual sigils of Earth. While it’s true they cannot both proc on the same hit, they up your chance for any single crit to proc from 60% to 84%. Over 20 attacks at 50% crit rate that’s the difference between 6 and 8.4 procs. Even if you only get one extra earth proc out of it (the other 1.4 say gets eaten by cooldown) it just added 500-1000 damage over that span depending on your bleed duration. What other sigil is giving you that much additional damage every 20 attacks?

5% crit chance sigil is 1 more crit every 20 attacks. Condi Necro average attack is likely to be no more than 200 damage, great you just picked up a weak 150 damage. When you factor additional average damage of that 1 crit from barbed and your 1st earth sigil, still looking at around 500 damage tops.

PVE/WvW, You can carry an extra weapon to pile up your stacks, when they hit max put your bleeder back on.

Should give stability for 6 seconds and the cooldown should be 60 seconds at most.

Heck the version you get in Soul Reaping, Last Gasp, a passive auto cast, is only on a 60 second cooldown.

Andele.1306:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_historical_traits#Necromancer_traits; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_UzwdXK5CU and for lich http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfE_Xu9H1Bw at 11ish minutes – just from beta 1 to 2, on the old press demo/alpha lich dropped a orb/urn that had around 50k hp (but low armor) and made lich immortal till destroyed (2 was a 3 second 1 minion spawn, 3 the vuln, 4 aura of chill, 5 aura of fear), DS let you absorb life force while in in and upon exiting worked like spectral walks second activation (you ported to where you entered DS).
Also we had pretty much permanent stability, perma retaliation, DS was a stun break and in addition to corruptions there were sacrifices that gave condition like effect for user hp, also like every 4th ability siphoned hp (as seeon on warhorn and staff in TBs video).

Also sweet old 50% damage reduction for 11 seconds on a 60 second cooldown from Sarmor…

I remember some of the old beta videos of Necro’s doing amazing things with DS, taking on 5 players and out attritioning them all. Maybe Jon Peters thinks the mechanics are still like they were? In any event, it seems the Necro got hit with a massive nerf bat across the board late in development, and the game shipped without them ever getting fully tested and walked back up to an acceptable competitive level.

Panhauramix.2784:

Were my opponents really good? No. Not at all in fact. But WvW burst is so crazy that having no real way to target drop, no easy access to Protection, Block mechanic, the “Noob Cannons” turns us into ashes before we can react (with our long cast time). I do the same thing, always targeting the necro first and bursting him down. For an attrition class, things should definitely feel different.

I generally feel sorry for opposing Necros who haven’t come close to mastering their class, they are such easy kills, offer no deception, no escape, they just get run over. The game is not balanced at the top nor at the bottom, and Necros of all walks can point out the same flaws and weaknesess we have. But even if it were balanced for the top 5%, that still would not be good enough. The other 95% of the player base will judge a game based on their own experiences, not someone else’s, and their dollars and attention will follow.

Telling Johnny hot join or Joe WvW that its ok his class can be owned by a couple of noobs or up levels, because he doesn’t have the tools to deal with the situation, while his ele or thief friend can easily kill them, but its all ok because if those opponents were great, his friend would be dead too, is going to be slim solace to them.

There are different types of fights in WvW and that will inform what is better. If you are rolling with a large size and very organized zerg or guild team, and everyone follows the leader into the enemy zergs, wells are much better.

But in more disorganized affairs, in sieges, or just outside structures, you will often get standoff combat between two large groups, where there is melee, thieves and such probing the no man’s land and then range on either side firing. Basically the groups scared to full engage, whether because of defensive siege, or whatever. In that case, Epidemic is much better because it can push the frontline back from distance, and if you get the other team running, they are likely to get wiped.

In small group affairs, like 5 people, it kind of depends on how you’re group is playing. If you have consistent knockdowns and cc, wells again can be deadly. But if you are kind of fighting a free flowing skirmish, with lots of thieves, and ele’s which frequently roam in small groups, wells might be lucky to hit someone for one tick, then epidemic can wreck more damage.

I switch what I use, but epidemic rarely comes off my bar. Even in zerg type situations, I don’t find it difficult to pick a heavily boon’ed up target, they are all over the place, corrupt him and then spread the conditions. Considering your own team will also have tons of conditions landing on all enemies, you are likely to transfer a painful pile of conditions, including burning and confusion, far better than anything we put on.

People say cleanses ruin epidemic, they can, but in a large clash, it only takes a few seconds for a target to get downed who has a full condition load on them. Sometimes you want to wait about 5 seconds into the initial rush, as then a lot of cleanses have been used up.

Undertow.2389:

In fact, the correct AI is already in the game.

Mmm yes, Ranger pets don’t seem to have near our problems dishing out damage, and not being braindead. Similar Mesmer illusions, you notice they are quick and unerringly zero in on targets. Are Necro minions being mush upstairs intended?

I don’t know but I could never stand any A.I companions in any games that are not responsive or buggy. Unpredictability gets you killed in fights, when you can’t depend on a creature to do what its supposed to.

If you could get Near to Death and Foot in the Grave, if both weren’t grandmaster, thus 60% stability uptime, then you would be talking some interesting possibilities.

It would actually make a lot of sense as an alternative to large mobility moves, which they seemingly don’t want to give us. But if you don’t want us zipping around the field, and we are to be bags of HP waiting to be beat on, at least give don’t make us so vulnerable to every cc, knockdown, stun, etc in the game so that we are being bounced around like pinballs in a team fight.

I think the 5 sec DS flash build is kind of what Anet mistakenly believes is the hidden secret to Necros. That they were ‘scared’ of people learning, or basically waving our weaknesses away on people figuring it out.

But in reality it comes out kind of as a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, or not much substance. A whirling dervish that attracts a lot of unwanted attention but isn’t doing that much. This kind of playstyle, swapping every 5 seconds, I also find very exhausting and tedious, and unfun way to play a build. If you take Near to Death and all the other bells and whistles procs for DS, you kind of end up like a DD ele playstyle more focused on timed rotations than actually skill reactions to what is going on in a battle. But unlike the DD ele, we have not nearly the sustain. Only 1 weak heal coming out of DS, and losing one condition going in.

And at the end of the day, if you are going to be diving into big melees with DS, to fire off your DS procs, its still comes back to lack of mobility killing us. As at some point you are going to need to get out of dodge in bad situations. But without invulnerability skills, turning invisible, or being able to Ride the Lightning out, you still end up a juicy pinata for enemies to focus fire on.

Andele.1306:

example who is a better tradesman, a person that turned 10$ into 1000$ (necro) or a person that turned 500$ into 3500$ (ele)?

Who is happier though, probably the richer guy.

The weird thing is in most MMO’s the harder to play learn/master classes, those with the highest skill ceilings as per your def, also have the highest play ceilings. Opposite here, other than warrior, who gets the shaft like Necros, but at least doesn’t get the shaft while working 5x as hard to not get it.

Gabi P.3094:

Right now imo the necro is lacking in a few aspects that should be balanced out one way or the other:
- ability to disengage/better mobility
- ability to sustain (either through more dodging/vigor or more regeneration; no healing in DS is also a major issue here)
- ability to reliably avoid one stomp
- ability to apply heavy condition pressure to enable more offensive play

These issues are present regardless of spec and they make a necro too much of a liability for the team. I think getting all of the above would be over the top, but at least 2 of those will be needed before the class can become viable for high-level play.

The Necro feels at least 10 trait points shy of a complete build to me, no matter which ways I build. One good idea I liked was them making the Greater Marks trait default, your marks just start the game at 240 radius and you don’t have those near mandatory points in Death Magic.

Kravick.4906:

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

Great movies man , now try to show us something similar but with necro

Sadly, such a video does not exist, or is it possible to exist with necros as they currently are. If the video did exist, it would have been linked repeatedly as proof that this class is capable of something other than being a floor ornament.

The class is capable of something, or was, but it was niche. Boon hate. In the perfect scenario, surrounded by teammate protection we were good at neutering some of the top sustaining builds. However now that they have given this ability to thieves, on top of stealth, burst, mobility, etc, and increasingly more to other professions too, we don’t have much left. Primarily epidemic, but the profligate amount of cleansing in the game and total imbalanced effort between cleansing and building large stacks of conditions, always put that on limited lifespan usefulness.

A profession should never be built around just a couple of utilities and we pretty much are. Even our burst builds that ignore those high profile corruptions, are also similarly built around a couple utilities, namely wells, which if you use at the wrong time, or vs any smart enemy that knows how to get out, you become just a poor man’s thief without stealth. While condi’s outside their corruptions are like big bloated mosquito’s, that prick you over and over, without ever elevating beyond an annoyance to being truly threatening.

1v1, as per the above video, Necro can come out well if the opponent is committing to the duel. In any non pre arranged affair though, it can be a lot harder in practice if they are willing to run away as soon as it looks like they might lose. I chased a warrior around for 5 minutes the other day before finally killing him. I’m convinced he messed up several times and could have outdistanced me if he was smarter.

Andele.1306:

Necros are pretty easy to start playing, even to play ok, but trying to master timing of DS, control over cooldown rotations and life force maximization is like asking a person that doesnt know how to open a web browser play SC2 vs a pro/max settings comp, virtually impossible, but the better you get at its usage (and staff usage since i still think the 2 are just made to work together), you get just as big of power jumps as you have invested.

Skill ceiling in the way I was using it was judged by effectiveness of what you can achieve by max skill input. We can choose a different word if that will move on past this word issue.

I don’t want to get into an argument over semantics. Just about every profession thinks theirs is the hardest to learn/master whatever. Necro I tend to also think is one of the harder ones, but it doesn’t change that you are not pulling off what other professions do in this game, regardless of having learned everything. If you want to call that just mobility, then fine, give us mobility. Skill alone cannot make up for not having it and only goes so far.

If you just go into casual hot join with kind of a beginner or average player, they are going to do much better with an Ele, Thief, Ranger than with a Necro. So call those lower skill ceiling by that definition if you want. But sadly at the top levels of skill the same thing applies, Necro still comes up short between two elite players who know their class inside out. Other professions do more for less work, less skill. Whether we are talking current sPVP top tier meta, or just messing around in WvW looking for fights. This is the complaint with the profession. It would be dumb to give Anet brownie points for making one of the hardest classes to play, also one of the most lacking in effectiveness.

New trait: Crit Conditions.

All your condition ticks can crit, now you have a real reason and synergy for your rabid gear and high precision. A little bit better burst and no more waiting on 20 second bleeds to never run their course because of cleansing. Give me this over Hemophilia, or Lingering Curses, which is redundant.

Gabi P.3094:

Tixe.3684:

In my testing I found that 40% condition duration was enough to get me 2 ticks on all of my fears.

That is actually not true, at least not at the moment; Terror applies it’s damage after each second of fear, so you need 100% extra condi+fear duration to pull off 2 ticks of it.

It’s only the bubble damage text that shows up after 1 second, the damage can actually happen sooner. It’s synced with all other condition ticks on the target. So if the next bleed is going to tick in .3 seconds when you cast fear, then you can get two ticks with just 40% duration. So it’s just rather random, and the original poster might have seen it happen often enough to think he was getting it every time, but he wasn’t.

In general if Fear is doing 1000 damage, then 20% duration you should average 1200 damage (2nd tick 2 out of 10 times). 50% duration average 1500 damage, etc. If Fear is the first condition you put on a target, it will never tick twice though at less than 100% duration since there is not an existing tick schedule ongoing yet.

Andele.1306:

Pendragon.8735:

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

It is much easier to fight 2 guys in the same time on guard or elem than on necro.

That’s because the class is too predictable. It has a high skill cap to learn but not actually a high skill ceiling once mastered.

You talking about ele and guard right? Because Necro have (next to engie) probably the highest skill ceiling, you know the fact how or class mechanics interact with cooldowns and control , a necro that times their DS and staff skill usage is 50 times better than a spammer, unlike in some other cases (not to diss on eles, but post learning the base combos you can pretty much just rotate around spamming everything in the right order and not give a toss, just you need to have like 4 arms).

We are talking different things I think. You are talking how hard the class is to master, which I agree is high ceiling to learn. But I’m talking what you can achieve once you actually reach that ceiling. Show me the videos of one Necro trolling 2, 3 or even 5 enemies, like an Ele, Thief, or Mesmer, you can’t. Because a mastered Necro’s max capability is much lower due to lacking the things I cited.

ProxyDamage.9826:

If you want a “glass cannon” make a “white damage” build. Or an hybrid. That’s what Rampagers is there for – hybrid glass cannons.

Even better, play a different class. As they have the proper defensive tools, mobility, and disengagement to make glass cannon builds viable. Facetank is not good synergy defense for glass cannon at all. Further even if you build for a glass canon too many of the necros skills and utilities are split with conditional effects and damage to get the most out of pure glass cannon builds that others can get. You are working against yourself, because as you say, attrition playstyle is too hardwired into our design to totally avoid it no matter what your build. If Necro had better sustain, say life steal was waaaay better, then it could work.

Necro is built to kill other players in between their bursts, when opponents best DPS is on cooldown, since we can’t match them in that regard, esp in regards to defensive elusiveness. Only problem is they run away a lot and get away after they burst, and we can’t lock them down like the devs claim is the Necro strength.

VOLTCIEAGE.3029:

It is much easier to fight 2 guys in the same time on guard or elem than on necro.

That’s because the class is too predictable. It has a high skill cap to learn but not actually a high skill ceiling once mastered. You can’t kill 2 guys at once (less they are bads) because the class lacks deception, disengage, and proper lockdown/chasedown burst. As well as lack of stability makes it hard to finish your bursts or stomp, which are crucial in pulling off upsets in outmanned situations.

To win such situations you need to confuse your opponents and have periods where you are taking no damage, while continuing to do damage yourself. Invulnerabiltiy skills provide that. Clones provide that. Stealth provides that. Necro is constantly taking damage, with little means to defend it other than facetank. You just run out of health before you can get one guy down. Even if you do get one down, you can’t disengage or reset the fight, nor rebuild your health safely, to deal with the 2nd opponent, so he finishes you and then can rez his buddy.

We actually already have a mechanic, claimed to be a core one of our class, to theoretically solve this specific issue. It’s just too short and weak: Fear. If Fear lasted about twice as long, suddenly you have enough CC time to pull off some tough odds high skill victories. They might have went the wrong way making Terror do damage, instead of just making fear longer. Because while the damage is nice, its still not near comparable burst to what others have.

People try to argue that well Necro is ‘just support’ and you should have a team. That is not what the philosophy of this game was sold as. But rather as no holy trinity, no defined roles, whether in a dungeon or wherever else, all professions can man all roles, and are self sustaining due to their own heals and not dependent on an outside healer or support. But Necro is dependent. He needs a GD bodyguard all the time, or someone to peel for him.

At this point, people don’t even want them on teams either, as per the EU tourney. And they are consistently being rated 7th and 8th in class value in the sPVP forum.

Someone made a great joke about our 5th DS skill being one that pulls a random thief player from the mists and sticks him on our enemy when being focused. That’s about the right of it.

Engels.8537:

I’m not saying that “target the weak” is useless, is in the wrong place, in a condition tree a major trait who increases direct damage for each condition on a foe is not well placed,

In a hybrid build maybe it works great,

Totally agree, the damage it adds for a Grandmaster Minor is pathetic, at a place where mostly only condi necros are going to have it.

I’ll give an example based on some testing. Killing Svanir in the mists, he has about 26-28K health, when I kill him as a Rabid Necro, only about 5-6K of my damage is direct physical. Now even if I assume an average of 3 conditions on him per the whole fight, Target the Weak would add 6% on that, = 300 damage. A good damage trait is giving you 500-1000 or more damage in a typical fight of that length. Vampiric, a master minor is good for about 500 (damage and healing equal 1000). Barbed Precision 1000 damage in the same fight at 0% duration, as condition build. And it’s a minor adept.

Target the Weak shines vs bosses that have every condition in the game sitting on them for a whole fight, but pretty meh everywhere else in the game, short of a full on power build deciding to go that far in Curses.

Sort of a side penalty, using either of BiP or Corrupt Boon I think straightjackets you into dagger off hand. I have many times wanted to try, and done so briefly, off hand Focus for condi necro, but can never get over the hump of not having Deathly Swarm to move that poison or self bleed off myself, since I always have one of those two corruptions. It’s not even close to worth it to blow Consume Conditions or Staff 4 to clear those conditions. But if the other option is leaving them on, suddenly you don’t want the skills nearly so much in the first place.

On our water death shroud we have transfer a condition on our auto attack! Now if this was on normal Life Blast, or even on Staff 1, suddenly you start having a little more freedom or synergy in a corruption build.

RashanDale.3609:

I like that kind of skills.

If anything, both, the effects and the self-conditioning should be stronger.
Especially Epidemic could need self-conditions that hurt more.

If they hurt more they would actually be more worth transferring indeed. Right now they are just strong enough to hurt you if you leave them on (about 2000 damage) but not quite strong enough to make them as valuable as losing a transfer that otherwise, could be saved for swapping much more powerful conditions, or multiple conditions on you.

Right now if you asked most other professions do they want a self corruption on any of their utilities that puts a stack of 2 bleeds on them for 10 seconds, or a 5 second poison, but hey, you can blow a cleanse to move it to an enemy, they are going to say no.

Which means if the self corruptions are more harm than good, the initial base skill should be that much better to account for it. Debatable if they are good enough for the penalty.

natsos.3692:

Also as someone above said, it is hard to heal the huge life pool of necro, and our best chance is some 25-49 ticks of life stealing,which is not a percentage and toughness would scale better than vitality on it.

Yep, if you have life stealing, or they ever make siphoning a lot better, you are going to want toughness and real health, far more than Life Force, because you can’t heal yourself while in DS, all your life stealing is being wasted while in it. Not to mention regen that might still be ticking, which Necro can potentially have a lot of, also being wasted the longer you sit in DS.

Just poor synergy. Be like if a guardian had a transform skill that lasted multiple seconds, but none of his boons actually affected him in it. Would make no sense.

Bhawb.7408:

Saying LF pool is bad is like saying having extra vitality is bad.

For a condi build, under discussion, no its not like saying extra vitality is bad. Extra vitality increases your survivability and attrition far better than more life force, because a condi build goes into sponge mode while in Death Shroud, he loses virtually all his condi pressure, loses his kiting ability (unless he wants to shoot into melee with Dark Path – dumb), and loses the versatility to react from his utilities and staff primarily.

Condi uses DS just as flash mechanic, to pop off one skill, or as a last resort to chew up what’s left if severely focused. When being focused 20% more LF is like a fraction of a second more survivability. So more DS isn’t a big boon to Condi Necro’s at all.

I prefer Blood Magic even, not so great either, but vs going all the way down Soul Reaping, because every 10 points actually gives me 1000 more real health to stay in my most effective form, not to mention 60% of that goes into DS as well. SR tree is pretty much just painful filler for condi builds, that you have to take to get to Master of Terror. The rest of it doesn’t synergize well at all. Crit damage with weak power and weak base attack damage? Garbage.

Most just want to have fun because the score doesn’t matter that much due to population imbalance so easily wrecking it. Anet appears content to let it be just uber casual WxP trains and blowing off steam gibbing a few folks for a while. Not really a atmosphere for advanced strategy to develop.

People forget, DB was a meaner tier leader. They didn’t bother with picking, both teams were getting cleared. Just a matter of who was getting it first.

^ It would be easy to separate the amount leeched in PVP vs PVE, as in PVE you can get consistent large stacks far easier and longer.

For PVP Hound. I agree in PVE they are fine, the corruptions even help you because you don’t need the transfers for other things. But in PVP I would far rather wait till that Ranger sticks 10 bleeds on me, or Mesmer stacks 5 Confusions, before blowing that Dagger 4. Conditions are flying fast and furious at you every few seconds, and you need all the transfers you can get.

As someone said you forget they are there, but they are there all the same, either doing damage to you, increasing the damage you take, or making you blow transfers for not that great of an effect.

If the skills themselves weren’t made for such specific scenarios you might think of a build where you let lose all your corruptions at once, a corruption build, then transfer them all with staff 4. But because you are waiting for the right time, to turn a lot of boons, or for a group to epidemic, they don’t really set up to be used that way.

Kravick.4906:

I don’t even notice the self inflicted conditions TBH. The vulnerability you get from using epidemic is something I completely forgot about until you made this thread. The bleeding from Blood is Power is always used with dagger offhand or staff 4 to turn it into additional bleeding on target. The poison from Corrupt Boon is never even noticed due to the fact that poison as a damage condition is so weak and insignificant, and the -33% healing is completely circumvented by Consume Conditions, which 90% of necromancers run anyway. No one uses Corrosive Poison Cloud because the skill is such kitten.

I find the self inflicted conditions to be completely insignificant.

The vulnerability doesn’t bother me too much, I think for what Epidemic does that one is a fair trade.

Blood is Power, yes I usually transfer with Dagger 4, but when you blow a transfer for one condition – unless you get lucky coincidence and have more, and multiple enemies to move them all – this actually puts you in a hole as master of conditions. If you don’t have plague signet, suddenly you just have Staff 4 left for conditions the enemy is going to place on you. Adding 2 more bleeds, when we have so many other avenues to apply them, isn’t really worth a transfer to me, but you pretty much have to do it or suffer a lot of pain.

The reality is those 2 bleeds hurt you far more than 2 more on the enemy. Because when the enemy already has a bunch of stacks, say 8, and it becomes 10, once he clears them he is going to clear them all at once, the entire bundle. While you have just used a transfer for 2 measly bleeds, that are still too painful to ignore.

Poison – you say is insignificant. At 50% duration and high condition the posion from Corrupt Boon will hit me for nearly 2000 damage if I let it run 9 seconds and don’t clear it. Hardly insignificant.

I don’t think these utilities are sooo much better than what other professions have access to, that they make the self corruptions worth it. They are certainly not worth it to waste transfers on, you are in a lose/lose either way with that side of them to me.

And you never want to blow you heal just to get rid of one condition you put on yourself. If it just so happens that you have a bunch of others, have lost enough health, to want to heal at that exact point, great, then it works. But because of the situation dependent usage of them -based on enemy action- its not usually a timely spot to be using your heal.

The subject is the self corruption conditions that the corruption skills put on you. Is this kind of a failed mechanic? It sort of feels that way to me.

The problem I have with them is the corruption skills are very situation dependent for when you want to use them. Especially Corrupt Boon and Epidemic, and even Blood is Power is best as an opener because of its long cast time and you want to get those might stacks spread over your full rotation for damage.

The tradeoff is you are left with these conditions sitting on you, and while I get the idea that you can quickly send them off again, its going to cost you a second skill, and usually a very vital transfer skill, Putrud Mark, Plague Signet, Deathly Swarm. Most of the time right after you cast the situation dependent corruption, it is not the best time to waste these skills to move one condition. Though with BiP and Corrupt Boon especially, those self conditions will inflict over 1000 damage to you easily as a conditonmancer if you let them sit. You can also blow your heal to get rid of them, also not always optimal.

So my question is do Necro’s feel these skills really are good enough to justify the self corruption, and/or giving you the ability to move an extra condition, but at the cost of your precious transfer skills? It seems to me wasting your transfers is actually not worth the condition that gets moved, and the initial effect from the skills, while some of our strongest ones, may not yet be strong enough to justify the self punishment and choice to make.

I think you can kind of see what they were going for here, but the Necro is juggling so many ball at once to be competent, and has to be so precious with his utility slots, I’m not sure we actually get a fair deal with these skills.

Blood is life. I like it.

And you are correct, Hemophilia is often useless due to duration elsewhere. sPVP players may feel different with no access to food, but I never use it anymore as a conditionmancer, as it would be pushing my shortest bleeds at 8 seconds up to 10. Few actually run that long against live opponents.

Death Shroud is an attrition mechanic yet does not work well with our main attrition build (conditionmancer). That was very poor design. Nor do you easily generate LF in most condition builds. Our power builds are our burst builds, yet those are the ones that generate LF the best.

OP is mostly on the right. They should staple this post to the wall where the devs discuss balance.

Some of our cast times need to come down, not only to help us be more reactive and skill based, but it would just make the profession a lot more fun not to feel like you are operating through molasses vs many others.

Life steal needs to scale with healing and just get buffed up in general, as that is the only mechanic I see we already have to really help our sustain. Unless they are going to start giving us a lot more boon access, but don’t see a rework like that in the cards.

Some kind of better disengage/mobility improvement, even on long CD, would work wonders as well. So the class is more self sustaining and not reliant on, or a burden to, teammates so much when focused.

More ideally, they would start to rethink Death Shroud entirely. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room for skillful play with the limited 4 abilities once you are in it, its just too simple. It’s history as a downed state is painfully obvious. The 5th skill can hope to help this, but solve entirely seems a stretch.

Shads.9468:

I say this with an honest, open heart: Any NA guilds looking for a new home need to move to Kain. We’re just a few guilds short (on their side) of this being the matchup we’ve been looking from. Yak’s could use some oceanic bolstering too I guess, but i don’t like to share the loot.

Yaks need Eurozone players more. Kain needs a bit more balance all around. Mag definitely doesn’t need a new wave, they are still over bloated from the last bandwagon.

What is going on with the drop rates in this game, they seem to be steadily and stealthy being nerfed into the ground.

I kill a pack of 5 mobs in Orr by myself, no other contribution damage, and not one drops loot. You feel lucky if 1 in 4 mobs give you anything being killed in this game. Then when they do, its usual gray junk or common items.

You hardly ever see rares drop anymore. Even wearing +100% Magic Find, I’ll go through a handful of events a day and not see one rare. A month or two ago you would get 2-4 per day pretty commonly. Can’t even remember the last exotic I’ve seen drop.

When you are level 80, you have no need of experience, people want to see some loot and treasure for killing things. They shouldn’t be railroaded into going to the same couple boss farms everyday to get a good drop. Play the way you want, remember? What happened to that?

The fun of exploring of the world, or wandering around to hit different events is just not rewarded in the loot system. It feels like there are one or two specific things they want you to do to build up any income. Run the same dungeon path over and over, or kill the world bosses. This gets repetitive. Please open the treasure vaults a bit to the rest of the world, so players are encouraged to get some variety, right now they are more discouraged, or turned off, from deviating from this repetition and actually experiencing the breadth of content in GW2 because of the constant nerfs to drops.

More modes would also drastically open up the professions and meta for more versatility. Conquest only, fighting over little stationary points, puts balancing into a straightjacket.

The vendors are still there, have they officially said the tickets won’t come in Black Lion chests anymore?

Targuil.3741:

Andele.1306:

Pendragon.8735:

Karka aren’t a problem they are dumb AI, and weak to condition. But when you face live humans, the above issues begin to present more obviously.

You know, that was kinda the thing the whole thread was based on, its just i noticed it when i tried to run past 8 karka in a small hallway and they ate 100% LF in half a second…

I assume you mean that suicide cave… I couldn’t run through it even with plague. I got straight dps’d out of it, and then out of LF, and then dead.

Yeah any situation like that is a similar representation to a Necro getting focus fired in PVP. Our main form defense is facetank, our class mechanic is a self degenerating face tank, and even our elite is just a buffed up facetank. How redundant can you get. In a situation like that, stealth is better, RTL is better, invulnerability is better, blink is better, etc.

Even Spectral Walk and Flesh Worm, which gives us pseudo telpeorts, can’t match the above, because their access is limited to a stagnant points which are behind where we’ve already been. They can never be used to cross a gap, or burst damage to a forward point.

Dark Path reverting to be used as it once was, as a true teleport, just drop the targeting requirement, would solve a lot. Would need to be a bit faster though.

It’s not new that you don’t want to facetank burst, but outside of dodging, that’s the Necro’s downfall. Not enough mobility or deception to outright avoid damage.

Try to tank in DS sure, that’s the devs idea, but your whole LF bar can be wiped absorbing one burst from an opponent, then you have very little to work with defensively the rest of the way, while other profs will still have multiple defenses, and often their main one back up from cooldown soon. DS will not come back up as rapidly unless you are a power or heavy spectral build.

Karka aren’t a problem they are dumb AI, and weak to condition. But when you face live humans, the above issues begin to present more obviously.

alfista.6094:

I had to wait in a queue for WvW last night so i really don’t know what everyone’s talking about. Maybe things are different on NA servers, i dunno..

Pretty sure WvW population caps have been drastically reduced since launch. I think at launch they were like 150, 160 per team per map, something like that and now are about half of that.

So this may not be telling us much about population vs say 4 months ago.