Somewhere along the line the ‘idea’ of the necro seemed to get lost in the design and it’s implementation doesn’t have a lot of playstyle synergy. Compared to some other classes abilities which essentially enhance what you’re already doing to a higher degree, necro’s get this lateral expansion of unrelated abilities. A single target short range DD, a short range teleport/chill, single target fear and the cone-aoe damage… which aren’t really similar to anything else we do, so you have to invest time into learning more, but in my experience its not really adding a lot more due to the high-cooldowns of the aforementioned abilities.
This is the Necro’s biggest problem and DS falls right into it, at least for condition certainly. Not much synergy. You can’t regain life in DS, so any kind of regen, life steal build suddenly stops being productive, you can’t keep piling up conditions, because you only have one skill that adds them, and it requires you to get in close, which you often don’t want to.
Therefore DS kills pressure and attrition playstyle, which really hurts in winning a long fight. You can dance in and out, but unless you have the one specific build meant to take advantage of all the ‘on enter/exit’ death shroud stuff, there’s nothing specially great about doing that.
A lot of Necro builds feel like 10 trait points shy of being complete. Maybe if they combined a few traits, like was recently done to warrior, it would be easier to help final builds start getting things to work together better.
A good basic building block for condition build would be 0/20/10/0/20, with key traits being Terror and Master of Terror, Greater Marks given. Then you still have 20 points to personalize in whatever way you wish. Maybe maxing out Soul Reaping to get Foot in the Grave or Near to Death, or finishing 30 in curses, or even delving into Spite for a bit more hybrid. I like Blood Magic, but that is a bit more unorthodox.
How to play, stay with the zerg, AoE on top of your tanky leading edge, spread conditions with epidemic, and collect copious amounts of loot bags.
Your job is not to kill individual players or try and spike one guy down, but rather to pressure areas, and control terrain. Lay your marks down at chokepoints, force groups to back off tower ledges, or fear them off siege. Chill/Blind into the hearts of big fights where your more bursty classes are charging. Don’t be scared to even jump into Plague Form to lead a charge, and see if you can break the enemy line. The side that starts running or back tracking first is most likely the one that gets routed and wiped.
Once you get familiar with your strengths and weaknesses, then you can begin to branch out into more dangerous or alternative playstyles, small group, or even roaming around if you dare.
I would also suggest switching utilities frequently for the situation. Wells are good for zerg engagements, stuff like Corrupt Boon, Blood is Power, even Plague Signet, are better for smaller fights, coming up on a contested camp, something like that. Though Corrupt Boon has a strong argument in large standoff fights too, especially for neutering tanky distractors like Guardians, Dagger Storming Thieves, and D/D ele’s that try to get your whole team to waste time on them, while their DPS spikes you. Spectral Walk for traveling around, even keep a Warhorn handy for the speed boost, even if its not your normal off hand.
Don’t forget to always use food, and even crystals if you can afford them. Condition Duration stuff like the pizza’s are a big boost for condition builds and to get your fears hitting harder and lasting longer.
Gear wise, I believe in being more tanky (Rabid, even a few Soldier or Sentinel pcs if you don’t have Ascended). Necro’s get focus fired a lot, and as an attrition / pressure build, you need to be alive as long as possible to do that job. You are not in a race to burst anyone faster. Also a lot of your usefulness is in non-damage conditions like chill, cripple, weakness, blind, and cc via Fears, stats like power and crit damge do nothing to help those get better.
- 2 dodges (doable with classes that have active vigor)
- ~2 seconds of stealth (this is debatable due to AOE’s and such going through stealth)
- 2 seconds of Block (Shield Stance for Warrior, and so on)
- 2 seconds of Invul (achievable by Mist Form and Elixir S)
- 2 seconds of Evade (Thief skills, Ranger skills, Blurred Frenzy, Distortion, etc)
- Any form of Disengagement sufficient to leave the area (RtL, Portal, Thief Shortbow, Warrior’s Rush and Whirling Blade, etc)
Now I do not know other classes well enough to say that there are more of these available, but this what I’m aware of off the top of my head. The point is that if Death Shroud is viewed simply as a Second Health bar, then it literally loses effectiveness the faster it is drained since it is replicable by other classes’ ability to mitigate damage for short durations.
Yep. Death Shroud might hold up as a defensive mechanic against the ones above in taking damage 1 to 1, but when you start getting beat on by multiple opponents – which is common because enemies know you can’t do X, Y, Z of the above – suddenly it stars lacking greatly in comparison, because all your survivability gets blasted out in a couple seconds as noted. While for outright mobility escapes, invulnerability, stealth, etc, those are reliable ways to suddenly wipe almost all damage from being focused for a few seconds. And they still have whatever other defensive measures are built into those classes, unlike if you’re LF is totally spent in one blow, you can be left extremely vulnerable.
The coupling blow that we have so little access to stability despite being facetank defense just adds to the Necro’s spike victim woes. The class almost demands active teammates looking out for you, which it should not, because this is not a holy trinity game, and many of the mechanisms listed above make defense on those professions much more self sustaining.
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Why in the heck is Dark Path such a slow cast time and speed.
This is an ability that is supposed to be used to help you lockdown, or prevent someone escaping. But by the time it actually casts (3/4 sec) and meanders to its target, they are often outside its range, or it misses due to how slow it is and they can juke or dodge by seeing it come a mile away.
The devs talk up skills that have ‘play’ and being reactive and skill based, but that’s pretty hard to accomplish when so many of our skills take so long to cast, and we can be interrupted, out of range, or otherwise miss our chance by the time they hit, due to how telegraphed they are.
And what is the trade-off benefit we get from so many of our skills being longer casts than other classes? They don’t have more power or hit harder, they don’t have shorter cooldowns. I don’t see we get any trade-off. It’s just as if someone had the bright idea to make the ‘slow puttering’ playstyle for a Necro, due to that they are attrition. Attrition still calls for being able to pull off fast reactions at critical points in the fight, to actually prolong that attrition. But many of the cast times make that quite difficult.
I won’t even get started on Life Blast, another slowbee, which is utterly worthless skill if you aren’t power based. Which probably leads many younger Necros astray and to being worse, because they don’t realize what a waste it is to use till they get much more experience.
Fear and Life Transfer are fine.
DS definitely needs another condition application, so hopefully the new 5th skills can shore it up some.
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The funny (or sad tbh) thing is by the time they get this ridiculously simple thing put in, it will probably be equal to the time you could have your Ascended slots filled simply by doing every daily and monthly. “Ah well, a lot of the grubby WvW players probably have their Ascended by now anyway, might as well give it to them much easier now that it hardly helps.”
If he can’t be used underwater, it at least shouldn’t blow out elite into cooldown by going in or out of the water.
Wells are balanced entirely around sPvP. We are never going to see a change to their cool down as long as sPvP is the focus of this games balancing.
They’d be a lot more useful in other ares of the game if they were ground targeted by default. Likely wouldn’t make them much stronger for sPVP either since they are going to get casted in the same places there regardless.
Considering you can’t use utilities in DS, yes this would make a lot of sense actually increasing our core mechanics versatility. In beta of course Dark Path was originally a teleport. Back then the whole DS mechanic was different and potentially OP and perhaps this skill suffered the chopping block because of it, but putting it in now like this would not imbalance us. The skill would still go on cooldown targeting it at nothing. But its so slow, you’d hardly get to your destination that much faster than swiftness, certainly compared against like a blink or RTL.
It adds up in a long fight. With Bloodthirst, even if you attack only 25 times in a fight, you will have dealt and drained around 1000 damage, for a total net value of 2000. That’s pretty competitive with what a lot of traits will give you in a combat. I would take Mark of Evasion over either the crits siphoning, or making them both 50% stronger though.
These traits probably deserve to be a little better and get slightly boosted, even so I find them underrated, especially in WvW and PVE. In sPVP maybe they are seen as less valuable as combats are more about burst and focusing down in short stretches. Thus the cooldown type traits can come into play more than other scenarios.
How long has it been now, 8 months and people still don’t get this issue. It’s not about if it’s day or night here or there, nor about if you’re American, European or Asian time zone. Still going to that silly strawman.
It’s about imbalanced scoring due to imbalanced population on the map. I don’t care if its 300 Americans running roughshod over an Oceanic server with 30 players in NA primetime, the scoring is just as stupid anytime you get in this scenario. In a case such as this the 300 players should have their scoring ticks reduced in value because they are fighting over things that are no challenge to take.
This would keep matches closer and more competitive, reward epic sieges, deserving of their difficulty, and keep players playing far longer into matchups, and caring about the true intent of the game mode, instead of about Wxp trains or ad hocing 1v1s behind a windmill because of how bored they are of the broken scoring mechanics.
But lets just keep ignoring the real issue and derping that the sun is rising somewhere as if that is relevant.
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New bug since the patch. When you try to use siege equipment in certain locations, usually on the ledge of a tower wall, it will give the error message in the title, and you cannot do anything from that point on. You cannot fire the siege, you cannot get off the siege, you cannot use any of your skills. You are just locked in place useless.
The only escape I know of is to waypoint or logout and in.
This has happened at least half a dozen times alone since the patch, it is very annoying and needs addressing quickly.
Having it fill up to 10% out of combat would not be bad, nor OP, at all. Just so we have some access to our class mechanic for each new battle. Could probably argue pretty safely for up to 25%.
I don’t think its wise to level one way if you are planning to have to change that at max level for whatever reason. Those levels are a good training ground to improve with your final build style, and having lesser options on your way up can help you learn the strengths and weaknesses of each skill sometimes better as that’s all you have to work with. I found the Necro an extremely easy class to kite with even without minions. They shouldn’t be necessary as a crutch.
It could be perception, or just bad luck. The numbers don’t back up that you should last way longer with carrion. There are certain class builds that don’t put out much condition damage then rabid will help you survive better. But of course you have to be aware of condition damage builds and get rid of it, which should be easy as a Necro.
If you regen life during combats, or are just good at being defensive, allowing longer combats and more healing, you will want toughness.
When I first built full rabid I did feel like I needed just a bit more health in a lot circumstances. Points in blood magic and ascended gear (like above post) put me at around 22K with super high toughness, now it feels like I can stay alive forever, unless I totally screw up.
In big WvW fights that last minutes, the amount of healing and sustain that goes on, benefits toughness a lot more. If you are in combats that are quick and bursty, which is what may be happening to you in sPVP, focus fire, carrion is going to defend burst better, and give you a little more time to react.
Soldier’s main stat is power, condi’s most worthless. That’s why Sentinel is better budgeted. If you are looking to increase survival, you want the most survival stats while accepting the least power. That could just mean 2 pieces, while you’d have to take 3 of solider’s for similar survival and lose even more offense. The ratio per piece doesn’t matter if you aren’t using a full set. Condi Necro is likely to have way more toughness than health due to being primarily Rabid, a few pieces of Sentinel would work you back toward the 1:1 ratio.
1:1 is theorycraft anyway, and can’t consider healing vs condition damage taken in a given battle, which can sway which is more valuable. Likewise how much condition removal you have. If you have a lot, generally we do, toughness can be better than vit. Same with Life Steal.
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And Carrion nor Rabid exist so you must take defensive stats and lose out on 80% damage you could do as a coni necro.
Don’t get what this post is saying. I said if I wanted to get more tanky. You would never build a whole set with this obviously, but maybe snag a couple pieces out from your Rabid if the Necro didn’t feel survivable enough where he was at.
Because Vitality is the main stat, you would need to use less pieces of this vs Knight, Soldier or Carrion to achieve the same survivability gain.
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Your second weapon set (doesn’t seem to be one in link) and gear choices are pretty much going to define this build, either as more power or more condition.
I don’t think Death Shroud up time can be long enough to ever have it be the main feature of a build, I think its rather an accessory to other builds. Well to all builds by default, just a matter of how much into it you want to go. As you will always be in main form longer.
It looks unfinished but rather toward a hybrid atm.
In my experience Precision gives me more damage than Power over time, due to Sigil of Earth and Barbed Precision procs, that is if you have extended condition duration, which you should if we are discussing condition builds.
Power will favor the staff and Precision will favor the Scepter/Dagger, but even with more Power staff isn’t really a DPS weapon you just sit on for long periods.
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I would take pieces of this over Soldier’s as a conditionmancer, where power does the least for us, if I wanted to get a bit more tanky. Vitality is probably the best stat in the game for Necros. Due to that we get 1.6X its worth counting DS, and that we can’t go invulnerable, can’t stealth, don’t have blocks, and are not very deceptive. Facetank is how we primarily defend ourselves and you need health for that.
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Nah, it primarily benefits zergs that can do massive damage to a door in 30 seconds. Small ninja teams are unlikely to get through a gate in 30 seconds, so even without scouts you can still defend vs them because you can have just enough people in the immediate area to repel. A 40 man zerg though losing 30 seconds on… goodbye structure.
Not sure why people want and defend this game getting more zerg friendly. Mechanics should encourage you know… PVP, not help avoid it.
It’s always been 1 second, and could get up to 2 with 100% bleed duration. No cooldown. Haven’t tested duration or cd since the patch, but don’t see any reason why it would have been touched.
Not greatly I don’t. I think its the pervasive green theme, I wish each prof wasn’t quite so strongly single color associated. But if it has to be, ours should be black, would give a more Necro-y feeling I think.
Even last couple days the income evolution of Kain is very similar to YB, Mag a bit ahead. So as long as you all aren’t over working yourselves to keep this up, I think KN can hang around here in the tier.
It is how it is set up now, they break down the play as you want barrier by having the fall back laurel currency. You never have to do fractals or guild missions, all you ever have to do is the daily/monthly. As long as everything they add has laurels as their currency it is still within their design philosophy.
That would be fine if it didn’t take 30 or 40 days to get an item via dailies vs a week of running dungeons.
^ You forced yourself through something you didn’t want to do for gear, that is why I left other games. A lot of people won’t do it anymore, even if its just for a week, 2 hours a day, or for a month. It’s a dangerous precedent to give in to, because what happens when they release an even longer PVE grind, that they try to make you go along with. You say you won’t ever go in PvE again, but you did this time. At some point you just say its enough and don’t do it.
Anet sold this game on variety of playstyles and not forcing you into stuff. Now it seems they are going back on their word. People need to make themselves heard and suggest what will keep them playing the game and supporting Anet. Not just bow their head and trudge through something if its not enjoyable to them. As that just creates bitterness eventually leading to going elsewhere.
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An unupgraded camp guard gave me a ‘miss’ on Epidemic today, I had never seen that before, even in its nerfed form. The internal mechanics of this skill were likely changed, or they just remade a whole new skill for it, but seems buggy now.
What actually happens is you sit in a keep/tower defending against an enemy who MIGHT. NOT. EVEN. BE. ON. THE. MAP. For hours at a time.
Exactly. Many don’t seem to grasp the population disparity in tiers. This may work fine for reset time, 3-4 hours of primetime each night for a server, or all the time in T1 or T2, because there are multiple zergs on a map, and sentry duty is likely to payoff, you will see action eventually and help your team.
But lower down its just doing nothing. Outside of prime hours the majority of time in these tiers there is maybe at best one small team on the map from each server. But sometimes none. Maps can sit one same color, or even shared, for an hour or two with no major attacks, just single party’s hitting camps here and there, solo’ers, or maybe a small group getting Breakout started, then melting away. There is nothing to defend, you are not going to get 10-15 people out of your 25 on the whole map to just be sitting around doing nothing, and shouldn’t have to. Then 2 hours later an opponent ports on to the map with all their non-EB forces, maybe 30 people and they hit at a random location, and you are supposed to have had 15 people sitting for those 2 hours at every structure…. riiiight. It’s terrible design.
If the direction WvW is going continues, it won’t take but the next game out that has any more lively RvR mechanics to get people to bolt in droves from this zerg friendly, wxp train style of gameplay.
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It simply means you have to be more observant – you’re not going to have white swords to follow, so instead you actually have to pay attention to your sentries and yaks.
Any small team with a brain knows you take the camp before the sentries and yaks.
My expectation has been that each ‘play type’ is getting some ascended gear.
This would be totally antithetical to much of their design philosophy from the beginning. Which is play the way you want, and still get equal rewards in any game mode, not being forced to do parts of the game you do not like in order to progress maximally.
Make all items available in all avenues, the only thing that needs to be balanced is the amount of effort to get them should be fairly even relative to each mode.
We will see ascended gear when those who are only doing their dailies have met the minimum amount of time to get all their ascended gear.
Why do I say that? Many people have been saving their badges since the beginning, including myself. Day 1 when this gets released, they will have all of their ascended gear out of the gate. Many people will cry about doing all those fractals or dailies and how they had to invest time while the WvW crowd got them right away. Allowing all the daily/fractal people to put in their time and get their ascended gear holds the whining to a minimum at least.
I’m think either the next patch or the patch after that will be our ascended gear patch. It doesn’t take that much work to put in a vendor that sells ascended gear for currency. It’s already done they are just biding their time.
When it finally does get put in it will most likely be simultaneous with even newer ascended gear, like weapons, that are not available in WvW for months more themselves, so they can keep the time gated treadmills as the only way to be the farthest along.
Just lost our fully upgraded Stonemist because the enemy team just melted our outer gate, and halfway our inner gate within 30 seconds. We could have easily stopped it. IF we didnt get notified by it by the moment they were at 10% left on the last gate. This idea was rather stupid and just makes it into “who builds the most and fastest siege”.
And to build the fastest and most siege, you need the biggest zerg possible, to take advantage of as much damage as you can in that 30 second window. The quest for bigger and bigger zergballs and more farming WXP continues unabated.
If you are not going to have a scout in a structure, you deserve to loose it.
That’s irrelevant to the discussion of if the alert system is bad design or not.
The currency seems to be simply the wait time we have to endure to get the stuff. It doesn’t really matter if its easy to buy, if by the time WvWers get their Ascended the vast majority of PVErs are fully slotted with BiS for months.
I would also contest that you can have just one sentry at each structure with this change. Before? Sure.
But not now, you need one at every single gate, less the only way that sentry sees the attack before 30 seconds is if he gets lucky and happens to be at the right gate, even if doing rounds to each over and over. A garrison will now need 5 sentries to watch all the gates, a side keep will need 2 or 3 sentries.
Even in T3 the majority of the day outside primetime I bet there is less than 30 players per team on the BL maps. Less the lower you go. You’re going to have a a third of your force standing around twiddling their thumbs? No way, not realistic.
It should be basic to have a scout at every structure.
If you are not placing a scout in your towers/keeps, you deserve to loose.
No it should not. What tier are you in? If not enough players are currently doing it right now on many servers that pretty much tells you they don’t enjoy it, why should players in a video game be forced to do something not fun and not enjoyable just because it will help them win? That is backwards logic, ‘we do it to win’.
What next, someone is going to come in and say their favorite part of the game is refereshing siege, no really, they prefer there is a time limit on siege so they can refresh it instead of it staying up like it would, and should, if it the game didn’t have to make compromises for server resources.
People refresh siege because it is necessary yes, same reason most act as sentries. But refreshing siege is necessary because server resources demanded that as a concession for the game to run better. While this is purely an arbitrary choice, that doesn’t have to exist, but does despite that it is looked at as a chore rather than enjoyable to most.
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For people that enjoy being sentries, there is nothing stopping them from doing it, and it already gave an advantage like it should as it was. The swords couldn’t tell you how many attackers (could even be more than 25 just not all attacking) what kind of siege was up, what kind of defenses were there, you needed human intel for that, great.
But it shouldn’t be mandatory at every location, and this makes it nearly so. If a zerg hits and you don’t have notification for 30 seconds, good chance you lost it. Especially now with WxP already having made less waypoints and upgrades around most maps.
I know this may come as a total shock but not everyone finds this boring.
Some people like the excitement of knowing that an attack could be coming at any moment. Some people just like helping their team even without a reward. If it isn’t something you are interested in then don’t do it. But you’d be surprised how many people actually enjoy scouting for their server.
Doesn’t shock me, but I would wager its a pretty darn small minority, based on my servers experience. And just because some do it (I’ve done it), doesn’t mean they like or enjoy it, but may feel duty bound to ‘take one for the team’, or because its their turn.
It’s also not scouting, scouting is roaming around keeping tabs on the enemy, giving information to prepare for an attack, etc, its at least active gameplay, I have no problem with that. This is sentry duty. Guard duty, just like the dullish NPC’s out front do, and should be doing for you. Why are NPC’s there if they can’t give an alarm on time?
Most that do this are often busy mutli-tasking with something else, surfing, watching TV, eating, who knows, because its about as fun as watching grass grow. But not quality gameplay if players feel they must be distracted by something else while doing it.
In T1-T2 there might be so many players on map, its easy to find people for this. Great. But farther on down when you need 20% of your on map force just standing around to cover all your assets, good luck finding 1 in 5 that like it. And the end result is keep trading, less fighting, less epic sieges.
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“Working together” code for ‘taking turns being bored’.
Yeah you deserve to lose if you can’t find enough people willing to be bored. Maybe they should install latrines in the towers and you need to find people to wash them, because hey that’s keeping it real.
This is nutty, was this a gameplay decision or a ’save bandwidth / resources ’ one?
I have run supply for my own siege in WvW sooo many times when it has taken more than 2 minutes. Nice to be able to stop and help a ally in combat, or take back a camp before you can get the supply you need. Sometimes you just need 2m+ because the closest available supply is a long run.
Only large zergs are going to bother dropping defensive siege now, and even more supply will be looted out of depots. They must really despise defense in this game, and won’t be happy until its just zergs exchanging each others structures back and forth and waving to each other as they pass.
Most tiers don’t have the people to support this mechanic. I really wonder at some of the decisions they make. Commence even more musical keep trading and WXP farming.
Vulnerability does very little for me at all as a conditionmancer, it only affects direct damage, which is a small portion of my overall DPS. In small team sized fights it helps the most, for your team, but in zergs, you really don’t need it, stuff drops fast anyway, and you are better off just putting out your damage first.
All I know is they better not debut a condition on us that other profs then end up being able to use better, stack faster, etc. :\
If Kain’s losses stop with no more, this tier will be balanced nicely.
I keep seeing ideas for more damage from a condition, honestly condition builds don’t need more damage.
We need some form of escape since we are so slow, a teleport would do.
I was tempted to say just bring back the old Dark Path from beta that was a teleport. But its seems kind of redundant to have a port in and a port out. They should just repurpose Dark Path to be castable without a target, and then it just ports you to that location if there is no target, though it needs to be a bit faster travel time.
I’ve been around 105-130 through various builds, that’s only counting gear/food. BiP will add 17 more or so, more with might, etc.
But just because you are condition build, I wouldn’t worry if others have higher, doesn’t mean your sole objective is to get your bleeds as high as they can go. There are worthy tradeoffs to make to gain other things and still put out very good condition damage.
Where did Mags late night numbers come from. Left over from the bandwagon? We’ve been getting pummeled pretty good late NA the last two weeks. Last time around, I remember YB had the stronger late night and overnight crew.
I love the idea of a space creating skill. Something like the rangers Point Blank shot.
Either pushing the enemy back or making you leap back. We have a skill that moves us closer (Dark Path) but DS is often being used defensively, and would be ideal to have something to create space for us.
Then it would also apply the new condition, whatever that is going to be.
Maybe a life stealing dot.
Problem with this is if you stay in Death Shroud you can’t be healed. If the dot is short therefore, it would often be wasted.
Stealing a boon could be good as we don’t have access to that many.
I don’t care what the new condition could be, it should start doing massive damage like burn as soon as it is applied and not like bleeding where it take 10 minutes to become noticable. It should also be something that not all classes can have so that when you apply it it’s not already at cap and does practicaly nothing.
Definitely this. It has to ramp up fast. Our bleeds need like 10 seconds to even out with burst, and Poison, while ticks decent damage, doesn’t stack in intensity, so also takes long time to deal out damage.
It should be a short duration type condition, under 5 seconds base, that has a fairly specific secondary, maybe like it stuns for a second on application.
It should also be instant cast, too many of our actual counter play abilities have way too long cast times, and make the profession feel kind of slow and at the mercy of highly skilled opponents with faster cast abilities.
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