Guild Wars 2

saiyr.3071:

It helps that the T3 matchup was updated 5 hours more recently than the T4 matchup. Maybe you should work harder at stealing free SoS points.

We beat them down every night during primetime, but where they gain back is off hours, not much we can do with no people then. Still, have them at -60 drop for this week, that’s big. Mag just +15 on the other end so far.

The main reason I want to see Mag up is more about getting a 3rd team that actually has forces to make it a 3 way match vs DB, instead of head to head during primetime (where we also beat DB, but its stale with 2 teams), regardless who is actually stronger. Though YB has I think ironed out some problems since first hitting T3.

Should note this would be a theoretical choice right now as Nightmare Runes aren’t even working on giving duration, nor Giver AFAIK. Hopefully it will be fixed on the 26th.

Running condition build I don’t have much trouble with all but the best of the thieves, which aren’t most of them. That is if they stay and fight. The annoying thing is the smart thieves that aren’t necessarily great, but still smart. They will run away before you kill them and try to come back at you several times. This is where Necro can be frustrating (hard to get away from… riiiight) because you can in effect beat the same thief 3 or 4 times yet he doesn’t die. Yet if he gets you to make a mistake only once, he wins for real, and you are running.

If you can put up with them getting multiple chances on you, then go for it. Just know that the tables aren’t exactly even.

Sometimes I like to use their own strategy against them. Which is to run away. Now as a Necro we can’t actually get away speed wise from a thief, but we can drop so much crap behind us as we run, that they will be severely wounded if they want to catch up. I’ve suckered many thieves this way, ran until I see their health dropping real low from my marks and other AoE, then turn around and gank them.

Maladon.5760:

Haven’t checked the score in a few days, anyone got an update?

Here’s the score that matters. We need new blood up here, Mag has to stop slacking!

Projections

SoS: 1 721.069
Magoombas: 1 719.758

Well we can hope, but what we know about Anet balancing so far, they usually don’t touch the most powerful builds. Or if they do take something small away from them, they also give something positive somewhere else, even buffs! So if the main builds on a lower end profession aren’t up to snuff they also won’t make those better to catch up, but rather will buff the least used weapons and abilities of those professions, which usually end up still not as good as even the most used builds on professions that are already behind. They will fix bugs that are far from the most important, like something underwater. In the end the major balance issues with the game do not get addressed, or do so at a snails pace.

Ojimaru.8970:

My question is this: given that PVE/WvW has access to Rare Veggie Pizza for an additional +40% Condition Duration, would we see a DPS increase for this spec? For that matter, would a Condition Damage spec benefit more from a different food buff?

If you want any duration at all in your build, the food is the best place to get the first 40% because it is budgeted far less there than anywhere else.

In other words the best food you can get only gives about 100 condition damage. While to trade out the equivalent of 40% duration from Runes or from Traits or gear, you can instead get like 400 condition damage in those places.

Lately I’ve been coming around on the idea that bleed duration in specific might be overrated, but not so much duration for our other conditions.

If you look at our non-bleed conditions, stuff like Poison, Chill, Cripple, this stuff usually lasts under 10 seconds, and any duration gained has a good chance to run before the target is dead, or in PVP, before it gets removed.

But most of our bleeds are already fairly long to begin with and most are not likely to run an extra 100% duration I think. Scepter base attack is only 5s and can be helped by duration but I don’t think most of our bleed stacks come from that in a given combat.

With the knowledge that you don’t even need 100% extra bleed to get a second tick on barbed precision, that was the one big damage boost that might have made it worth it.

Ironically I am using bleed duration runes atm, but only because general duration are bugged. I’d far rather have 20% all condition than 30% bleed which is a choice available.

How much duration, of any kind, you want is also going to be dependent on your build. Even among conditionmancers, there are variations. If you are running more tanky stuff like rabid gear, longer durations will fit your more attrition based stat setup. While if you are going for rampager, beserker, something like that, you should probably focus on front end damage instead of duration, since you need fights to end fast.

Just make sure you know what you’re doing, as if you make any sort of gripes here, be prepared for people to suggest basically you just don’t know how to play.

But a more productive question might be, what do you actually want to do endgame in GW2? If its something like run dungeons, people should be honest and tell you Necro’s aren’t the most welcome class in groups.

Pinko.2076:

The entire function of the wvw system isn’t competitive. It’s a population matching tool and not much more. To say that servers need to earn a new matchup seems like people misunderstand the function of it!

You can certainly work harder with the people you do have, to do something like try and bump up a tier if you are close. I know when we were down in T4, the server was very united in doing everything possible to get back into T3 where it was a lot more interesting.

Anyone who feels that their contribution means nothing, not sure why they would even play. Is it going to be enough to win vs lose many matchups, no not that often, but it can affect ratings for sure. There is a big difference between servers that play a week out, and those that just kind of give up once the finish order looks settled.

Pinko.2076:

Explain this “earning it” thing in regards to meaningless rankings.

It means SoS took a huge nosedive, opening up a spot, as they continue to lose players.

It’s been a decent enough few weeks for this server group, but looks like Mag will be getting a free invitation to T3 next week, SoS departing. Not sure that they really earned it, but coverage should be more interesting for us at least. DB will have free reign off peak, even more than usual.

Looks like T3 and T4 might not be changing for a while. If our night crew can keep up the strong showings that should be fine for us.

The Marks also don’t trigger on a lot of world bosses that have targeted spots in the air, dragon claws and such things, even if they bring them to the ground they don’t trigger. They just sit on the ground below them doing nothing. Once again, diminishing our DPS and contribution. This really needs to be fixed.

Anti-res mechanic, bah, the player won’t need a rez, because he will just rez himself and you don’t have the time to both DPS his buddy and the downed player.

I would far rather have them hit downed players. Can’t count how many fights I’ve had other professions come back from downed because as a condimancer, our DPS goes to crap on downed players since 1 of our 2 weapons becomes useless. And of course we don’t have virtually any stability for easy stomps.

flow.6043:

Pendragon.8735:

Also, if you use epidemic a lot, I like for those other non damaging conditions to get spread as long as possible, rather than just the bleeds hitting a little harder.

When epidemic is used, the remaining time of each condition is copied, the duration wont refresh and start from scratch with the individual condition duration of the necromancer.
However, condition damage applies to every condition, even to the ones inflicted by other players.

Right they don’t start from scratch, that’s why you want them to be longer in the first place, so something is left. As you get into zerg size battles then yes, most of the conditions might be from allies and not you, but most other profs aren’t going to have condition duration, so theirs tend not to last real long. I don’t like being in the zerg that much. Epidemic is still great for small scale encounters.

Dark Path back to a teleport, let it aoe bleed and chill on landing to keep its current offensive utility. This change would actually make Jon Peters salesmanship about Death Shroud a little less humorous.

A while back in an interview discussing Mesmer Portal, and how it made the Mesmer too unique in that utility in WvW, they discussed perhaps giving other classes similar skills to balance it out. Imagine if we got some kind of party based spectral transport skill.

CHIPS.6018:

Finally got the time to watch that video. At 12:10 ish he was saying “When you take a big blast like that, you have to realize and shadow step away.”

LMAO. Wish we can do something like that.

^Well Plague form is a great getaway crutch for us – except it doesn’t stop immobilize…. and you don’t have access to your utilities in plague to actually remove it. So while you can sit and take a beatdown from 5 or 10 players for many seconds, that’s exactly what you will do, get beat in place till you are dead. Seems typical of a lot of our issues.

That’s where something like Mist Form, Blinks, or even Endure Pain is so much better vs large numbers. Our high toughness, health, or death shroud, simply doesn’t scale as a defense as # of opponents increase.

Indeed. It won’t stop unhappy players from quitting a game by telling them “Oh the mode you play isn’t truly competitive, so we don’t care about balance there”.

And actually I think the danger is far greater on that side for class imbalance than sPVP as far as retention. sPVP players are there to win and most will switch to whatever professions are needed for their team to do better. If one profession stinks at the top they don’t really care, move to what is working or changing in the meta.

PVE and WvW players are not like that so much, they are more prone to have picked a profession based on aesthetics or style (and of course you have to level it). Which is not to say they don’t care about winning or will accept getting stomped into the ground everytime they run into X vs Y. They are just far less likely to adjust by rerolling what is more effective. Some will certainly, and you see a ton of thieves, and DD eles in WvW, but many more just won’t play the game mode as much.

Rennoko.5731:

And I never base any arguments of Spvp. Thieves are 100% fine there.. and no one disputes that practically. But a large share of the community doesn’t spvp (no sense of progression, big guild feel). I mean heck, they had to make paid tournaments free because so few people were doing them. That doesn’t suggest a healthy section of the game.

Yet 99% of the balancing feels like it is coming from there, and that’s where the disconnect is. Heck they’ve made changes to some individual class mechanics that would definitely make sense to carry over for WvW, but don’t apply them due to PVE I guess. There must be a way to separate PVE and WvW if they are ever going to get where we need to be.

Right can’t forget fear. As an example to what Rising Ducks is after, right now I’m using Undead Runes (about 330 condition damage) since duration runes are bugged, but according to my figures 30% more duration in runes is going to give me more damage just on fear on average, since more fears will tick a second time.

Barbed Precision is going to favor duration as well, and will rarely ever be cleansed at 1 or 2 seconds, though the difference is not much. Maybe 100 extra damage over 20 procs at 10% duration, vs 100 cond. damage.

You can do these sort of comparisons fairly easily in the Mists. Killing the golems and veteran sPVP mobs you can get an idea of how much of your damage is coming from conditions by subtracting the direct damage from your combat log out of the HP.

Killing Svanir on average, I’ll put about 5-6k direct damage on him, and about 22k in conditions. That equates to about 200 individual bleed ticks (a few less as some are poison). But even if half those were cleansed, they’d have done about as much as an equivalent amount of power or precision would give me.

Duration vs Damage, if you figure your stacks get cleansed on average after 5 seconds, then condition damage is going to be better straight away. But if an 8 second bleed becomes a 10 second bleed and runs the course, duration is better, even at 300 less condition damage. The break point is somewhere in the middle. So I think its more about how much you value the other conditions.

But there is no figures that will 100% accurately represent PVP. There its going to depend a lot on how much removal you run into. Also, if you use epidemic a lot, I like for those other non damaging conditions to get spread as long as possible, rather than just the bleeds hitting a little harder.

For PVP, yes duration is more risky, but even if your long durations run half their time, damage is competitive with precision or power.

What people underestimate though is that duration really helps your non damaging conditions as well. Chill, cripple, weakness, poison, all this stuff is good in PVP, and makes life hell on enemies the longer its on. It also helps hide your bleed stacks longer, and gives your more damage too (target the weak & feast of corruption).

Pyroatheist.9031:

The one thing that can definitely be said about maguuma, is that not in any of the weeks that we fought them did 1 person ever complain about nightcapping. Yak’s folks just don’t seem to understand how wvw works unfortunately.

Instead they just left the tier and I don’t think a lot want to come back tbh.

I’ve only been down 30 SR as a secondary to conditions, but it seems really weird to play any kind of DS dancing build without having it at 5 sec recharge. Would seem ideal for cleaning a condition, and keeping fury and retaliation up.

It’s looking like we might hang around as a thorn in the side of T3 another week yet. Early, but so far gained more points than Mag has in T4. It’s got to be SoS’s remaining high rank though, when that settles to a proper place it will be harder to gain.

Ok didn’t know you were settled, remembered seeing you on Maguuma last time we played I think. I’m thinking we are facing pitched battles most of the day and night here and we got merc teams on us too! But things do change fast in this system.

Reiko.1560:

Niim.9260:

Has some great fights this afternoon, specially at Wildcreek, thanks for the fun.

You mean the ~20 SoS pugs vs 5 [AoN]s… that was both hilarious and sad at the same time.

Are these the guys that server hop looking for tough action, no allegiance really. Seems like the biggest pop server in this tier wouldn’t be the ideal place for that.

This talk of boon hate also made me uneasy. This is kind of our specialty right now. If it they start handing it out like candy to balance how over reliant certain builds are on boons, it will weaken our unique identity even more.

Mesmer was the last class released, its not that uncommon for things that are developed later to see a power creep. They also seem always almost proud of boasting the ele as king of versatility, which can easily be read as best at whatever role they want to do, often at the same time.

They don’t want to nerf a top build they say, but rather bring other stuff up. That would be fine if it was happening at a quick pace but its not. The minor buffs they have given here or there to, so far, mostly non popular builds and skills, still haven’t even gotten those up on even footing, so for every profession to reach the place of the strongest couple builds, its going to take years. Which is not good enough.

I don’t know why people even care how fast they drop, they are easy to buy, and don’t sell for very much really. That some people still link even rare’s that drop is utterly head scratching.

Now you put ascended in as rare drops, which they actually should, and you will have a valuable commodity and something to get excited over finding.

I feel a bit sorry for SoS because I think their non prime players are going to be driven entirely off by the huge disparities they face in T3. It will still be fun for the main bulk of their players that play at the same time, but the server will be like a giant on/off switch as to when you can actually WvW and have any fun there. Unfortunately affects of that extend out to the other 2 servers in a match.

^ I don’t agree with the above. For bleeds it is true but no other condition. Sacrificing duration for condi damage also sacrifices length on your chills, poisons, weakness, cripples, etc, all of which aren’t really that long to where most of the time duration will help them even in pvp.

If you want to be a condition spec, instead of hybrid, I think you have to go for it 100%, which means bringing enough condition reapplication to actually overcome condition removal. No class can remove conditions as fast as we can apply them and the idea is to dupe them into blowing removal early or a the wrong time and then overload them. Most good condi clearing classes tend to favor boons, and we can make that work for us by removing and corrupting those boons, making them waste removals to clear conditions they themselves are responsible for adding.

Barbed Precision is also a trait that almost 100% benefits from duration since at maximum a 2 second bleed, it will almost always run its course. It has no cooldown and triggers a lot with high crit rate.

First thing they could do is actually fix our condition runes, which is screwing up a lot of condition builds. We still have outstanding bugs and they are letting more seep through the cracks. Necro’s have to be careful not to fall into a Stockholm Syndrome where we’ve been neglected so long, or bug ridden the point people begin to wear it as a badge of pride that they can perform alright by managing to overcome handicaps with a lot of dedication.

If you can’t play for the week, just play for the time you are on no doubt. But still will be waiting for the next big exodus server to fall or the next big zerg one to come up, for a shuffle. As once Mag and YB can get back in the same tier, maybe with a CD or such, should be ideal.

Have to realize these guys aren’t as good as the top sPVP players. And therefore don’t know the strengths and weakneses to the same degree, other than what the community tells them, and whatever they can make out of all their internal data tracking about who is playing what and w/l records and such.

Then even in PVE/WvW they can have the requisite skill to understand the class in those modes, but that still isn’t enough if you don’t have people playing it every day for an extended time frame. And where the issues aren’t exactly the same. It takes becoming familiar with every aspect to really be able to see the fine tuning that needs done. It’s obvious just by looking at how many weapon sets are failures across every class that not enough time was able to be done for this prior to release. Now that the dev team is even smaller, post release, its still not able to get done.

It could be faster, but I love this skill even if it only transfers one condition. It’s great as an opener in conjuction with a corruption, and then also you are often going to blind a big opening attack of the opponent quite often. The cooldown is pretty reasonable as well, so it should come back up later in the fight.

You just need to be aware not to think its going to clear all conditions on you unless you’re in the middle of lots of foes. Otherwise just use staff 4 or consume conditions, or plague signet.

As far as not casting I don’t notice this too much, try to keep good straight on facing.

I would go condition if you just want to zerg around. Our utility in large fights and sieges as a conditionmancer, and with all that range, is hard to match.

Power is viable too, but is more fit for like small group action, roaming, or situations where you can freely commit to ‘win or die’ engagements with good chance of coming out alive.

I have a non-traditional view myself, that condition can actually cover all scenarios above, but not gonna say its easy. But I like to move from different style operations within WvW without changing more than just a few utilities.

They did mention they were going to look at cast times with something like the ele heal, I wish they would look at reducing just maybe 1 to 3 of our longer cast time abilities.

If they are interested in increasing ‘play’ in a class, such in the way described, you need to have access to some fast twitch abilities that aren’t locked out so much due to being stunned, chilled or w/e, in situations you only have micro seconds to do something reactive.

A skill like Epidemic, because of how massively dangerous it can be, is justified in its cast time. And often you’ll suffer the target dying before it lands if you aren’t careful. But some other stuff doesn’t need to be so long I think. Enfeebling blood, Spinal Shivers, Dark Path, etc.

It’s also clear how much community feedback factors into some changes. If Necros are content with being ‘almost there’ and some trying to pooh pooh anyone that still sees some issues, maybe just because one person’s particular build or chosen playstyle is doing fine, then that is where we will always remain.

Rennoko.5731:

I think it is a misconception that we have more viable builds than other classes. Our builds are just more normalized across the board than other classes. When a class has a really REALLY strong build (like shatter mesmers), all the other builds are looked at as not viable, because of that. It is very hard to like a mesmer build that doesn’t have 30 points in their fifth tree.

It isn’t an issue of viability, but rather of balance. If all the classes builds were as balanced as the necro (in traits), they would have the diversity we do. Of course the flip side of that is, those classes better get ready for the nerf bat on their favorite builds.

I agree that its more lack of a clear powerful build that makes us seem diverse. We have 3 or 4 others that ‘work’ or I guess you could say viable depending on one’s definition of it, but none that really stand out as powerful in the way many other professions do.

But I don’t think those singular powerful profession builds are really in line for a nerf. DD ele is just getting tweaked very minor these last few patches, instead they seem to leave powerful builds where they are but throw some bones to other professions to try and catch up (like our Focus was given damage per boon it removed being one example).

Now that they brought axe up on damage they appear to think we are fine. I think we have 3 or 4 manageable builds but all of them could use some minor tweaks yet, if they aren’t going to ever quickly whack a mole the strongest builds.

As I’ve said before they need to focus on more than just the tourney meta, as indeed, even one of the players in the interview noted something like the mass abundance of thieves in hot join and how this isn’t good long term for bringing people in to the game.

saiyr.3071:

I understand all of this. I’m just pointing out that this is not a “sudden” occurrence.

Mag is lower last two days around this time than earlier in the week, by about 50 to 100 ppt, you can look on the evolution chart.

Ultimately both servers will continue to move up and down I’m sure either way, even if we spend an extra week here. If there was one more server with the strength of Mag and YB, it would make for a great tier.

saiyr.3071:

Pendragon.8735:

Think we are gonna stay, Magoomba’s have too many scared of T3. They are losing to CD at the moment all of a sudden.

Every morning I get on to check the scores and we are almost always last in PPT. This is nothing new, and you of all people (being on YB, IIRC) should know that their Oceanics are obviously more numerous than ours.

DB’s Oceanic is several times stronger yet. And yet the last couple nights we have managed to actually battle a foothold overnight instead of getting wiped off the map.

Basically players have got to want it, there is a difference between pushing toward the end of a week and kind of just sitting out. I’ve seen both on our own server, but we definitely have not given up that way this week, despite the score gap.

Think we are gonna stay, Magoomba’s have too many scared of T3. They are losing to CD at the moment all of a sudden.

I like the challenge of this tier I just wish we had more players for half the day, because its really difficult to find people to play with at certain times due to how many more enemies are out.

Because of SoS’s extreme population skew, T3 is almost like a straight head to head for the majority of times. DB vs SOS for NA off hours then DB vs YB for a large portion of NA time slot. It’s not ideal because pop imbalances are very magnified without a strong 3rd team presence.

There are some other stealth issues that will be helped by these changes that have nothing to do with combat strength. Stuff like a thief tying up an entire team post keep capture because of near permanent stealth builds, and you can’t stop searching for them or they go and rez their mez buddy and flip your keep back 5 or 10 minutes later.

Or even something like Dolyak hunting, you want to be able to give 1 or 2 defenders, which is a thankless job, an even chance to protect supplies without needing so many people around to AoE dump to kill them in one off blast. With reveal popping on any destealth, it will make it a bit easier to defend that immediate area around an escort.

Anet finally realized that you can’t have a stealth this powerful in a game without detection counters to it. Early on in development they talked of not even having stealth (should have went that way), but then end up putting one of the most potent stealths of any game in recent memory in. Was a pretty WTF move.

So to fix it you can either make it less powerful or leave it but introduce new detection methods. The latter solution obviously requires more dev time and creating new mechanics and abilities, so they went with the easier solution.

fractalKinesis.8569:

I’ve played necro a bit recently, and while it’s kind of fun, I feel a bit disappointed that it’s more dark-caster and less master-of-death.
While necros are great at inflicting- and manipulating- conditions, I’ve really thought that they should be at home in a different place entirely: death. They should have corpse exploitation mechanics like they did from GW1 (not necessarily in raising minion armies, because that was incredibly overpowered at times), by spreading conditions and general discord from nearby corpses, which in turn helps them make more corpses to feed on.

Aesthetically I agree, all the minions are more like weird aliens, maybe frankenstein creatures at best, rather than something you rose from the grave.

Though we do get life force when stuff dies, and can even get regular health too. Though our actual skills we have available to use in Death Shroud to consume all that life essence, don’t seem all that death inspired. I think it might be all the green. I know they tried for each class to have a color theme, but its a bit overkill on the green effects. How about some black or purple.

^ I think its more likely the tooltips were bugged actually, not that the dev team put in +16% meaning to put +6%. Least I hope so.

Because +6% duration for a 4 pc bonus is pretty crappy, especially when you can get +10% on a 2pc bonus on 2 other sets, or from 1 single slot weapon (whenever giver starts working).

It’s exactly the setup I was using, +30%, and really lets you get away without Master of Terror if you want.

How about Orbs – that you can’t put in tower or keep.

The orb cannot physically enter a structure, you drop it if you go inside. Boom, instant open field warfare constantly for those that want it. It’s like a football and people just go after it, but it still confers bonuses to the team that holds it.

Actually… that might be too tempting and no one would fight over the structures anymore lol.

I’d like to see some random targets. I don’t know if this could be like an NPC caravan that pops up on the map and rewards points and lots of supply (maybe siege prints), or something else valuable to the war effort, but you would want it still less valuable than a tower or keep, so that a whole zerg would not want to go for it, and leaving something more valuable unprotected.

But you would get small groups wanting to go for it, and by nature of its appearance being randomly timed, this would get the small groups actually fighting each other. Where with camps, they always just sit there, waiting to be stormed by the zerg whenever the zerg is en route to an objective nearby anyway.

There has to be a reason or reward for the 3rd team to attack the 1st team. At least when there were orbs, if the top team held them, it was a small objective that might be valuable to both other teams.

Now there is just no reward for taking on, what is, as said above, a tougher target to take points on.

Maybe if the rating system worked so that all 3 teams were exceedingly close, the 3rd team would legitimately feel like attacking the top 1 would position them to win the match. But now the 3rd team is typically so far behind by about the 3rd day, its plain as day they have no chance at first. I think shorter matches might improve this.

Wow never thought I’d see someone praising WAR in relation to GW2. What I remember is the game was a buggy incomplete mess with nothing delivering on what they promised, fine as the ambitions might have been.

GW2’s WvW is far closer to resembling an interconnected war type scenario, what with the siege and logistics aspects. And despite the misgivings over the Glicko rating, which is far from perfect, it has produced far more competitive matches than I remember in Warhammers mostly horribly lobsided faction wars.

You can’t have permanent gains in WvW or one side starts quitting. Look, even with matches resetting every week, see how people migrating to winning servers still screwed so much up. If winning wasn’t any kind of its own reward, why did so many people bandwagon?

But as far as longer term rewards, those will be coming in the March update I presume, at least in terms of an individual, which is probably the better place to give permanent gains anyway.