Guild Wars 2

style.6173:

1. 1-3. No one can compete with these servers. We don’t need a league to tell us that.
2. 4-12:
3. 13-21
4. 22-24

Best would be

1-3
4-9
10-15
16-24

10 – 15 would be the most competitive grouping, and doesn’t belong with the few just missing gold. Every server in that tier would compete except NS, who would be needed as a 6th team for rotation purposes.

And maybe you make another 3 and a 6 out of the last 9 as well.

Jeknar.6184:

False… The proof of that is that we (Both SF and ET) will not get Yak’s Bend in our league…

This week is an outlier even for the randomization system. In the current system you usually get at least one team right around your rank. And often get even a decent compelling match.

When leagues start the top three servers will destroy 4-6, and in Silver tier, the top 2 servers seem poised to easily win all matchups except against each other.

I’m not familiar with the Bronze servers that much, but I can’t imagine that 16 or 17 vs 24 is going to be more fair than what you guys usually get either, not counting this admittedly terrible matchup here.

This week is really boring and its Anet’s fault. You can say this or that server is worse in manners attitude whatever, but end of the day, players are going to find alternate ways to entertain themselves when the core concept is broken in a match, and that usually means incredible unfariness toward one side.

Nothing new for YB to be on either end. For the last few weeks we’ve done the same thing bigger servers did to us, karma train around, let weaker servers take back their stuff, only so we could take it again. It’s a big joke, might as well have enemy players waiting behind each other in line at each tower, not fighting, when its their turn to PVDoor cap.

Just so happens this week that is not being done because leagues are starting next week and people want to actually get ready to play more seriously again and defend stuff. I have my doubts how long that serious mindset is really going to last, because there is going to be even more imabalance in leagues than we have now in the random system. But its not hard to understand why people would become utterly board of the musical keep trading either.

In summary, when the coverage is this lopsided there is no strategy you can actually have which is not going to be unfair.

Trouble with roaming in this game is too many roamers prime objective is to not die, rather than challenge themselves and try to find out the biggest odds they can overcome. This is in reality more of a ganking mindset than a true roaming one in the spirit of taking on do or die challenging fights. Kill the weak players and run from other good ones if you can’t beat them.

Small ‘roaming’ teams have the exact same distinction. If you see all thieves and mesmers, that is actually a gank squad, that won’t actually stay and fight or hold ground. If a small group has warriors and guardians they can actually fight as a shock troop unit, take on bigger forces without endless kiting strategy, and those can be incredibly useful in WvW, because they can stand their ground, fighting as a unit and supporting each other, instead of as separate assassins, and WvW is all about territory control if you care at all about the actual game mode.

So that is a big difference in mindset within roaming. It’s hard to respect the cowardly specs that play simply not to die, but unfortunately, because supreme mobility differences in professions allows for this style, the majority of roamers are made up of players that run as soon as a fight turns on them. For example, the change to allow warriors insane mobility and escape was a really bad one. Just added another trolling build into the mix.

It’s better, but still don’t get why its so hard for them to give a non stat bonus.

50% Magic Find, Increased Exp, Karma, obviously the stomp pts, that would be enough.

100% Fear duration, even beyond, will help you against folks running around with Melandru and other condition decreasing effects. Guardian just got a new one.

flow.6043:

In a way the buff to the lf pool indirectly improved our regular healing as well because it allowed us to stay in DS longer to protect our hp.

Yeah but that is still a very suboptimal way to use DS. Because unless in Power or max SR build, your DPS drops big after you blow fear and torment and the degen is an absolute waste to let tick away compared up against the burst defense you can have by saving the pool for damage spikes. Other condi builds can especially melt DS in no time, half damage or not, if you don’t jump out and clear them.

digiowl.9620:

First off, ANet is deathly afraid of indestructible SPVP necro bunkers. End result, they will move with extreme caution when it comes to upping necro survivability.

Second, ANet is attempting to favor build diversity in the Blood line. This by making Bloodthirst optional rather than mandatory when building for siphon. Thus freeing up a trait slot. Or at least that seems to be their thinking.

So long as they fear improvements over 1 or 2 point health increases on siphoning at a time, the traits will feel weak and close to irrelevant. They don’t impact your playstyle to form the basis of a new build or style, which is a shame.

Condi with dhuumfire plays a certain way. Necro with full wells and trait support plays and feels a certain way. Minion master clearly has its niche and traits. But a life stealing build? It’s just not there, they feel like minor abilities tacked on to whatever the rest of your build is. Drain and deal 40 damage per hit, its not significant, doesn’t change how you play nor even how you survive in a fight.

At the end of a long battle you’ve drained maybe an extra 1000 or 1500 hundred health, big whoop, its very lackluster. That’s barely better than one 5 second regen, a buff given out like candy to certain other specs in the game.

Thematically, its not hard to go with the idea that while you are in a spectral ghostly form you would take less damage. Might even have been their intention – especially as DS was just looked at and a bug fixed in it, not too long ago. But if not, balancing is more important than long dated design ideas. And pretty obvious to see we need every bit of it, as losing half our LF, when already vulnerable to spiking, would neuter us hard.

The way this works now seeing the light of day and explainable though greatly changes the value of Soul Reaping in a positive way. Since the damage being hit in half applies after SR additions, it means your DS pool getting bigger is a lot more valuable than say raw health acquired from the blood line, which now gives far less to DS than it would if indeed the DS number was 100% of our health and mitigated at our armor level.

Yeah you can argue their viability if you include the damage, but that is not what the point of these were or should be.

If they aren’t going to ever make life steal respectable, please just stop wasting a trait line and dump the siphon traits and do something more productive and creative for us here in the Blood line.

So these aren’t that impressive still it appears. Our max sustainability hasn’t gone up since after the changes you still get the same if you take bloodthirst. Minion Masters perhaps come out a bit better.

The only kind of nice thing is that if you don’t want bloodthirst you can still get 80% of the previous max siphons and still pick up something like Mark of Evasion.

On another note, maybe ‘per hit’ or ‘per crit’ is too simple of a way to go with these traits, and they should change them to something a bit more reactive or skill based. As right now they certainly seem to fear if they bump per hit siphon up to high it will simply become a near passive way to be to sustainable without no effort other than attacking.

They might work better siphoning much bigger chunks of health but on more specific and longer triggers.

Post-Patch test, Lifeforce true amount appears unchanged.

As far as I can tell we take half damage in DS. Eat 10,000 damage from mob only about 5k actually lost in DS display. This also applies to conditions.

Bhawb.7408:

It isn’t a nerf, its simply some weird interaction. A dev posted here fairly quickly after DS was finally bug-fixed to be the proper amount of eHP to direct damage.

I imagine Andele is right and there is just a really weird armor interaction here; they wouldn’t nerf DS by about half.

That would defeat the purpose of the change to display our LF health because the number would be meaningless. If my combat log says I took 8000 damage but I have only lost 4000 DS health post-patch on the display, what good is it? Might as well keep it a percentage.

Lopez.7369:

Are you taking Soul Reaping into account?

I’ve tested with and without and it always comes out looking like at least 100% health in DS, and more if you have Soul Reaping points.

Like I said in the first post I took an 8k hit in DS and only lost about 25% of my DS health. That was with 20 points in Soul Reaping. Considering I only had 25k normal health it seems I had about 30k DS health. If tomorrow I now only have 18k (60% + 20% SR) it will be a massive tanking nerf, espeically for eating quick burst with no degen, like a stunlock warrior jumping you or such.

emon.1863:

It is hard to say if they nerf’d LifeForce, because we never saw a real numbers there.

It’s not that difficult to calculate though. We can’t see our Lifeforce number right now but we can see a percentage, we can see our real health, and we can see how much damage is taken to us in Death Shroud via the combat log.

I just stripped all my traits including in Soul Reaping, and did another test against Svanir in the mists. He delivered 4 ‘mauls’ to me, hitting for 11,000 damage taken entirely in Death Shroud. I have 42% of my LF left after that was dealt, while my out of DS healthpool is only 18.5k.

Based on a 60% number for DS my LF should be zero or next to it after that barrage. Instead 11k damage comes out to 59% of my actual health pool, thereby fitting practically perfectly with the idea that current DS is equal to 100% normal health.

I’m going to retest all this stuff tomorrow and the percentages better not change, as in damage we can eat, but I don’t see how it possibly won’t if the video is true. Its not like we gain toughness in DS, as the hits we take do not decrease in the combat log, nor does our base stats change in our panel when we enter it.

I’m bit a puzzled trying to figure out how much lifeforce we have (yet again). In the recent patch stream today we see that lifeforce now has text showing the exact amount of health we have in it. In the video the Necro has 28k normal health and about 17k lifeforce in a full bar, which is 60% of his life, as always claimed by Anet.

But my tests in the current build do not support this number. Running around Orr I had 25k normal health, which means my Lifeforce health should be about 15k if it is 60%. Yet in testing against a Risen King Champion who has a single attack that hits for 8k damage, and swapping into Death Shroud right as that attack hits me, I only lose about 25% of my Lifeforce instead of what should be half my bar, or a tad over 50%.

As with all testing I have done on this, it seems to me right now we have 100% of our health in lifeforce, but the patch build shows differently.

If I’m missing something here would be glad to hear the explanation. Or curious what other players are testing this at, before the patch hits. Because I really hope we aren’t about to lose 40% lifeforce in a nerf.

This is the video link, with the new necro life bar displayed at 30:55

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/470213011

Too late for Dumbfire to be axed, as it sounds like they are addressing it by giving other classes more cleansing power.

Would like to see it give Torment maybe (we need some other source), renamed if necessary. If you are already condi, the conditions it places are kind of redundant as you already have 2 other sources of both.

Why couldn’t they be deleted from inventories? Just refund people their buying price in tandem with the removal.

It’s an unsolvable issue because Anet has no idea what they are balancing Necro around. And a mechanic like this really can’t be balanced when sometimes you start a fight with zero and other times have a whole second life bar.

Dueling is kind of a joke in this game anyway because the classes are not balanced with any intent at 1v1 balance. At least 2 to 3 professions or at least builds within, are always OP at any one time.

I love to fight people 1v1 just out in WvW, because the randomness of it is part of the charm and challenge. They might have more buffs, less buffs, better gear, worse gear, bloodlust advantage, etc, that is all part of it.

But in dueling people expect to create a fair setting which can’t be done, because the game wasn’t built or balanced to bring that about. And the LF question is one of those reasons why.

Reasonably you should be trying to mimic a real organic game situation though, and in WvW the real game situation is most Necro’s will have full LF if you run into them in the field. Only if you engage one right out of another fight, might they be low.

In sPVP you start with none as per the game mode, and have little time to pre-generate it, so your first fight vs a Necro he is not likely to have much or any to start, which makes more sense for sPVP players to duel without it.

They are probably paranoid about silly things like zergs taking a dive to farm each other.

But yes, noticed far less rares and exotics drop in WvW vs PVE since the very beginning.

ilr.9675:

But you also bring up RvR… I’m really curious now what caused DAoC’s biggest declines there?

WoW?

There is a lot of nostalgia for old games, especially those that people first cut their teeth on in a particular game mode (be it pve, raiding, rvr, etc) but they have a lot of faults when you examine them in a modern context, vs what gamers expect nowadays.

Many played an alternative gamestyle in DAoC anyway (simple 8v8 roaming fights) the actual RvR portion wouldn’t be my ideal of a perfect system.

At best you can take a few of the best mechanics or incentives from older games and incorporate them. But old games died for a reason, they were surpassed or people got bored of their simplicity even if they loved them for a time.

Anet doesn’t need to dig in to history to find the answers for WvW, they simply need to listen to their playerbase in the here and now, and not go off dreaming up new features nobody wants, or ever even asked for or discussed.

Which includes leagues and bloodust.

There should be no complaints about numbers in this match, based on server ratings and the first few days of the matchup, EB should be losing by no more than 30k, probably a lot less. But when it looked like they weren’t going to win the week, it seems most just gave up and stopped playing. That is why you are so outmanned, its on your own team more than the other side having so many more.

Niim.9260:

Yes I am sure 1 good match will make up for 6 other weeks of boredom.

Well yeah, not unless you bought into the ultimate end score after 7 weeks being worth pursuing at try hard levels even through all the blowout easy weeks.

But at least you would have 1 uncertain outcome to play for, everyone else lower won’t even have that.

This match looks closer, and closing more all the time, than first appeared.

Silver league is looking boring for anyone past 9th, but SBI and Mag might have a fun fight for the winner of it.

Necro’s mobility is not limited outside combat, at least not if you run spectral walk, your signet or carry a warhorn. It’s only once you engage a fight that you are pretty much locked into a do or die.

I rarely ever get run down from a distance, but the absolute key is being able to identify long odds quickly and from range, and not engage those battles. You don’t have the mulligan ability to be reckless like a Thief, Ele, even Mesmer and just jump into random battles then bail if they go bad.

If you run a tanky necro then you can actually out escape bad situations pretty easily in group or zerg combat. You just leave, lol, and as long as there are still bad/stupid friendly players around in a clearly lost battle trying to fight to the death, enemies will be too busy focusing on them to worry about the spongy Necro living to fight another day. One or two might chase, but they usually give up once they are loaded up with marks and fears as they try to follow. If they follow too far, away from their zerg, just turn and kill them as they are weakened greatly usually.

What is baffling is why Anet does not listen to the player base, what the people supporting and populating this game mode ask for and give feedback about.

No one asked for the ruins, no one asked for a little sPVP area smashed down in the middle of the BL. No one asked for more buffs to stack over population servers advantages even more.

There are plenty of other issues in WvW that are talked about every day that they could be working on. Instead out of the blue they create some random idea that no one wanted or asked about, and expect it to succeed?

The level of disconnect and obliviousness here is very concerning.

Look at some of the great matchups we are having this week in NA, due to that the generator actually threw close ranks together for once.

Tier 1 is typically decent, and insofar as they are the only 3 servers that are fit to fight each other, the best that can be done there. 2 and 3 are a bit unstable, but 3 isn’t too bad with SBI getting their shot at Mag.

Tiers 4, 5, and 6 all have nice close matches, except for NS should not be in T4, but YB and EB are still having a great fight despite it.

The other two middle ones are close because they are servers that would be fighting each other naturally under the old system. These could actually come down to the final day, wonderful, just like the system actually intended! For the whole week to matter. You would think this is what Anet would want, but apparently not.

All these close matches are going to be ruined by leagues, as they may only come up 1 or 2 times in the entire 7 weeks, and the rest of the weeks will be pitting the top of a bracket vs the bottom and it won’t be remotely close. This tradeoff is not worth it simply so that one winning server can all get a gold finishing move. Please.

Some people used to complain matchup by rank became stagnant, and that it began to corrode the true rank due to lack of variety to retest proper server strength. This could be solved by using the current more randomized system just once every month. The rest of the month, the other 3 weeks, you would match up based on rank.

I think the vast majority of the playerbase would prefer competitive matches, as opposed to what is going to happen with leagues. Blowouts and even more disruptive large server transfers, that risk killing off some servers altogether and further metastasizing the already growing problem of extremely top heavy population on 3 servers and everywhere else dwindling away.

Brando.1374:

Malediktus.9250:

Speak for yourself. I know many people who like the stat buff.

… who wants a stat buff to the already over populated server in a match?

People that transferred specifically to be on the over populated server so they could win more easily. It’s right up their ally to get an even bigger advantage.

I agree that life force is straight jacketing us in this way. But I think the solution is easy. A skill that uses and eats a ton of life force at once, probably at least 50% but for a return of giving us something we otherwise don’t have, and aren’t allowed to have.

Whether that is a short range teleport to help escape / mobility, whether its a short invuln, or stability for 5 seconds, something that mimics these well known mechanics we have been talking about lacking for months.

Then it becomes a choice, do you want to keep your attrition life force for a battle, or do you want to blow it all on some super important moment in a fight to get access to some defense or ability that we otherwise never get, but almost every other profession does get. You could also do a long cooldown for this ability such that even with a high LF regen build it could not be used again for a fairly long time.

Rackhir Tanelorn.9123:

Also I’m afraid ANet is currently banking on the idea that when Leagues and Seasons start the new “WvW Achievements” are going to pull tons of PvE/Casual Players into WvW completely eliminating the population imbalances.

Sadly I don’t think it is going to work, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that is what they are thinking…

I think both the last few posts hit on something important. The numbers Anet are seeing is a lot of spillover from PVE, its not new customers, and its not WvW players. Many of these casual PVE’ers are just out to farm, karma train, or get Ascended mats. When you get in a unfavorable matchup they disappear and suddenly your server has 1/4 the amount of WvW players.

But this is dangerous to count these players participating as a success for WvW, becasue the style that brings them out, is the same style that WvW endgame players dislike and feel is killing the game mode. And if the hardcore WvW base bolts, you will be left with just the casuals, who Anet already has hooked into via the other PVE modes in the game. It’s just the same players doing cross over, but the true WvWers leaving would be an actual net loss of player base if it happens.

Whereas if they just manage to fix WvW properly, create consistent balance in matchups, the casual PVE farmers will simply go back to PVE to do their thing, but Anet might actually also grow their WvW base.

Right now for much of each day, WvW just feels like PvE maps that happen to have all players flagged for PVP. Occasionally someone feels like fighting, but most of the time, because of the imbalance, its just zergs doing ring around the rosy, following each other in an endless train.

aliengmr.7381:

KN is fortunate to still have a few serious wvw guilds left, at least in my time zone. But the loss of any of them would cripple us badly.

Its really hard to tell what shape we are in with the beating we are getting, but right now wvw on KN is farming our own territory for xp/karma. Draining our keeps and towers and moving on before the zerg shows up to take it back.

From what I see that is what everyone is doing in these matchups for most of the last few weeks. Only difference is how many people you have to determine how many BLs you can attack and how fast you can recap stuff. Once in a while zergs cross, a fight here or there, or a guild team defends something just to get some action, but for the most part, its more PVE than PVP. Anet needs to rethink a lot of this.

This money grab is going to backfire, because once those 3 servers are full, or more beyond full than they are now, and the lower tiers are fully destroyed, your lower tier players are just going to quit.

It may even start happening in leagues if its as bad as it looks like its going to be balance wise.

Maybe they will try consolidating servers somehow for WvW only, but that would be dubious. The time to fix this is before the disaster happens. And its already in progress beginning.

Is KN really this depleted, or perhaps just tanking to try for… I guess they’d call it Bronze League?

Have Anet definitively said that Ascended armor is also going to be crafted only, or crafted at all?

Let’s say in theory you could trade 200 toughness (or vitality, either one) for a skill that made you invulnerable for 2 seconds. We’ll call it ’’wraith form" or whatever thematic name. Now suddenly you have added a risk/reward mechanic in for the class that could make them worse – or better – but all dependent on play skill.

If I take “wraith form” and drop some of my tankiness, I could potentially come out stronger if I pop it at the exact right time, to eat a proper burst, where it saves me more damage than the 200 toughness would. But if I use it stupidly to eat some auto attacks, its actually going to make me worse than the 200 toughness. But either way, you are moving more of the fight outcome over into the hands of the player’s ability – a good thing – instead of the outcome being so reliant on just their pre-built stats or big sack of static HP and life force.

“Well but that’s just like what an Ele has, we should be different.”

Different is fine if equal, but we are not equal. You might say to eat the burst a Necro can (and should) just pop Death Shroud. Fighting one player, that is fine, your trade off of life force is probably equal to the ele blowing his mist form. The difference is when its a coordinated burst from 2 to 5 players all hitting you. An ele pops mist form is still alive and max health at the end of his skill. Where if a Necro pops death shroud against coordinated burst, he is probably dead at the end of it regardless. This is the problem with face-tank as the only defense.

Bhawb.7408:

My question is this: why do you want stability? Or vigor? We want this for a few reasons: to be able to actually do the above class-design; to be able to survive huge burst and get past CC to get to our target. Why do we need those things in specific though? Why do we need to dodge damage, instead of being manly-men (or women), and face-tanking their best damage while beating their face in? Why should we worry about being CCed, instead of eating it up like and then after start serving out knuckle-sandwhiches for dessert?

The reason why I want those things is that because face-tanking has little to do with skill. Without consistent stability, dodges, invuln, you are pretty much eating burst regardless what your strategy is, and thus fights just come down to if your stats/build is good enough to outlast the damage, instead of having something you can actually do inside the fight, skill based, or reactionary, that can mute some of the damage to turn the tide.

This is especially apparent in a 1v2 or 1v3, where because of the above defenses on other classes, mobility, deception, resistance to being locked down, other professions can come out on top in those situations based on skill increasing their ceiling. For a Necro if a quality 2nd player shows up, because we just have to ‘be a man’ as you say, or facetank both their damage outputs, you just die, because two (decent) players have more damage than one, without being able to skillfully avoid some of it. The mechanics just aren’t there or strong enough to do it.

Now if they can add in that elasticity in other ‘new’ ways not yet implemented, that’s fine too. But so far not seeing this creativity, and devoid of them showing it, would be better to just give us mechanics that are tried and true and could actually make true our class philosophy statements they put out, instead of waiting around endlessly with these specific short-comings..

In past mmos in raiding events there was a term given to certain fights or bosses called a ‘gear check’. This was usually a simplistic fight where a boss just had a ton of health and winning or losing a fight was simply based on if your raid had enough DPS within a certain sustained time period (before the boss put out enough damage to kill everyone), to win the fight. It wasn’t a skill based challenge, and there was little you could do in such a fight except burst at your max DPS level, and you either had enough damage or not, based simply on your gear, to win.

Right now fighting a Necro, or as a Necro, is a bit too much like this scenario. There is not enough leeway for variation or surprising outcome.

I’m at near 100 and its starting to take an enormous amount of salvaging to move that bar a point. Been making the mystic forge kits for better remaining mats but starting to run low on crystals and I’m not spending the silver to keep buying the master ones.

I honestly think a lot of the plan here was just one giant money sink. Theoretically all the MF you gain would pay off if you play long enough. But how long, 5 years?

I’m definitely feeling where my MF is at its time to start thinking more short term and selling or trade posting the items instead of salvaging them.

It’s simply natural that a mature MMO, meaning most players are max level, will have receded population in the leveling zones.

But anywhere there is something notable for level 80s, a timer boss, new living story stuff, I see lots of people. Pretty much at any time of the day too.

I like how the living story stuff recently has got people to go out and get back into the lower zones, whether for the balloon stuff, scarlets random attacks, or simply to chase down jump puzzles and chests for new ascended mats.

Maybe they can ‘accidently’ move a few thousand players around to fix WvW. Sure people would be mad at first, but it might be for the greater good.

If the amount of rares and exotics are any indication, drop rates won’t be anything to write home about.

Very suspicious how many more rares I get in PVE with 100% MF vs WvW actually.

We take their stuff anyway. They aren’t the best at defending.

What happened to poor Kaineng, did they finally get deleted as a server? And why do we have their previous points.

Now YB has Magoomba’s and SBI. Don’t want.

Bweaty.9187:

Our Weakness is mobility, escape, CC, and Attrition.

Very valid point as well. I don’t think we really get stronger as a fight goes on. Maybe if you are talking beyond the first 5 second burst of a shatter mesmer, stun lock warrior, or thief, sure, but once the fight goes beyond 10 or 15 seconds, we have nothing special as far as sustain unless you are in some kind of rare all out spectral life force recharge build, which is sub-optimal due to other sacrifices. And our sustain is a joke up against the best sustain builds in the game over the course of its evolution.

Any sustain I have in my Necro is entirely based on gear I have chosen and not internal mechanics of the class, which is a shame and oversight on the part of the design imo.

If we can’t escape battles, can’t stop fast classes from escaping us, and have no total damage nullification from massive burst, then we should definitely sustain as one of the best classes in the game. Right now only a full life force bar gives the illusion of that, but its still a finite resource, a giant pitcher that you die when its empty, instead of a ever refilling cup, that skilled play can extend enormously in a long fight.

I don’t want more total power for the Necro, what I would like is a rebalancing toward where skilled play can extend the upward ceiling of the class, to pull off things that great players on other profs can do. Without Anet ever relaxing any of their dogmatic positions on what the class is or isn’t, not sure that is possible.

Advent.6193:

The problem here is, you’re asking for something ANet’s guys have said is not getting added to Necros.

The bigger problem is understanding why they’ve drawn this line, when in a lot of ways it doesn’t make sense other than “we want every class to be different”.

Don’t get me wrong Necro can be one of the stronger classes played right, but still doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly frustrating and not as interesting to play, when you don’t have the proper counters for certain situations, mainly, getting kicked around and locked out of your abilities a lot in a fight. That just isn’t fun.

If they aren’t giving stability, aren’t giving access to vigor for lots of dodging, no invulnerable defenses, AND no escape mobility, you are really neutering the type of play styles that will actually work for the class.

They talk a lot about build diversity and increasing it, but the above facts kind of lend to the same fight mechanics for the Necro regardless of your build, whether you are going power or condi, etc. You always have those same weaknesses and limitations.

It’s too straight-jacketed of a design I think.

If they would actually make good on their claims of Necro locking opponents down, so they also can’t escape, just like you can’t as a Necro, then the trade-off might make sense.

My complaint wouldn’t even be so much about power or balance, as I don’t lose too many solo matchups, but rather in a game that is supposed to be fast paced, reactive combat, the Necro by far feels the clunkiest and slowest – not in run speed out of combat – but as far as in combat activations and mechanics. Feels like you are moving in mud vs some of the other profs.

They really have to do something else with the ruins, and of course, change Bloodlust.

Right now they are just an after-thought, there isn’t any continual fighting at the ruins. Whenever a big zerg sweeps into a map, they might send a few side forces to go cap the ruins, then they will sit unchanged for a while till the home server grabs them back, which is where they sit most of the time.

Except in highly lopsided matches (which are most sadly), the weaker servers at some point stop bothering to try and take the ruins back because they know the high pop side just has far more people to spend to go do the dirty work of grabbing them back. And that’s all they are right now is a side job or dirty work you do to get those stats.

If Anet thought this was going to be an area to entice roamers are small groups, it has not worked at all, least not in any matches I’ve been in.

SBI still primarily uses zerg tactics to take things. It’s common to seem them try one gate, fail, but we don’t have enough forces to actually wipe them all out, so they rez up, and 40-50 people run like keystone cops to the next gate. Fail. Run to a camp, resupply, then to a third gate, or back at the same one. Eventually they have worn down all the supply maybe gotten some siege down and eventually bust down a gate and rush in like barbarians. In any higher tier with even numbers, that very first fail on the first attempt, would be the end. Because even numbers would rush out of the tower/keep and clean up the rest of your forces, game over.

They can say ‘well we just want fights’ or they don’t care because the score is not in doubt. But its very bad practice for upper tiers. If you can’t make organized successful attacks consistently even with a big numbers advantage, imagine doing it against even numbers, on top of all the strategic siege.

Just do temples. Melandru and Dwayna are pretty simple and that’s 60 a day. If your server is decent size and skill they will also take down Lyssa and Grenth pretty regularly at least a couple times a day. If not, just guest to a place that does.

Dragons are also good, give a bit less, but don’t take long to kill.

Doing temples I had my first Ascended within a week. And two in two weeks. To get the same 1000 Dragonite sacking keeps, with the pathetic embarrassing 4 Dragonite per cap (typical Anet crapping on WvW players), it would take 250 Keeps, lol.

The ruins are far too cramped. Yes there is an open area where the actual cap is, but WW players are used to feinting and circling and using lots of terrain. Many play WvW because they hate the confined wrestling ring like restrictions of sPVP.

The ruins are just a little sPVP conquest area dropped into the middle of a WvW map, its not remotely the same as free range roaming. Not surprised many are growing bored of it already.

Also the Bloodlust buff remains a terrible blight on WvW. Get rid of it.