Some freaking consistency in design would be nice. Right now they are heading towards making Fear a binary feature that you have to either go balls deep to get decent use of it or completely ignore it thanks to how they are trying to cherry pick when it counts as a condition or stun.
All skills or effects of the same type not following the same rules is garbage design to be frank. Just shows incompetence in balancing if this doesn’t get addressed.
It would be like if there was a sigil to increase burning time, but they just selectively decided not to make it work on a certain ele burn skill because it was deemed too strong.
But yet then the food and runes that in turn reduced that skill would work just fine.
Choose a lane Anet.
Yaks was about as ranked as Maguuma. As was SBI. We’ve beaten them both, so I’m sure we can give Mag a run for their money.
Yaks was once close to Mag, before their massive transfer surge that sent them up the rankings on a rocket just like Kaineng. Then they ran into T2 and got beat down, and some people left. They like to pretend all the bandwagoners left, but they really didn’t, they still come out and zerg zerg zerg, karma train all over when they have a favorable matchup. But then disappear vs the tough fights.
So no Yaks isn’t close to Mag anymore.
To get back on topic, this week has been great, and I hope we get a rematch, because DH and BP did not get Yaks best effort this week for a variety of reasons.
0/30/20/20 should be fairly survivable. I would experiment with Spectral Walk over Blood is Power. You can use it to get into the heart of a battle, fire off all your conditions, port out. Or save it for when you start getting focused, run your opponents away from where you really want to be (your team say) and port back 7 seconds later, they are far away, and you can escape behind cover of teammates.
Spectral Wall is also very viable for defense now. Run over on initial engage for the protection and to scatter enemies right off the bat that try to get on you.
You can gain survivability with sigils too, endurance on weapon swap, or life steal sigils, etc. Staff is a good choice for a defensive sigil since earth sigil doesn’t do much there.
If you are still having trouble living in fights, try using Plague more defensively, instead of offensively. Unless you are disrupting an entire zerg it can be a lot of noise without that much substance. When you notice a bunch of players getting on you, such that it looks hopeless, pop it right away, while still over 50% health, and just spam blinds and tank for a while into the middle of your team’s DPS. Enemies will die if they foolishly try to chip you down.
You might also consider moving out of Blood Magic and into Soul Reaping for Master of Terror and longer fears, which can help you break off being focused in a pinch, though requires a lot more timing. Blood Magic siphons are pretty worthless vs burst in a condition build.
For general speed, carry a warhorn in your pack and switch it on for the swiftness just to run away if necessary, before you are in combat and see a bad situation coming.
Most important thing for Necro above maybe any build thing is simply positioning. You have to spot a focus train coming immediately and act defensively long before 3 or more players are all on top of you. Necro needs to be a master of kiting even within a large hectic battle. If you have teammates doing DPS, there is good value in just leading people around with fears, chills, cripples, while you teammates kill them, even if your own offense suffers for it.
With the recent patch though the opposite method is just as viable, all out pressure and aggression, best defense is a good offense, I personally love playing this style, putting opponents on the defensive as their cleanses get overwhelmed and they are trying to get away from you. Be ready with Doom for anyone that tries to shut you down.
Spectral walk is also amazing for trying tricky jumps, and if you fail – instant do over!
I don’t use Flesh Worm a lot but it might be handy here too.
Counting stun duration twice, or perhaps multiplying it? As we know the + stun duration on Sigil of Paralyzation was multiplying off base, and they never really fixed that (?) but just made it not work with Fear. So perhaps negative stun duration works also as a multiplier just to the negative.
However the math adds up, its clearly hypocritical and we are getting the shaft again.
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No, we’re focusing Yaks because we find them the bigger threat. From the start of the matchup this is what we had in mind. If we break the bigger server, then the win will be easy.
So far the strategy has led to DH in 1st place, not looking that easy.
Wouldn’t surprise me if Yaks finish safely in 3rd with the release of the Bazaar.
This should be taken as a good sign. Maybe without the Sigil of Paralyzation skewing things, Fear won’t need to be nerfed directly (or nerfed as hard) in the August balance patch.
Wouldn’t get hopes up. More fear nerfing will probably coincide with everyone finally figuring out you just have to focus down the Necro first same as always.
Please reset the points. This is silly adding new stuff all the time and you specced into sub-optimal choices you would have done differently.
Just put a re-trainer if we are going to have new skills every release. It can be fairly pricey if necessary to prevent people reskilling just for one siege or what not.
+70 PPT YB, eek.
PVE content release, there goes the comeback as usual.
Necro staff 1 was changed but still bad! Now it sounds like nails scratching a chalkboard.
It’s a shadowy hand flying through the air, can’t you find some kind of cool ‘whoosh’ sound.
It’s ok, I like Signet of Spite more now for certain situations since the power boost and enhanced conditions. I usually run SWalk for stun break, so plague is usually redundant.
The radius is huge, the size of a greater mark. The animation is small. I don’t remember if it used to look different, but I guess it probably did and got hit in the big particle effect cleanup during beta.
Well yeah but you can aim greater marks. Maybe its the delay to activate more than the size I don’t know but doesn’t always hit stuff even in melee fights, one dodge roll they are out of range.
The low number of posts from Yaks side means that for the first time in weeks both our opposing servers are polite both ingame and in this thread. I for my part am positively surprised at the atmosphere in this thread. No need for me to make some replies to Forum Warriors – i kinda like it.
Ayup, notice the only bonehead posts are from outsiders / former opponents sticking their noses in.
Nice effort all three servers so far.
The skill misses a lot because the radius is pretty tight. With people dodging all over the place or even just juking in and out, even in melee fights its prone to not hitting.
The long cast time of the animation to come down from the sky also means enemies often have moved by the time it activates, vs when you hit DS.
Speaking of Reaper’s Protection, have you considered moving the 10 points from Blood Magic to Death Magic to see how that works? Losing Mark of Evasion hurts, but I’m curious if it may be worth the loss,since the base duration on RP is so long (and Terror hits so hard).
To add another opinion, Reaper’s Protection is great for roaming, I chose it over keeping Mark of Evasion, simply because its just about always up when you engage in a roaming fight. Esp If you get jumped by a thief, real bad day for them. Or just about any prof that loves opening with CC. Less good for long zergy fights, as it tends to get blown up early, likely still have people on you anyway, then does nothing for 90 sec.
Plus some of the other things may not need nerfed so much if things like this weren’t left unchecked.
Except we are tuned way too offensively right now, while most builds are rather squishy, and therefore just the opposite of needing our defenses nerfed even more.
The problem they see is our pressure and DPS, there is no way those things are going to be untouched by further reducing our defenses.
This direction would be like if at the height of DD ele’s strength, someone said, let’s weaken their DPS more and make them even more survivable.
Can’t nerf everything. Once they choose what the worst offender is, or worst combo (and I think we all know what that will be) all these other traits and skills will fall in line.
Necro gets long weaknesses intentionally to help them be more survivable and ‘stay in the pocket’ while having no access to vigor, escapes, invulnerability, strong mobility, or easy to reach stability.
Right now most Necro builds are still way too squishy even with weakness, and that is why they are talking about upping our survivability more, especially if they cut back on DPS.
The problem with weakness, is that while its good 1v1, when getting focus fired you cannot guarantee to have it on everyone hitting you. So in that sense its a far worse defense than Protection, Vigor, Block, etc, which are inherent to your own defenses regardless of the damage source. Also as a condition, it remains far easier to remove than defensive boons.
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Torment would be a lot worse for power builds. Even with a target moving and 3 stacks, you are talking about the difference of about 58% the strength of burning with no condi damage, vs about 75% of the damage in a heavy condi build.
People keep going into hysteria over burning and terror, but don’t realize we already were nerfed last patch, despite also getting stronger.
Corrupt Boon was nerfed, its nowhere near as effective vs bunkers now, already unreliable to hit. Epidemic and Corrupt Boon were also indirectly nerfed by moving Terror up to master slot (itself a nerf), as now you can’t have it and Master of Corruption for 20 points, and if you go 30 lose lingering curses or another desirable trait.
As a Necro running both those corruptions I hardly feel the adding of burning and torment even made me that much stronger.
Also the Putrid Mark nerf (or bug), doesn’t really matter which until or unless its fixed.
Necro’s ability to deal with conditions actually took a hit last patch, even though our number of conditions and DPS went way up.
That is why they must be extremely careful about any future balancing down, as not to forget these significant above cutbacks were already made.
There is a balance in conversion rates that is important to maintain. Some people stating that as gold to gem prices skyrocket, Anet will just make more money, are not necessarily correct.
Those who don’t want, or cannot, spend idly on the gem store, but find being able to get those things important to their enjoyment of the game, may actually quit the game if they feel everything cool or desirable is out of their reach, beyond 100s of hours of farming, farming which is constantly being nerfed.
Well those players aren’t bringing in money directly to Anet so why does that hurt? It hurts because less players for the game makes the game less interesting even for the more frequent gem buyers, as guilds get smaller, less people to run dungeons, events, play WvW, sPVP, etc, and eventually server contraction, and then even your spending customers start leaving.
So what is the way to fix it? Easy, make some desirable things in the game be available only by gold, not always via the gem store. Their are original release things like this like certain crafted items (corrupted weapons, etc), but they haven’t updated things only obtainable by gold often enough or with desirable enough things.
When you have things that can only be gained by gold, then people with more real money than time, will buy gems to convert them to in game gold, to acquire these things. This will push up demand for gold and the conversion rate will come down, or at least not skyrocket into absurd territory to where the system is effectively broken.
It was a brilliant scheme they came up with to launch the game with this exchange system, it would be a shame if it becomes essentially non functional due to the rate of exchange getting totally out of hand.
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If they nerf terror we will end up weaker than we were pre-patch, except for Torment. Terror > Dumbfire, because Terror is controllable, burning is random single target. You can’t depend where its going to go or when. Terror is the only thing that gives us anything even remotely resembling a mini burst, and its a joke burst compared to what some other professions can do, and without chance to stunbreak or cleanse their burst.
It’s hard to see how they could nerf Dhuumfire (it’s already just a 10-point Engi trait), but nerfing Terror is going to seriously hurt Condi builds and Terrormancers without any real point. I wonder if they’re going to reduce Terror’s damage but then increase our access to Bleeds or Poison to compensate.
Jon said they’re toning the bleeds back so if they do nerf Terror don’t expect anything else adjusted to compensate the nerf.
I thought he said the opposite, that they ’don’t’ want to mess with bleeds as that would effect too many main builds.
To the quoted question though, how to nerf terror without hurting condi builds, well they would have to seriously buff traits in Death and Blood Magic. Get rid of the auto minion traits, beef up siphoning more, etc.
They could still do more yet for Soul Reaping but then 30/30 Spite/SR builds might get too strong.
But far better than any of that just tone down dumbfire a bit. Either 15 second cooldown, or reduce duration by a second or so (25% damage).
The sigil of Para nerf is already gonna hurt terror.
Third problem would be that ArenaNet wants us to be an attrition class with low mobility and high attrition, which i totally agree with… i don’t think we should be given mobility and stability and be turned into an elementalist… So we have Death Shroud to compensate for our lack of mobility.
Here’s the catch… a thief goes into stealth to escape 1 player or 5 players, a mesmer goes distorted to escape 1 player or 5 players, an engineer eats an elixir to escape 1 player or 5 players… guardian becomes invulnerable.A necromancer can absorb damage from 1 player to escape… dies instantly from 5… if DS is to be used to compensate for that, it would be either too much for 1v1 and enough for 1v multiple, or not enough for 1v multiple…
Now add the lack of mobility and stability / escape mechanisms… and we have the perfect class to be focused. No chance = free kill = GG.
The only way i see this getting fixed is with additional mechanics vs being focused… like Reaper’s Protection moved somewhere more accessible and have an additional effect such as: “Resets in 90 seconds AND resets every 3-4-5 consecutive CCs done in 90 seconds under 90 seconds”… therefor DS remains the same and doesn’t imbalance 1v1, and focus fireing gets punished…
The sad thing about this is that devs still don’t get it. They’ve stated that they are going to nerf our damage now (we deserve it, but I’m afraid of what are they doing anyway) and increase our survivability via rising up our Life Force generation, which isn’t bad but don’t solve the real problem.
Exactly. They say stuff like we need to sustain vs focus better because we can’t escape a fight, but then propose simply upping DS regen as a counter. It is not, for the reasons Nemesis stated, it does not sustain virtually at all vs multiple opponents. And 10 or even 25% more Life Force is still going to be spiked through just like it is now by multiple players bursting, it won’t even last half a second more.
I don’t see how you have legit sustain in this game without Vigor, Stability, rapid Regen/Healing, Invulnerability, or mobility escapes. All things they refuse to give us.
With addition of a new condition called torment and access to burning, some classes do not have enough condition removal to remove other important conditions like poison, bleeds, fear (terror traited). Torment, cripple and other condition are shielding more damaging conditions such as burning or stacking bleeds.
This post is very disturbing. People played so long vs underpowered Necromancers they now feel they have the right to remove every condition a Necro puts on them because they once could.
That is the whole reason Necromancers were underpowerd in the first place! Why they needed a buddy like an Engi always with them to lay cover conditions, it was not a self contained class. (And need a buddy to peel for them being focused – still a problem if they don’t kill the opponent(s) super fast).
A condition Necromancer is getting about 75% of their damage from conditions, you are not supposed to be able to remove every single one.
That would be like if a warrior’s opponent could negate 75% of their direct damage.
Now you have to actually pay attention to what is on you and carefully choose when and what to remove, instead of just spamming a removal whenever you see any condition, which used to get the job done vs Necro sadly.
I guess that makes sense.
But do you really lose dps?
You won’t have a lower crit chance if you still run 30 in Curses anyway, but if it’s just 20 then you just lose 100 precision. You won’t proc burning significantly less reliable with -5% crit chance if you had ~50% to begin with.
Also, I’m sure you remember all those threads about golden ratio on power vs precision… anyway, the point is you get more direct damage from power so you really don’t lose dps by going into Spite.
No I’m saying if I’m going Spite for burning, I really don’t want to be made to buff up my Precision. Rather have pure carrion, but just 20 into curses (what I have) doesn’t get you there, and even 30 is still going be low crit chance for reliably starting burning fast in the fight.
I don’t get why they tied precision into the condition line either. Putting barbed precision there is a trick to make you want crit but you still aren’t getting as much damage from crit as power even with barbed. Not unless you run a bunch of earth signets.
Precision needs Power to be good, far more than Power needs Precision. Carrion stat layout would be fine for condition builds if they’d just have put duration in the Curses line along with Condition damage. So many things about this class design don’t make sense to me.
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Whether they leave it burning or change it to something else, I do not understand the critical component on it.
Spite tree gives power which thus then encourages power stacking to make your power attacks good, even as a conditionmancer opening up some choices like wells or making DS better.
But you have to split into hybrid stats to then get your chance to proc the burning (or w/e it may be now) to actually go off in its window. Like way too much Necro stuff it has an oymoronic mechanic. I’m actually walking down my DPS replacing power with precision, just to get burning to proc reliably, how is that synergy.
Would rather have it be a flat chance, like 25% per attack, similar to how procs on a lot of runes work, or just give it more direct control when you use it, like a trigger off lifeblast, or when you poision something, etc.
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Didn’t they up the Blood Fiend siphon a while back? Pretty sure it heals nearly 1000 per hit now. That part is really good, its just its dying all the time in any team style fight and then you don’t have a heal on demand. Too risky.
Not sure how to fix it without changing it drastically. Maybe it will just remain more of a PVE choice, where it is pretty good. Anet seems content with some stuff being favored in different parts of the game, as long as its a viable choice somewhere.
It is not too strong.
We have 4 self corruptions, 2 put damage on us, and 1 increases the damage we take. Even if you immediately transfer poison / self bleed off, or heal it, good chance they tick one or two times eating 200 to 400 health off our own bar. Just about canceling the consume conditions gain. The point of consume conditions is to work in tandem with these skills, give us a trade-off, as well as with the philosophy of condition master in general.
The idea is that we want to acquire conditions, because we have tools to make use of them. Either to wait for enough to transfer back to the enemy (Putrid, Deathly Swarm, Plague Signet) or to heal and gain from them. Well while we are holding these conditions, not yet ready to transfer them, we are eating a lot of damage. The extra conditions heal on Consume is to make up for this.
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Whoa now, the way Chap was sounding the Sigil won’t work with fear at all???
I hope that’s not what he meant, and rather it would just be a flat 15%.
Because if it doesn’t work at all, then why in the world do stun reducing skills / food / runes, etc, reduce our fear length. It’s either a stun or not, if it is, it should be affected by plus stun duration.
I complained about this trait months ago, is anyone taking it?
Signet of Undeath also gains way too slow I think. Though in sPVP its taken primarily for the rez, it’s passive should still be competitive on its own vs other signets and I don’t feel it is.
The devs are just so scared of any of our life force generating skills to get out of hand that they made them all extremely weak outside spectral builds. Almost to the point they were not worth having or having made them in the first place. If they are too scared to make LF regen fast and can’t get a handle on it, then it should not have been our class mechanic.
Only now in the most recent State of the Game are they seeming to realize that this was the avenue all along to buff us to make us toward what the supposed class philosophy was. And not to give us more offense to build a ‘kill or be killed’ style character.
But we’ll see if its all talk, and we just get another 1% more increase on our main weapon skill generators.
+1 To the title.
Nerfing terror would only be a partial nerf to 30/30 builds, while being a major nerf to any traditional condi build that doesn’t not go spite, almost forcing you back into burning to get burst back and condition coverage back up.
Which would be counter productive to what their intention is, which is to make Necro more survivable.
They don’t want to change bleeds because it will ‘ruin the main builds’ ???
Um, nerfing terror would ruin all the old main builds. And pretty much force you to go burning+terror for condition build.
Hope this is made up, or they are patching up other areas of concern in compensation.
If they would give us real increased sustain, not 1% increase to DS generation skills, then I would be happy to trade off some offense for getting the class the way it was originally envisioned, sort of tanky sustain pressure.
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Scepter + Epidemic = AOE.
Especially now with Poison lasting up to 7 or 8 seconds.
No posts. Because people are all dub v dubbing. This will be the closest matchup in all tiers.
Trying this on some mobs, seems pretty wonky. Sometimes the pull just fails, other times it will put them into the wall then fear them normally back out.
There’s a good chance protection of the horde is doing absolutely nothing for many Necros. And others bringing maybe just a flesh golem, or occasionally having a horror pop up for 10 seconds, that is 20 toughness, utterly garbage. Good traits are usually worth around 100 stats.
So if you have 5 minions out 20×5 = 100, then it gets there, but way too situational and build specific for a passive.
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5 second reduced cooldown is in order.
Also make the boon ripping order random, or last applied.
This seems like a pretty substantial nerf vs guardians, and specifically bunkers. Especially with so much of our burst dependent on terror, they can now build to ‘cover’ their stability just like we cover our conditions, except with even more assurance.
Likewise anyone running max lyssa runes or anything else that can fire up massive boons at once.
Please fix these traits, remove them or place them in the active chosen list.
Plenty of Necro’s go down Death Magic who are not minion-masters and don’t want minion master related auto traits.
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Starting a betting-pool on what the ‘fix’ will be:
I say: Paralysation Sigil will no longer work with Fear.
Makes no sense.
Fear is a stun and is broken BY stun breaks, so why in the world would they introduce a inconsistent rule where a stun duration sigil would not help a stun.
I think the Spectral Wall might be the culprit, not sure we need a fear there. No one asked for it, and it might be overkill on sources.
Our offensive pressure is insane, and most likely Dhuumfire will get a nerf when they start actually fixing our defenses.
If they want to fix us to be real attrition, fine. But don’t see how if they won’t give us mobility, Vigor, or Stability in larger quantities.
Otherwise, gonna have to stay a juggernaut on offense, as its basically ‘kill them before they kill you’.
Necromancers haven’t been made any less squishy directly.
And actually we got a lot more squishy for most of the new builds people are going for.
Still, Dhuumfire could definitely be replaced with a trait that applies three stacks of Torment on a critical hit on a 10-second cooldown. That would be a slight nerf, and it would fit with the theme of the class.
Would still be a downgrade for coverage, since going down power you have lots of duration, it means our DS-5 Torment lasts a long time and would often overlap with the on crit Torment, not actually giving us the additional coverage burning does.
Also, yaks would slowly win and rank up, because KN lost too much to stay t3. Ratings are a population balancer and nothing else, and yaks is closest to us.
Don’t see how, look at the score I just posted, KN almost took us out just last week. Mag and YB were very close once before your big bandwagon push up. I guess a lot of those left, but a lot didn’t too. You’ll probably continue bouncing up and down unless a major shift occurs somewhere.
SoS is a mystery but might be a good matchup for Mag score wise, though primes would be opposite. Nothing can be done about oceanic servers though except stick them all together which they will never do.
If they stopped randomizing, yaks would certainly be with us forever.
No, Mag is 7th, Yaks 10th. By straight order you’d have SoS and KN next week, we’d have EB and CD.
You can ignore the score and ‘just play for fights’ even though good ones are a lot harder to find the bigger imbalanced populations get. But when you do get a score that can matter, WvW is that much better. This is what we had last week, awesome match.
EB 214 956
YB 209 036
KN 206 758
Much more interesting when anyone’s home BL can be in jeopardy at anytime and no one is just sitting on safe waypoints.
Mag doesn’t fit in any tier. Bigger than those you named plus Kaineng, and much smaller than anyone from t2+. We haven’t gotten to face SoS, but I imagine it wouldn’t be even during NA hours at all either.
The real solution is ignoring the score.
The score isn’t the problem its more the karma train, 40 people taking a keep with 5 defenders a couple times a day. Puts you in constant upgrading mode, people want to stop paying for upgrades, stuff sits at paper, etc.
Solution is they need to randomize matchups less often, only once in a while to shakeup stagnating scores from the same teams playing over and over.
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Yaks and CD I hope we get to fight again this week. I think it’s a good match up overall.
You want to hang with our tier you need to shed peeps. By rating T4 would be YB, EB, CD, which would probably be competitive the majority hours of every day. As it is, we only get a few good hours each day in this matchup. Mag is 7th rated currently, but in the 11th seed this week.
The 4 second fears are most likely to be stun broken too though. Of course we have so many fears now a lot of nervous players are likely to blow it on the wrong one and eat the bigger ones.
I was wondering how much condition damage on average necros are taking for their terror builds and other bursty condition builds (if there happens to be more). Im asking to better understand how much condition damage, and how much is a good amount to kill with.
Burning is such high base and Torment better than bleed when moving, not sure we still need massive condition damage, even in a condition build. Can scale back a bit for other things if you need to and still kill fast.
A lot of these new condi builds are more burster than attrition at this point.
I only have 1250 after food/crystal, but usually get corruption stacks maxed pretty fast to get back to 1500. Can run Blood is Power for a big boost too, and that should easily cover your big burst sequence.
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The first two camp upgrades can easily be argued for instant. Because camps rarely survive long enough to get all 4, and when you do, they aren’t very good. 2 or 3 people can take a fully upgraded camp fairly fast, and even 1 person can if dedicated.