Guild Wars 2

It’s not a good roaming game, because the professions are not balanced for roaming. About 3 classes are vastly more effective at it.

You can go against the grain with something else, but its with a hand tied behind your back and much more challenging.

Sinaya.4201:

Between getting 5:1 karma trainrolled, finally finding even-number fights only to be repeatedly focused down by a team of three glass thieves with double guardian backup and pretentious forum warrior antics, I retreated into PvE this week.

“Inc North camp, 5 to 7, all thieves.”

It’s not their fault. I once tried to guest on Mag for some events, but it said my class wasn’t available. Only ones you could pick were Mesmer and Thief. Then after you chose one you are required to carry on endlessly with vapid comments about how no one engages you. Go figure.

I think you get chain ganged to the karma train otherwise.

Now that we’ve had several weeks of adjustment via random variation to the normal ratings, it has shaken up more properly some of the stale rankings that were created by the old locked in system.

But we really don’t need this every week, as it is depriving servers of more interesting and competitive matches that would be legitimately well balanced, as now every week you get someone moving up too far and getting stomped (KN) or a few other servers getting a free ride down a tier or two for easy victories.

The random additions to server’s rankings should happen only every other week at most, maybe even less than that. Rest of the time go back to straight order.

I would not use Earth if you are more carrion, its going to get surpassed in damage by Sigil of Battle, or Geomancy if you can get close enough most of the time. Plus an on-crit sigil will restrict your choices on your 2nd weapon set as if procs within 2s of a swap, it will ruin an on swap sigil. Though you could pair it with like Force, or a duration one, increased bleed or chill time for instance.

Swiftness sigil is kind of neat on off hand for open world PVE, if you kill fast and in groups, you can stack up perma swiftness several minutes long moving between events.

If we are viewing WvW as intended, its pointless to build siege in the middle of nowhere, because that ground is not worth anything. If you are just a group looking to kill the other force and they siege up worthless ground, go take something of theirs, and they will leave. Your own fault if you walk into it.

If we are talking about siege at a camp, I would not call that open field, you are protecting points income, and how siege advantage is any different than terrain advantage, say using a chokepoint or high ground, doesn’t make much sense. I don’t see groups ever giving up terrain advantage for a ‘fair’ fight. Seeking that you should setup a planned team fight.

Where open field siege is truly counter productive is camping the other team’s spawn. While it makes sense tactically, win at all costs mentality, its going to lead to a boring experience because you’ll have no one to fight.

Rennoko.5731:

For instance, my goal in WvW in a condition build is to deal as much damage as possible as fast as possible. It means I want BIP, EPI, and now… spectral wall… so no-where in my WvW build will either of those find a place.

I see two types of big fights in WvW, stand-off and head on smash to the death, mimicking a GvG. The former is where Corrupt Boon still had a place imo.

Pure damage put out, yes BIP is great, however in just mass spamming a zerg, not always guaranteeing kills, because people just being normally worn down will try and retreat to the back to heal, and come back. The value of Corrupt Boon even in these big fights was it was the ultimate spike prep. Guardians, Ele’s and Thieves spinning often serve as the ‘push’ or vanguard in a big fight, over extending and trusting their boons, Corrupt Boon would ruin their day and almost guarantee a front line death. Frequently you could target a boon’ed up commander, and this was a huge morale hit if he drops.

Also a quick Corrupt and Epidemic could still cause chaos in lead ranks. I never found the skill missing or being dodged as many say, as in big fights, most people can’t pick out individual skills being cast at them to avoid properly.

For the other type of fight, smash into each other, of course WoC much much better.

There have been several classes that were must have for team pvp – and this is not the only part of the game to consider – and rarely would you read in their forum they were OP. It’s almost like some are so used to being underdogs they want to remain so. Are necros even going to be a staple in teams, we have yet to see that. If they do become so, doesn’t mean they are OP even still, as several profs have enjoyed that position since launch, with little done except mild tweaks.

Necro should be an extremely feared opponent to engage, because they still are pretty much fighting to the death. While Torment is nice, it does not actually convincingly stop escape classes, and that they have the option to escape and/or resets fights multiple times, they should have to pay a price in in-combat power for that versatility.

Other professions can in effect ‘lose a fight’ and yet still live to tell about it, and go help their team somewhere else even if they have lost the territory being fought over initially. Necro loses, he is just running from spawn, which in WvW, is a ridiculously long trek back often.

Can’t speak much to PVE, but are Necro’s yet a top wanted class for dungeons or speed running, wouldn’t imagine so.

Zindrix.1750:

This is kind off topic, but since there’s so many great minds contributing to this thread, which offhand sigil do I want for Scepter/Dagger weapon set? What are some good choices of sigils in general for necros?

What kind of trait setup do you have and gear. If you have terror / burning, you might want to look into Sigil of Paralyzation, to increase your fear duration back up.

If more old school condition necro, rabid gear, then you’ll probably want a Sigil of Earth for bleed procs, and corruption off hand. If you have carrion style gear, then you have more choices in sigils, Battle, Geomancy, or several others even are often chosen.

We’re not OP because we can still be focused more easily than most (maybe other than Warr). We don’t have troll potential like Thief or Mesmer due to their mobility and deception.

All they did was increase the pain the enemies who do focus us will suffer for getting close and finishing us off. But its still pretty much a matter of time, with few avenues to force a call target off, or to totally disrupt opposing team strategy.

Rennoko.5731:

I will agree now that WOC beats out corruption boon in almost every case.

It seems to me smart players just don’t stay in it though (outside tPVP) and it doesn’t end up converting more than 1 or 2 at most.

And if you are traditional condi, all your CC is mostly fear that will just push them out even if they are in it. Maybe flesh golem knockdown if you can time it right and be right there with the well.

ManaCraft.5630:

The bad news is that the playstyle of the condi necro has absolutely nothing to do with attrition whatsoever. You get stuck in, unload a bunch of condi AoEs, and hope the enemy dies before your own life reaches zero. Your offensive arsenal is truly impressive, but you are still a sitting duck for focus damage and CC. Even with both near to death and foot in the grave, the small uptime you get on stability generally isn’t worth the investment.

I think the avenue for the big attrition based condi build is really avoiding power, and with points into Death Magic and Blood Magic, due to the toughness, boon duration, health and healing those trees give. Probably not going all the way into SR because DS is now an offensive mechanic as much as defensive and will never help you sustain too long due to the self degeneration. Unfortunately, Vampiric is just not quite up to snuff yet even with the new limited scaling it has, it needs to drain about 45-65 per hit / crit, I think to really be strong sustain.

If one is going all the way into Soul Reaping for condi, say 0/30/10/0/30, then I think the attrition build for that is full spectral, attunement and mastery, to constantly refill that Life Force bar as you jump in and out,

No matter which way you build though, and these latter methods will definitely make you more survivable, ultimately Necro’s attrition will remain capped due to lacking deception and immediate mobility escapes or invulnerabilities for when the crap really hits the fan. And this is precisely why so many are probably being tempted to just go the opposite way and to try and burn the enemy down first. This works solo, but in team fights you cannot burn down 5 or more people before they burn you down, if they focus on the necro, which smart teams usually do.

Bovinity.8610:

This would all be moot if they’d just give Condition specs some decent itemization. It’s rather annoying that Carrion is about the only easily accessible choice, Rabid doesn’t have a craftable exotic version or a full set that you can purchase with Karma, and Condition/Vitality/Toughness doesn’t exist at all. Meanwhile, power builds have just about every stat combination possible and they’re all fairly easily attained in comparison.

I invested in a few pieces of sentinel gear to balance the loss of survivability from my old condi build, which I figured was about value of 5k health stemming from 1K health blood magic, 1800 regen from Full of Life + Mark of Evasion, ~2800 DS health from 20 into SR, and Last Grasp auto-cast, which likely will save you another 2k health with the protection.

The nice thing about sentinel is primary stat is vitality, making it much better itemized than solider. It’s hideously expensive now though. But hard for me to see where a lot of Condi Necros are going 30 into power and just doing nothing to recoup their tankiness. In 1v1 or small situations the improved weakness and longer duration of stuff like chills can make up for it, but in larger zergier fights where you aren’t guaranteed to be debuffing all targets hitting you, you end up way squishier if not counter balancing it in some way.

That thief probably jumped so many players in WvW, ganking them before they had a chance to do much of anything, because most players aren’t real aware of thief mechanics without having one, and in all that time he probably never once thought of his own profession as OP. But lose one time to a Necro and they become outraged.

Gonna take a lot more time to figure out where we stand, but I’m sure on one thing. We are much closer to balanced now than prior to the patch.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

If you want my personal advice, I wouldn’t go for a crit rate higher than 25%. Using that, dhuumifre will trigger every 23 attacks, but this adds a nice threshold for dhuumire: when on off cooldown, it’ll trigger once every 8 attacks (90% certainty). Heck, arguably what you could do is pop DS to get fury, and with fury and just 200 points of precision, you can get 33% crit rate, and that comes to just 6 attacks.

So yeah, regardless of your build you are probably fine.

Hah, wow. Have to admit I got waylaid not too far into your process, but still interesting and appreciate you trying to take it on.

The end conclusion does surprise me a bit. I’m at about 27% crit and scraping around to see what bits I might gain more from, or was. Your numbers weren’t too far off on build assumption. My burning only lasts 7 seconds though. The trouble with averaging fury at 50% uptime, is I can’t see jumping into DS at the beginning of a fight just for the buff, then not having it available for 10 seconds. Often the LF just isn’t there to want to burn some early. And therefore the most important dhuumfire to proc is the first one, which usually will need to be started with just the basic crit rate.

If you are doing something like chain farming, or even taking waves in an event, most mobs won’t live past the first burning sequence that hits them anyway, so maybe I’d adjust it up a few % points, thus end up being content where it’s at.

Would also note on fighting multiple enemies, burning is still worthwhile to get up fast, because you can epidemic it to 5 more and usually have good damage left on it if your duration is long.

sas.6483:

A few points that might be useful:

1) Barbed precision is terrible. It’s so terrible in fact that vampiric is better. (Vampiric is actually pretty good, but people that can’t do math think it sucks.).

If you are running full rabid its not bad for a minor adept.

For ease of comparison, in an entire rotation of both weapon sets and DS you are attacking around 20 times, at 50% crit rate, and say 50% bleed duration, Barbed Precision should add about 1000 damage (6.6 procs) over that rotation. 1000 damage for such an early trait is very strong compared to what a lot of our traits are giving, especially the passives.

It’s really doing a bit more since when you jump into DS that fury proc is going to make Life Transfer fire off a lot. Then stuff like wells, locust swarm, any fire and forget skill that attacks fast, will return a lot of them too.

If you are carrion, then yeah its pretty much nothing.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I suppose the big thing about sigil of earth is that it is incredibly negligent of AoEs. In scepter/dagger it isn’t so bad, since you’ll stagger grasping dead and enfeebling blood far enough that it can proc on each. But on my WvW staff build, I’ll commonly throw out 3 marks and well of suffering in the span of 2 seconds, then following that up with life transfer + weakening shroud for the next 3 seconds

You hit on one of my major beefs with Earth Sigil. It kinda stinks for staff. In fact, a few months back it would frequently bug out and stop even working (not sure now). But even when it does, yeah you are going to cast 4 marks at most, and it won’t even take much longer than 3 seconds, the thing may proc one time. Compare the damage of that to something like a Sigil of Battle, that is going to last 20 seconds, up your condition AND direct damage, on all AoE’s, and last likely through your swap into scepter. Only problem – the Earth Sigils from Scetper/Dagger on a high crit rate have an exceedingly high chance to put any on swap sigil on cooldown. So you basically can’t run a on-swap sigil with Earth on the other set unless you want to lose any sigil function probably half the time.

Eh, its a big help, but still we are being pigeon-holed toward a few strong keynote combos.

There are still sooo many more cool builds they could open up by fixing Death Magic, further working on Vampric stuff, Minions, etc.

I’ve been finding it situationally useful, not running it all the time. If I’m coming up to a zerg v zerg in WvW, there are all kinds of nifty uses, splitting their charge in half, walling off retreaters, of course basic choke-point. It’s also a nice getaway mechanic, drop it right behind you when being chased and suddenly you gain a big lead. Bit more of a detour than the reaper’s mark even, since it will stay there for a few seconds and they have to go around or hit it again.

I wouldn’t keep it on all the time though, seems easier to combat in small scale fights.

sas.6483:

Really nice analysis by BRA. I’d argue that the Sigil of Earth is over valued by a factor of two or so because of the cooldown, but it’s all good.

Also because of cleanse. Where Earth Sigil really can surpass Carrion is getting your durations up, esp at 8-10 seconds. This is nice in PVE, however for PVP, how many times per fight does an opponent clear your bleed stack, least a couple if they have a decent build. Good chance one of those removals eats up a lot of your earth sigil duration. Barbed really don’t have to worry, most of those will get through at 1-2 seconds.

Currently I am not using earth sigils, for a 30/20 burn/terror build, I’m finding a mix of carrion and rabid fitting. I want just enough precision to crit that burn pretty quick when its up, but not too much that it is eating into Powers natural advantage over Precision. (Maybe BRA could tell me the exact ideal cut-off, ).

And there are other good sigils that can compete with Earth if you aren’t going full rabid anyway. Which have to be factored back into the damage of carrion. Because its dumb to use earth with a low crit rate.

Deciding on a split is one reason the sPVP turns me off in this game, builds are too complex to be straight jacketed by the limited amulet choices.

kerona.3465:

Pendragon.8735:

Magpies are hulking out in numbers on this new patch. Inched past SoS now in score, who I think might be due for a stop in T4 soon.

Except there are no tiers anymore so we probably will be facing each other again. Either that or back to tier 2 servers.

I know, but I’m kind of suspicious on just how random these matchups are. And SoS has been floating up taking beatings for a while now.

Magpies are hulking out in numbers on this new patch. Inched past SoS now in score, who I think might be due for a stop in T4 soon.

Bellamy.9860:

So essentially we just became some semi to hard nuking caster with still close to zero attrition. Great! I guess i can finally give up on nec.

It’s weird. We have way more burst, but are also more susceptible to burst now, if you are going for the new dumbfire.

If the max number of boons that can be converted at a time is 5, which seems a standard number in this game, then there should also be no single skill that puts up more than 5 boons at once.

zach.1847:

hahaha. Just tried some builds around and 30/20/0/0/20 + Conditionapplication via DS5 is pretty fearsome. So gonna get nerfed. x)

Do some of you guys have stockholm syndrome. This is why we can’t have nice things. At least let the meta absorb this before we go shouting to bring a hammer on our own heads.

Necro being toward the top, if it were to be the case, would be karma we richly deserve for being doormats so long. And Anet does not believe in whack-a-mole, so they will carefully monitor and if any adjustments need to be made, baby steps, just like the way up.

Heck, we still have issues that need fixing. The siphon ‘fixes’ seem pretty kitten to me. Death Magic is still a mess, yadda yadda.

Glenn.3417:

Dhuumfire is so not worth it for condition builds, a measly 4sec burn on a 10sec recharge and single target.

Maybe in team pvp, outside where you can use food, that burn can easily get up to 7 or 8 seconds. That is about 75% up time, and plenty left over to epidemic which takes care of the single target.

That 7-8 second burn is also covering for your bleed, poison, etc, or vice versa.

Only thing I don’t like is the tree gives power and you need to buff back up precision to actually proc the darn thing, pretty much forces a hybrid stat build.

I don’t think the wiki is right. Mine were hitting for 84, popped Blood is Power, went up to 97. Which means needs about 26-27 malice (condition damage) to go up 1 point, of course double damage if they are moving.

krippler.9826:

So the burning says it applies for 4 seconds, but to get it, you have to have 30 trait points in the Spite line. Does that mean that the base amount will be 5.2 seconds? Also, do crits from life transfer apply burning?

Yes DS can proc it.

I’m seeing damage from torment in PVE and the Mists, but no boost when they move.

Bah, they had to go and fix chillblains cast time, I’m already buggering up my queue from being used to it being fast.

Kitedyou.1720:

Hrmmm…in re-reading the patch notes…it seems as though Torment cannot be removed by any other class…is this correct?

If that is the case, and only Necro’s can remove it, that is a win…

I make the above statement because Thief and Mesmer can apply it…but nowhere in the patch notes does it say that any other class can remove it, except for Necro’s…unless other classes have “Consume Conditions”…

Anyone able to verify this?

Too good to be true. If so just blew my mind.

Death Shroud is brutal now. Place wall behind, torment, fear through wall.

We are going to be annoying as all get out now. People will hate us, maybe as much as mesmer. Heck I fought some 1v1s today pre-patch, and the guy hated how much CC I had already.

Can’t figure out if I want burning or not though, lol.

Do not want!

Sounds like nails on a chalkboard.

I’ve run in game tests taking on/off various amounts of toughness and the accepted formula’s listed on the wiki and other places hold up perfectly.

But when we are down to the point of people arguing whether they win or lose in random fights, how they feel in combat, really not much the forum is going to gain from it. I’ll go with the math everytime.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Curses used to be a good example of well-designed Grandmaster traits. Each choice was supported by a bonus the trait line gave you. Lingering Curse was supported by the Condition damage and Withering Precision was supported by the Precision. Smite, meanwhile, did not benefit at all from condition duration as both grandmasters were power-based.

Sadly, ANet saw fit to swap this around. Spite now has one Power option and one Condition Duration option, but Curses now has one condition damage option and one random option (as it doesn’t really get improved by the Precision anymore due to the long cooldown). Why could they have not left Withering Precision as-is?

Along the same track as these issues, dumb fire requires high crit to fire it off as soon as you can in each time window, yet spite line gives power not precision.

Even if they get out themselves, should be good for getting rid of mesmer and thief clones. Which was an especially big problem for rabid builds because of how weak your direct damage was.

Stability blocking fear is why the Corrupt Boon nerf hurts so bad. It was your prep skill for your other fears, would fear their stability and then open them up to your other ones.

Now unless Corrupt works on a priority system with stability near the top, its just a roll of the dice against some opponents, and if you don’t get their stability, you can’t use your fears till the buff runs its course.

You could run focus 5 to strip their remaining boons I suppose, but its getting a lot more messy with the cast time there and sacrificing OH dagger.

Kravick.4906:

Healing scales better with toughness. I also think someone screwed up the math some where in regards to carrion. EHP means nothing when you don’t have anything to compare it too. Even my friends notice a huge difference in survivability and longevity in team fights when I use rabid instead of carrion. I also notice the difference immediately rather than over time like you’re suggesting.

Long story short, I’ve tested both carrion and rabid extensively in actual fights (not controlled circumstances or through theorycrafting math), and found that rabid allows me to live much, much, longer. You are also so much more susceptible to burst with carrion. As I said before, conditions are not a problem considering I have so many ways to transfer them.

I transfered over to carrion and don’t see any difference in survivability, that’s why I said its perception. And I do more damage consistently because cleansing removes less of my overall DPS. The top tourney necros run carrion. You take more damage yes, its easy to notice, but you also have 5-6k more health to absorb that damage.

It could very well be that having the bigger health pool fools people into playing more aggressively because they haven’t adjusted. They see 20k health left and mistake that it is worth the same as 20k with Rabid, so wade into risky situations.

Playing the game generates a lot of perceptions but the mechanics are based on hard math.

Rabid requires lots and lots of healing to start noticing a big difference from carrion. Your initial health pool will handle the exact same amount of direct damage between carrion and rabid, with the extra health exactly balancing out the extra mitigation, but obviously the bigger health pool eats conditions better.

Lets say you heal a total of 7500 in a fight, one main heal a few regens, the mitigation difference in favor of rabid is only about 1500 effective health. Yet if you have taken your healing amount in condition damage over your entire pool in that time (so 7.5k condition out of say 30k total), the extra mitigation will be entirely negated out.

It’s easy to move most long bleeds out, but stuff like confusion, burning, terror, even first few ticks of poison, and indeed even bleeds that other profs can stack in big bursts (say 5 or 10 at a time) will still tick some on you, its just impossible to think you aren’t still taking a fair good bit of condi damage in a big fight with conditions flying all over.

If you are in some prolonged zerg fight with a coordinated team blasting healing water fields all over, as well as quickly cleansing conditions, then the difference would start adding up meaningfully.

^Food 40, Spite 30, Para sigil 15*, Runes 10 (or giver weapons) would get you there.

Iceflame.5024:

Since burning is going to be an on crit trait, then it would require rabid gear while carrion is currently the way to go….

And if you are going Rabid, then you probably want full Precision to take advantage of whatever on crit stuff you have, but yet are forced to get 300 power for going down Spite anyway. Very questionable how deep they think this stuff through.

Gryph.8237:

Burning is moot, and useless in a condition build because they force you to go into spite to add this condition.

Basically if you want burning and terror as condi, you are going to be rather squishy. Either low toughness or base health. 30/30/10 is trading out a lot of defense and survival for burst potential, but necro isn’t a burst profession outside dagger main, which has the LF gen to ‘stick in the pocket’, but otherwise, none of our other skills or mechanics synergize for burst. And still susceptible to your burst being cleansed or stun broke out of, which simply isn’t the case for direct damage burst. Kind of goes against the whole concept of attrition they are supposedly trying to build up. The burning is also random, not on demand skill, so hard to use with terror in combination.

And there is really no ideal gear stat combo to get that survival back. Which would likely be Vit/Tgh/Condi for instance.

To offer burning as a new option, hey fine, but then to nerf existing, merely ‘decent’, builds that frankly need a bit more help yet still, that doesn’t make sense.

Torment better be a panacea.

Gryph.8237:

Actually, in my opinion they did absolutely NOTHING for condition builds, but make it tougher to have a good condition build with terror, and decent cooldown on corruption utilities. I am actually hating EVERYthing they did. Let’s break it down.

Changes to spite, force people to try axe more because they move the never used grandmaster trait to master level… whoopie,, its still not going to be used. For condition builds, they add dumb fire… who gives a crap… so now, you can’t have any toughness for condition builds, if you want to add this whole new condition to you’re mix up, unless you kitten your existing condition build massively. Sure you can go 30/30/x/x/x but you don’t get kitten for it. You want to encorporate burning into terror, you kitten yourself, and you wont be using staff at all.

what they are doing is forcing hybrid builds, and kiling our best pvp skills. I.E. corrupt boon. F that.

BOring kitten changes that basically balance out to no godkitten difference. F this patch. zWhoopie freaking dooo… 7 seconds instead of 10 for DS. oh boy.. so huge a difference. BORING ANET. you did nothing again, once again all yyour talk and your still full of crap. yay buring… all crap.

I sympathize with most of this. I think my current condi build likely got nerfed as much as helped. From what I see so far, not that interested in burning and losing around 5k of combined vitality/toughness/regeneration, as well as the awesome Last Grasp armor from SR, just to get in return overkill duration (which dont need outside sPVP due to food) and about 4k damage in burning per 10s, which is still susceptible to cleansing. Then pretty much every trait along the way to get there, inferior to what I have in other trait lines.

Yet somehow I get the impression we are going to start seeing a ton of these cookie cutter burning/terror builds, which actually then served to kill diversity, instead of increase it, as right now you can build a condi build with probably a dozen variations that are all similarly effective based on playstyle.

Corrupt Boon and Epidemic (or even BIP for PVE) with nerfed cooldowns due to terror moving up to master, and Corrupt Boon now only turns over 5 boons… bleh.

Roe.3679:

Weren’t there a lot of posts concerned that Necros would be OP if they have us burning on top of terror? Now that they made it difficult to get both people seem upset. I don’t get it, actually having to choose between your traits is a good thing, not something that limits you. Not having any good choices for your traits is more limiting than deciding what to pick.

I for one didn’t even need burning, happy with my current build if they would just fix our defensive issues and bring down some cast times.

Instead because they are doing this total shake up, moving traits around everywhere, they are creating new problems for existing builds, without addressing our prime issues – well we’ve yet to see the full notes, but dubious based on past experience.

All because they don’t believe in straight line nerfs or improves, but rather this incoherent idea of increasing versatility as a means to balance.

If they want more versatility, they should clean up Death Magic and Blood Magic. Everyone shouldn’t be forced into hybrid due to it looking like the clear winner.

Ascii.9726:

If i roamed with Terror i would use something like this;
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAodWjMax7dbib0bKApCPD9IXdBISBxBTVocA-jkyAYNBRqCA5BiIAmCLiGb9tIasqbMdMRUtBXIymrVLFAELAA-w

Terror being bumped up a Tier only hits TPvP because they now have to drop greater marks to get Master of Terror.

Looking at that… I still kinda hate the Spite line for condi. Burning just a band-aid at the end, but you have to take the ugly cousins along the way.

Making marks default large would have opened so much for variety. But they probably left it on purpose, to help seal off burning.

I’m not sure they have gone the right direction in trying to balance this class. Hopefully Torment will be worth the hype.

Not helping Blood Magic is neglectful. They specifically acknowledged the weakness of life steal in a SotG, but no action.

Not happy about the terror change, don’t like any of the other adept curses traits. Even for not going for burning, now gonna lose Master of Corruption.

Roe.3679:

I believe the allegedly leaked patch notes changed it to a 25% chance for any attack to fumble, which I believe is a 12.5% reduction in direct damage. If that is correct it does make weakness more of a factor, but not enough to base a build off of, IMO.

12.5% of a 20k health pool though is 2500 health. A valuable amount to have extra when a thief is trying to burst you down.

Thing is I don’t think going for perma weakness or near so, really requires much deviation from a normal condi build. Mainly its the two traits, weakening shroud and withering precision you would need. Probably losing hemo, lingering curses, or master of corruption.

^ I had a long response typed out to him, but yeah well… suffice to say power crushes precision unless you have massively high base attacks like a thief and/or crit damage at or surpassing +100%.

Procs can make up a lot of that damage lost, if you are content that your bleeds will run 5-10 seconds without getting cleansed. Procs that go on cooldown via one target from our AOE’s while Power continues to boost vs every target hit. To each his own, wrong thread for this.

In a 1v1 you wold notice the delay the most of getting your burning restarted upon the window opening at say 50% vs 20% crit. It’s going to take an extra 2-4 attacks probably. But which is probably only 2 or 3 seconds of real time. Would have to do some math and experimentation to see how much DPS those 2 or 3 seconds additional ramp up time is costing you.

I really think if all these changes are true, the entire cannon of necro builds are going to be massively shuffled. Hard to really see the best way to go until we see every detail.

Rennoko.5731:

Just a point to throw in here, if we do get that burning on crit in the Spite tree, I think that will be the knife in the coffin for Carrion. Low crit procs was okay when you were just missing out on earth/barbed, but losing the burning proc as often as it comes up?

If the patch notes are correct, your precision won’t be that relevant as long as you have at least 20% crit probably. Because you just need one, it’s not a chance on top of crit, like say barbed precision which really fractions down chances to proc. If you get one crit, you have burning.

Because you can only get burning once per 10 seconds. All you need to do is crit one time in that window and you will keep your burning limit met. All those extra crits you get at 50% crit rate will do nothing.

Even with a lower crit it would still be ridiculously easy to jump into Death Shroud for the fury and get your burning proc’d from that, life transfer hitting 9 times is about guaranteed one. Looks like Shackles will be a channel too.

Necro has so many AOE attacks going around, if you only need 1 crit in a window, such as in the new burning or withering precision trait, you really don’t need high crit to proc it. Especially in any team fight situation bigger than 2 v 2.

I suspect burning is going to end up in more hybrid builds than condi actually. The investement so deep into spite is really forcing sacrifices of points in curses, or no master of terror.