Every MMO seems to undervalue Speed and Stealth on their “balance” spreadsheets (probably because these two attributes have less PvE value).
However, they always cause massive balance issues in PvP.
For some reason, developers think some classes without these attributes can be balanced in PvP yet have the same DPS in PvE.
The real answer is making each profession near equal in these two aspects…For example, offer traits for each profession that give similar stealth and speed attributes.
Therefore, if someone is choosing these traits, they are doing so at the expense…in theory…of other dps traits.
Releasing this new map when only a few classes can clearly exploit it…is just bad design…or worse.
LOL…Apparently Anet thought the reason that Ele’s were grossly OP was due to 5 seconds of cooldown on RTL and one trait- Evasive Arcana.
They can claim that a bunch of other little nerfs were made, but it’s just going to make them look even sillier when they realize they did nothing to d/d dominance over other professions/builds.
On top of that…If these were the only changes necessary to get Ele’s back down to earth, why weren’t they implemented sooner???
It took 3-4 patches to address the ridiculousness of Thieves at release…I guess it’s going to take the same for something equally obvious.
Very disappointing.
You must not have gotten the memo…the game was called Thief Wars II until D/D elementalist trumped even the most kitten thief mechanics.
You should have seen Thieves at release prior to 3 major nerfs.
sPVP is corrupted by the overpopulation of thieves.
It’s quite head scratching how beta and alpha didn’t diagnose the obvious problems with thieves.
Swotr had almost the exact same problem with their stealth class – Operatives – at release, but they fix thing much faster and effectively.
I noted how Speshal just dropped out of this thread after Nemesis rebutted him. Have to say, kudos to you Nemesis for the work and effort put in. Definitely an eye-opener and let us understand the different ways to play a necro.
Cheers!
I dropped out because Nemesis actually rebutted nothing…well…maybe I understated the damage he does with fear by 600.
Other than that…he just made excuses for his gameplay in an EDITED video (imagine the stuff we didn’t see).
He also made claims about being undefeated in duels yet none of these duels mysteriously made it into the video that supposedly showcases this build (how many more weeks and editing is needed before we see that?)
He also constantly deflected criticism of his build by asking about mine…it’s a primitive technique for arguing and laughable too….I told him exactly what specials abilities I use, what elite i use, that I have ground targeting wells, and 18 seconds of protection…yet he needs me to spell out my build??? Wow.
He claims I don’t understand the necro class…yet he uses a condition build without BiP…thankfully some other guy in this thread presented an alternative condition/fear build in this thread that is more sane.
BTW…I realize some of his videos may help some people, but it’s amazing how people become such fanboy sheep…my best argument is just to watch Nemesis’s own video again OBJECTIVELY…there is absolutely nothing to see…except how to ignore your special abilities, ignore your elite and press buttons 1, 2, 5.
Some people want to critique me as not being as “helpful” to the community as Nemesis…well…for the record…I used to have 6 UN-EDITED videos back near beta/release…as well as stream…but this isn’t a kitten contest…I haven’t critiqued any other Nemesis posts or video…I just felt obligated to point out some serious problems in this one for those that are new and see his video thinking it is awesome gameplay/build.
Maybe i’ll do some new videos soon, since the old ones are no longer applicable….However, it’s clear nothing is going to convince Nemesis at this stage…he thinks the build is awesome for world pvp…he is undefeated in duels with it…and he claims he can kill me once I pop Lich in 5 seconds with his conditions.
The people that believe him will continue to be his sheep no matter what.
Good luck with that.
In case it was not clear with my reply i was mimicking the impulsiveness of your first input on this build.
You’re right…I WAS mimicking your build…Your other videos are fine and probably helpful to many.
However, anyone reading the “advice” on this build should be perfectly informed of the following:
1. You spent several traits, runes, and gear on getting 6 potential fears and for those fears to do ONE extra tick of less than 2,000 damage on ONE target.
2. One of the fears is on a 90 second cooldown and is not available on demand. Two require you to be down. Another one REQUIRES the other person having stability and you successfully landing Corrupt Boons on them.
3. ONLY 1 of your 6 fears works if your opponent has stability and that requires you to have Corrupt Boons off cooldown and land it successfully.
4. Your own EDITED video didn’t highlight 4 of those fears doing much of anything that made a difference.
5. You make fun of wells…yet you use one.
6. You claim the cooldowns are too long yet you waited longer than 45 seconds between applications of Epidemic and Corrupt Boons in virtually the entire EDITED footage. Corrupt Boons has almost the same cooldown as my wells….Plus, YOU use a well with an even LONGER cooldown than mine..lol
7. Wells have shorter cast times and provide area denial…break up front lines…sabotage other professions area buffs…etc…mine also corrupts more boons on more targets.
8. You use Plague Elite sparingly (probably because it has zero range…what did you say about your build’s great range?). Yet a wellomancer with Lich form would be devastating opponents regularly with it from much greater range.
I use Axe and Dagger O/H, so you have slightly greater range with the scepter, but, in your own video, there was almost always someone withing the 600 range to hit with an axe.
You have ZERO mobility. I can spectral walk to chase someone…or get in range…and then portal to get away. I can exploit z-axis for which there are many in this game. I can also get to a point or help someone faster…You can’t.
My LF pool is greater than yours and does tons of damage while also giving greater survivability. Your LF generation is horrible, the pool is smaller, and you do no damage in DS.
BTW, I’m not your typical power build. I get 18+ seconds of protection at 50% health…so my survivability and mobility murders your extra 800 toughness.
You claim power builds don’t use condition damage which is patently FALSE. Barbed precision, dagger 5, DS 2, and mark 2 all give bleeding. In fact, my bleeding damage adds up to much more than your piddly fear damage.
As for a 3 v 3 scenario, you would be in very sorry shape against me and my team. I could just pop Lich and kill 1-2 of your guys.
Or I could burst you with the axe/dagger while spreading weakness and vulnerability. I could add further LF and conditions with my marks and then burst you more with my piercing and vulnerability stacking DS#1. (I also have the same 2 fears you primarily use..they just don’t last an extra second or do a little damage.)
Oh yeah…I also have those wells…I’ll just wait for you to dodge some of my burst which drains your endurance. Then, I’ll chill/cripple you and drop wells on you. Other professions may be able to escape wells, but not YOU and your build…lol
Fighting my 3 man team would at least give you a chance to showcase 2 of your fears because you would be going DOWN…except of course, if one of my teammates has stability…then your 2 down fears are worthless. Even if they hit…how many times would you actually be able to rally????
Let’s think of your best case scenario…You succeeded in building stacks of conditions and landed a successful epidemic and also landed your 90 second cooldown fear on me or my teammate who cc’d you…Big deal…I could just heal to remove all conditions or use my staff/dagger 4 to xfer them back to you. I also have an added fear break with spectral walk..so gg to you.
Oh…and best of all…even if things go wrong and my 2 other teammates suck…I can just spectral walk out of there and fight another day.
What are your options again???
That’s what I thought.
If you’re having fun with this wacky build…more power to you (pun again?)
I’ve explained enough for people to decide on their own.
GLHF
How many high damage wells do you have and what is the CD on them ? How can you have the same survivability as 2600 toughness in a power build and still do high damage with wells…
What do you do when you are on a wall or at a wall, when you are at a gate or on a gate ? Do you place wells then ?… Do you dedicated one entire trait line just to make wells ground target, also… what’s the CD on your wells again ?… also when you make them ground targeted what’s their damage ?… mmm… can people simply walk out of a well ?…
In all my footage people were disappearing faster then i could tab through them, either from dying or from having too many characters in one place, so they wouldn’t render anymore. Each time i had an opportunity i tried to take advantage of it.
I thought i will show what you do in open massive battles… cause for single target the same build / a variation of it i have been using in TPvP. The only class that gives me any problems are bunker elementalists, but then again that gives problems to anyone…
They either kill you or run away, and you can’t stop the run away part… they have sustained low damage, insane healing, insane escape mechanisms… they never come alone, because with their high mobility sometimes they can join two fights…
Where do I start with all your questions? I thought my post was fairly detailed and clear.
First of all, your reply keeps referencing well cooldowns as being such a negative…well (forgive the pun)…I got news for you…
1. If wells are so bad, why do YOU use a well as 1/3 of your elites. The wellomancer build I discussed involved using 2/3 wells (corruption and suffering) with Spectral Walk…so I’m only using 1 more well than you, but the two I use are getting used far more often and effective.
2. You make fun of the cooldown on wells, yet YOUR Corruption elites might as well had the same cooldown. You hardly ever used them on cooldown and even when you did, they weren’t that effective. Count how many epidemics hit lots of targets with big stacks of bleeds. Count how many times you successfully used Corrupt Boon on a target with Stability and got your ‘juiced up’ Fear with 1 extra tick of damage.
3. Yes, people can walk out of wells, but Epidemic is even worse. It has a one second cast time compared to 1/4 for a well. Many times your target disappears or others around are gone by the time it even hits. I can get 2 wells down to cover a wide area in the same time it takes you to do 1 Epidemic.
4. You can’t use Wells in every scenario as you mentioned, but the same applies for marks…You seemed to use marks plenty in your video and they hit often. YOU even tauted all the all the AOE damage you were doing. Instead of "juicing up’ fear, I choose to juice up things that are used OFTEN like AOE.
5. BTW, you ask if I “dedicated a whole talent line to ground targeting”…Yet it is YOU who is dedicating far more traits, runes, etc. to get fear to do damage and get that damage to do anything significant.
6. As for survivability, it’s true you can’t get the same amount of toughness, but you don’t need it. As you already mentioned, people move out of wells because they are so potent. You can use this to your advantage defensively at times to get people off of you or choose another target. Also, with Spectral Walk, I’m generating tons of lifeforce that adds BOTH survivability AND damage via Death Shroud. Your build does almost no damage in Death Shroud and builds LF at a fraction of the pace (I also build LF on crits and 3% on marks, so that substantially adds to my survivability via DS).
5. Spectral Walk is amazing for survivability if you know how to use the juke properly. It’s incredible when fighting on a Z-axis, but works well too just running in one direction and then teleporting behind them. Some use the Flesh Wurm portal skill to similar effect. Your build has ZERO mobility/speed increase…that weakness offsets any extra survivability from toughness…unless you are comparing two bots standing in place hitting each other.
I would agree that your build is fairly effective in 1v1…especially if you “allow” for getting downed and have a chance to do 2 fears via “down-state”. However, if Anet provided total damage stats in WvW or sPvP, the damage you did would be embarrassing compared to a wellomancer and survivability would have been almost identical.
I don’t get this build at all.
In fact, the footage proved it to be even worse than I thought.
Re-watch your own video and notice in all that edited footage…
1. How many times did the “downed” fears help you?
2. How many times did ANY of your “juiced” fears make a BIG difference from a normal fear? I noticed almost none, but even the most optimistic analysis would say sparingly.
3. The cooldown on one of your fears is 90 seconds so at best it can only help you that often. Combine that with the sparing or rare use of “downed” fears and you really only used 2 fears with any regularity. In fact, sometimes you entered DS and didn’t even use fear.
4. Despite a 15 second cooldown on epidemic, it was sparingly used and only a couple of uses seemed extremely productive (i.e. with lots of bleeding stacks on target). In fact, the one case where you highlighted its use was not even that great….a wellomancer would have done tons more damage in that same situation.
5. How many times did you successfully use Corrupt Boons? Sometimes it worked, but not enough to justify it over other Elites. It definitely did not hit a target with stability very often…so no extra fear. Well of Corruption would have converted far more boons …on more targets…more often in those group fights. Even when people avoid wells, they serve as area denial and endurance drains that cannot be overlooked from team value perspective.
6. You have ZERO speed buffs. Spectral Armor or Necrotic Travel would have provided equal quality survivability while also giving you extra damage in the form of LF or Minion Damage.
7. You like Dagger 5, but I didn’t see much use of Dagger 4 when you had conditions…plus the blindness is helpful too.
8. Seems like Plague form wasn’t used much despite it being ideal offensively and defensively for many of those fighting situations.
If you’re going to go condition build and not use Plague much, not use Epidemic on cooldown, not find many successful applications of Corrupt Boon in all that play time…then it would be much better to go Wellomancer.
In short, a Wellomancer with speed elite/Lich would have been just as survivable and dealt much more damage in a group setting. Just watch how many times your elites weren’t being used or wasted compared to a ground targeting Wellomancer in group PvP like you showcased.
It’s fine to get excited about a thousand or two extra damage due to 1 more second of fear on 1 target…until you realize how many traits and runes you spent to get that occasional “payoff”.
With one trait in ground targeting wells..you would have hit the same people (and more) that you hit with all your marks with even greater synergy in runes/gear/traits.
If Anet ever provides stats for total damage like WoW after BGs, you would see just how paltry your contribution was in those fights.
If you want to get nit-picky, neither of you are right about heals.
The optimal time to heal with this build is just after 50% when protection kicks in. Many professions have abilities that increase damage at <50% and <25% health, so it’s true that you don’t want to wait til the last minute and give your opponent ‘free’ damage. However, using it prior to triggering your protection is also wasteful.
As for mouse clicking, there is no justification for it…period.
If you click and know it is bad…so be it…but anyone trying to justify clicking needs to L2P.
I run a very similar build, elites, weapons. (In sPvP, I use Spectral Walk for a little more utility and build LF versus using Darkness well.)
Video is nice, but it really just featured melee heavy duels. This build does have issues with range that aren’t as likely to take any damage from the wells/marks.
For example, you can sit on a mark and be sure a thief will hit it. However, your targeting has to be very skill-full and sometimes lucky to get even half the use of your wells/marks against a good range. In fact, good Rangers can dodge so much that they are near kryptonite for this build.
I agree with you that the protection trait is very handy.
If you find it helpful in lots of duels, you may want to try equipping “of the Forge” runes. You do lose some crit/power, but you gain toughness and over 18 seconds of protection after you fall below 50% health (rune gives you 12 seconds and trait gives you 6). The fact that you can get this protection once every 60 seconds makes it a viable option to consider.
It can actually offset much of the glass-cannon aspects of this build.
How can you say Necros are not broken with a straight face?
I only have to bring up ONE example…Minion AI
Watching a flesh golem do NOTHING over and over and over again is a complete joke. Any slight bump in terrain totally ruins his charge too.
Even WOW 1.0 had better pet UI than this ten years ago.
Whoever programmed this should be embarrassed.
Whoever reviewed it in BETA and still released it this way should be more embarrassed.
Whoever has continued to do nothing after 3 months shows complete ignorance or incompetence.
Sorry…You can’t have a minion based profession with this poor AI and say it’s NOT broken.
(edited by SPESHAL.9106)
So many people have abandoned the game…that it’s mostly thieves left. If someone hasn’t noticed the corrupted population of thieves in sPvP, then they are just delusional.
If you look at the scoreboard at the end of the game, most of the thieves are FoTM re-rolls and aren’t even rank 20.
This is the catch 22 for Anet. They let sPvP become Thief Wars 2 and now they have to keep thieves happy enough not to quit too.
It’s unfortunate because the OP is actually right about the game being pretty good in most areas. However, someone really dropped the ball in identifying issues with Thieves (and numerous bugs for other professions).
One bad apple can spoil the bunch. These numerically small, but critical errors have really sabotaged the game’s popularity and credibility.
Whether it’s heartseeker, pistol whip, backstab, signets, dancing dagger or whatever else is next…the profession should have never got out alpha and beta with all these issues.
Someone wasn’t doing their job and there is a reason the game is now called Thief Wars 2 for spvp.
Unfortunately, it’s too late for this game to recover. Most people have moved on from this ridiculousness.
Personally, while thieves are an embarrassment to the programmers, I think the AI of necro minions takes the cake. I never thought I’d see a game in 2012 with such poor AI get released from any reputable game developers. It’s worse than WoW 1.0 which is nearly a decade old.
The current minion AI is embarrassing for a game in Alpha…much less Beta or two months after release.
I used the Lyssa Runes and here’s how it appeared to work.
The activation of the Golem charge WILL proc the 6 piece elite activation from the rune, but it is based on the cooldown of the Elite summon – not the cooldown of the charge.
Thus, assuming you are using a 1 minute cooldown Elite like the Golem summon, you can proc the Elite activation rune bonus every minute. You CAN’T proc it every 40 seconds which is the cooldown on the Golem charge.
Thus, you will have to estimate whether the rune activation is available or not because you won’t know for sure by just looking at your elite skill button when the Golem is already summoned.
I suspect the same is true for the Mad King Rune. The Golem would still be the best elite option for necros because of the shorter cooldown on summon.
lol…I knew a mere prediction would arouse paranoia from warriors.
There is also a bug with a separate warrior ability that allows huge dmg…I guarantee 100% the paranoid responders to this thread would defend it if Anet hadn’t already said it was bug.
You would hear the same excuses about the bug…“l2p”, “l2dodge”, “it only affects necros with minions”, “it requires setup”, etc."
Fortunately…it looks like my prediction won’t come through because all these warrior responding seem to have great difficulty landing a kill shot and they can’t figure out how to properly incorporate 1 ranged shot with 9k potential into their builds/rotations.
whew….thank goodness for noobness and ignorance to cover up bugs and faulty design.
Props to those few warriors who have figured it out
btw…I knew paranoid warriors would try to discredit my prediction, but someone actually argued about the decline in the game’s popularity. If you don’t even notice the difference from release to now, i don’t know what to say…it just shows people will argue ANYTHING.
The game is still primarily Thief Wars 2 for sPvP, but I predict the the insta-gib fans may be switching soon.
Watch out for Kill Shot in your death summary in the near future.
Personally…I don’t have a huge problem with insta-gib specs, but given the nerfs since release…it doesn’t seem like these things were intended. (If so…whoever was assigned to Thieves and Warriors internally at Anet did a crappy job of uncovering insta-gib opportunities during beta.)
With thieves…First it was heartseeker, then pistol whip, then the signet.
Warrior’s HBs has a fair amount of tradeoffs, but adding it with over 9k potential from range is something I don’t see lasting very long in light of the Thief nerfs…no matter what the setup required.
The other option is to give every profession a similar RANGED insta-gib option that everyone has to L2dodge.
Right now…you just have a few professions corrupting sPvP population due to insta-gib potential and a few corrupting tPvP due to their superior bunkering potential. Both have caused a dramatic decline in the game’s popularity and credibility.
I would love it too if I were a Thief.
It’s definitely a buff and allows more builds to take advantage of a Signet that they made even MORE required now…lol.
I don’t see anything in this patch materially changing Thief Wars 2. At a minimum, I thought they would stop the ability to finish someone while stealthed.
Very strange…
Welcome to Thief Wars 2.
This problem is similar to SWTOR at release. Operatives were equally insta-gibbing people.
They fixed it in SWTOR within 30 days, and I would expect the same with Anet.
It’s just more drastic in GW2 because people can re-roll instantly. Anything OP like this immediately corrupts the PvP population.
They didn’t spend all that time programming different professions and abilities for everyone to be a BS Thief, so I’m sure they are aware of the issue.
All-in-all they have done an admirable job. MOA and thieves need immediate attention, but otherwise it’s just minor things here and there.
Whether it’s OP or not…losing almost all control of you character for that long with no ability to trinket IS ridiculous.
Isn’t the Mesmer class cheesy enough already???