Guild Wars 2

I will probably get some flack for this, but just want to see if others are taking a similar approach while roaming in WvW. I have been roaming in WvW with my power necromancer for a while now and am perfectly aware that it is not the most effective roamer, but it is certainly fun and I think over time I have gotten somewhat better at playing the class/build.

Now while roaming in WvW, I have found myself coming up against two broad categories of opponents. Opponents who are fun to fight and those who use extremely broken mechanics to great effect. There are several builds that exist that, IMO, are just not fun to fight. A condition/invisible mesmer with endless dodge roll clones is not fun to fight. A perma-evade or perma-stealth thief is not fun to fight. Most builds that use perplexity runes are not fun to fight.

That is not to say that I think that they are “op”, but as the opponent, there is little enjoyment in fighting certain builds. I have fought them and sometimes I win and sometimes I lose. Regardless of the outcome, the fight wasnt fun. Recently, when I have come up against one of these builds when roaming, I will just alt-F4. I dont care if they get a bag or if I have to run back from spawn.

As much as we can say “WvW isnt balanced”, which is true, some fights are not fun and I refuse to fight them. If anyone else feels the same, I urge you to just alt-F4 when you come up against these builds. Maybe over time when people who play these builds see that they cannot find fights, they will play a build/class that allows for a good back and forth without resetting the fight whenever they get close to losing.

In power builds, DS is in a much better place than it was one year ago. With deathly perception it hits hard, there is increased utility with tainted shackles and we are able to stay in much longer with vital persistance. We can now use it with spectral armor and spectral walk for defense against burst. If we take reaper’s precision, we can have some degree of being able to keep out DS up. We also no longer have a “down state” UI and have some calculation with numbers of how much life force we actually have.

The two main things I think DS needs for power builds is (1) a quicker/more reliable projectile on dark path and (2) no overflow from DS to health pool in PvE only and (3) possibly some ability to heal HP while in DS (e.g. regen, blasted water fields, etc). They would have to be careful with (3) because it could easily make DS overpowered. Otherwise, looking back to where we were a year ago it is not so bad off. I know at one point the devs told us we needed to L2P with death shroud but its really the small changes they have made that has made it a useful mechanic.

I can’t speak to condition builds because I dont play one

Hey all. In the name of getting better at playing gw2, I am trying to work on saving my dodges for hard hitting skills. I am not very good at it yet – still having difficulty knowing when one of those skills is coming and reacting in time.

Anyone have advice for practicing how to save your dodges for an enemy’s money shot skills?

So what I am hearing from everyone is that eles and non eles think this trait is stupid and should be replaced by something that is more useful to the ele overall and is not op in one particular situation

I think that sounds fair. Devs?

Just leave you dirty warrior

Spoj, thanks for the post

What kind of results do you get in longer boss fights without having Close to Death? Does the combination damage modifier of Target the Weak and Strength of Undeath throughout the fight make up for losing the non-conditional 20% increase when less than 50% health.

I can see that theoretically you could maintain a damage modifier of 29% with all conditions on the target throughout the fight and maintaining full life force but how many conditions do you generally have on the target during the fight and how often does your life force stay up there?

Not being difficult – just dont know the answers to those questions and know you have figure it out so thought I would ask

Appreciate it man

I will be getting more footage as soon as I can. Last week our server was pretty outnumbered so it was hard to run into less than 4 or 5 while solo roaming and this week we outnumber the other servers so I am having difficulty finding people to fight outside of the zerg but I have been picking up fights here and there and will try to get some good stuff this weekend

Oozo.7856:

I’m not convinced that the developers have a poor grasp on balance. I actually think they just have a soft spot for trolls and trolling. Stealth mechanics, perplexity, mobility warriors, misting through doors, etc etc.

GW2 is the most troll-friendly game I can think of. Diamond skin is a mechanic designed to troll a specific class and build.

Haha, you just gave me an amazing image. After watching that dev livestream, I can just see Karl sitting there running Diamond Skin and laughing at the pathetic rabid necro trying to land any damage on him. Hurrr durrrr hurrrr durrrr

Part of the reaction also, I would assume, is due to the fact that these things build up over time until the necro players have enough, at which point the forum explodes. Dhuumfire, all the subsequent nerfs to other skills, little in the way of practical (not theoretical) increased survivability all add up…

Until things reach a critical mass which was reached by giving us a crap heal with little/no perceived interest from the devs (SoV), a nerf to necro survivability (weakening shroud) and a hard counter to the condition necro (diamond skin).

The discontent here has been building up over time and this is the result

As a side note, this is one of the longest threads I have seen on our subforum in a long time…

zaragoz.6351:

Just remove consumables from WvW problem solved.

+1

By the way, my toon is dressed in his Christmas gear with his santa beard for the holidays

Hey guys. A few weeks ago I posted a WvW roaming video using the berserker necromancer and appreciate all the feedback. A few people have asked me to post a build video, so I made one a few days ago and am just getting around to uploading it.

Please note that I made this before the Dec 10 patch so I have changed a few things since then.

This is not a groundbreaking new build and uses the generic 30,10,0,0,30 stat distribution so I take no credit for any originality. Just went into a little detail about what I am running, how I run it and general playstyle.

Any feedback is much appreciated. Again, I am new to making these videos so bear with me.

On deck is another compilation video, a video about uses of spectral walk and a “how to counter x build” as a power necromancer. With my track record, it will take a while to get these videos out but I hope to start working on them soon

jmatb.6307:

So much terribad from the Suckromancer community

Yall just go back to your class forum and hug your ugly minions until they slap you in the face enough to realize that your class does not revolve around condis

The sad part is, it feels like this is the thought process of the devs as well

If you spent any time on the “suckromancer” forums you would see why we are so frustrated. People who care about the class despised the dhuumfire patch. People who play other classes ALSO hated the dhuumfire patch. The only people who liked it were fotm trolls

The problem is, rather than admit they were wrong about giving us easy access to burning and rolling back the patch or moving traits around so that you cannot spec for both burning and terror, they have systematically shaved the skills that were not op before but now people question, ostensibly because of the reprocessions of giving us easy access to burning.

Now, they are introducing a hard counter to the viable build. All this could have been avoided by rethinking dhuumfire

Also, other builds are now indirectly being nerfed because of changes meant to shave down one build. For example, I play a power necro. It is a berserker build because with the way things are now , speccing more toughness or vitality does not allow you to burst the enemy quickly enough and you are ultimately wasting stats. One of the main forms of survivability in thus build was weakening shroud (causing weakness as an okay survival mechanic), but now that has been nerfed to 2s of weakness, making this arguably up build less viable.

All because of a change the necro and non-necro community did not want

And please, don’t be so disrespectful towards our community. We are passionate about the class but those comments were just immature

Edited for word filter filtering 2 words that were not profanity

Nemesis.8953

Not only does it anger me when i see that two kittens, that just started the game last week, spam 3 buttons and can kill me… every time i kill someone, it’s because i clearly saw how bad he was… and even when they make the most stupid mistakes ever, i don’t always get the chance to finish them off, because they run away…

This x1000. As much as I want to say “it’s just a game”, when you put hours upon hours into something, try to learn the mechanics in and out, record and review gameplay to see where you went wrong then modify your play style based on it, etc, it is infuriating when you come up against a class with a broken mechanic or a class that is a hard counter to the necro and get rolled.

I am not near the skill level of nemesis but am not terrible either. I love the power necro play style. But getting face rolled by someone who is invisible 90% of the time or has multiple CC or kitten, even a build of our own class that can condi burst more quickly than I can power burst in a full berserker build is just infuriating

Well guys – at least ANet didn’t nerf our survivability skills while handing us this flaming pile of crap that does nothing for survivability

cough weakening shroud cough

Infect.2738:

Sepreh.5924:

My worry is that the nerf to Enfeebling Blood is absolutely going to kill my berserker necro. It was the main source of defense for this build and I can only imagine how quickly I will get burst down now.

That is a legitimate worry for sure. I too used enfeebling for defensive purposes when i ran power. Still need to test out how the new death into life scaling with power. May make up for it. Probably not haha

Yeah, I am trying to think of another way to keep my defense up in the power build and am thinking I will probably have to run well of darkness (which I already run for the stomp) as well as signet of spite to get a little more weakness and a blind on the foe.

I dont think I will swap out weakening shroud yet, primarily so that I do have SOME weakness available on demand for clutch situations. I may end up having to take near to death to make it viable though which I would rather not have to do :/

My worry is that the nerf to Enfeebling Blood is absolutely going to kill my berserker necro. It was the main source of defense for this build and I can only imagine how quickly I will get burst down now.

Spiteful marks would be somewhat more useful if, as others have said, it increased all staff damage by 10% and not just marks

Staff has the highest base damage modifier for life blast while in death shroud. Right now, axe with axe training makes for the highest damaging life blast due to the damage increase from axe training. If all staff damage were increased by 10% rather than just marks, you could run staff + spiteful “marks” for the hardest hitting life blast combination

I dont know if this would make it worth the master trait but at least it would make it somewhat more desirable in a niche situation

Distaste.4801:

I’m not saying the heal is great, it’s certainly not even close to the mesmer’s new heal and certainly doesn’t approach the warriors signet. However it’s not exactly unusable.

I appreciate the reasonable approach to the heal. I think the thing that is most demoralizing to most necromancers is that there was so much potential for a new heal skill and this heal seems to be a little bit of a hybrid of the idea behind Well of Blood (team support) and Blood Fiend (life siphoning/heal over time) but overall less effective than either.

I have posted this in another forum, but there were so many original ways that they could have gone with a heal like this, for example:

Signet of Sacrifice:
Passive: Regenerate life force
Active: Convert your life force to HP

or

Grenth’s Embrace:
Cast time 3 seconds. Pulses 3 times. Each pulse heals x HP.
Pulse 1: Apply blind in an AOE radius
Pulse 2: Apply blind and cripple in an AOE radius
Pulse 3: Apply blind, cripple and chill in an AOE radius

or

Bloodseeker:
Mark your target with 5 bloodseeker debuffs lasting 5 seconds each. Every time you hit the target, remove one bloodseeker debuff and heal 2k HP. No base heal.

Obviously with any of these the numbers would have to be balanced but they are just examples of concepts that the dev team could have used in developing a new necromancer heal skill. IMO, with a heal skill like SoV, we get the impression that the dev team is less excited about the necromancer in general and just making a heal skill because they have to, rather than saying “wow, you know what would be awesome” and getting excited about the possibilities.

Again, that is just a perception of the situation and I know that it is not 100% true. I also recognize that they did try to do something original with the heal as far ask being able to “mark” a target and siphon based off of that. The problem is that this was not the type of heal the necromancer needed. Survivability is the primary issue. Ability to stay “in the pocket” is the primary issue. This heal does little for that and had the potential to do a lot for that.

OtakuDFifty.2965:

I’m really depressed by the amount of players that desperately need a strong healing skill just to survive. Like they’ll automatically die if they don’t get that extra 1000 health.

That’s not the complaint and not the point. The point of this qq is that they had the opportunity to introduce a healing skill that increases survivability and instead this flaming pile of crap was thrown our way

I reposted in the sPvP forum with the topic worded slightly differently and more focus on the impact of the skill in sPvP.

Hope it doesn’t get infracted because it is a legitimate question that belongs in that subforum

Edit for spelling

Hey all, just reopening the thread that was started to discuss the problematic nature of the new necromancer healing skill, Signet of Vampirism. It was specifically started in the sPvP forum to discuss its impact on sPvP, both pros and cons.

The necromancer community would like to give feedback about this heal in sPvP and get the more objective opinion of other classes on its impact in sPvP. That is why we are moving it back to this sub forum.

Playing a necromancer, it seems as if everything this heal attempts to do could be better done with our other heals and that there really was a missed opportunity to create a fun, original heal here.

From the sPvP standpoint, what do both non-necromancer players and necromancers think about this new heal?

Thanks for the feedback!

Haha I agree with all you guys about the catastrophic reaction – I don’t think we are near as bad off as we are sounding right now.

I was just in a “make jokes about anets approach to our class” mood today

April 10 2014 update:
We have reinstated the necromancer class due to concern from the remaining professions about losing easy kills. We have streamlined the trait lines to make them more in line with our vision for the necromancer.

The existing trait lines: Spite, Curses, Death Magic, Blood Magic, Soul Reaping have been deleted.

There are now two necromancer trait lines:
Dhuumfire
Reanimator

Up to 70 trait points can be put into each line. Adept and Master traits have been removed.

Grandmaster Traits:
Dhuumfire Grandmaster: Dhuumfire – burn everything within a 1200 radius of you. This includes environement, structures, NPCs, characters and your CPU

Reanimator Grandmaster: Raise the Dead – Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe

Gaiyeerishima Cat.1082:

You guys are ignoring the fact that it is a healing skill which provides damage.

We don’t need more damage. We need sustainability. We have been saying this since before the dhuumfire incident of 2013

About the same, the only reason being that I can check the forums while at work but cannot play while at work

KarlusDavius.1024:

Immobilise needs to be looked at. Not fun having huge durations of it

They are decreasing it from a max of 5 stacks to a max of 3 stacks

One of the saddest things is that there was so much potential for actually making a really fun and useful skill. I know I am not a dev but just a couple conceptual ideas off the top of my head:

Signet of Sacrifice:
Passive: Regenerate life force
Active: Convert your life force to HP

or

Grenth’s Embrace:
Cast time 3 seconds. Pulses 3 times. Each pulse heals x HP.
Pulse 1: Apply blind in an AOE radius
Pulse 2: Apply blind and cripple in an AOE radius
Pulse 3: Apply blind, cripple and chill in an AOE radius

or

Bloodseeker:
Mark your target with 5 bloodseeker debuffs lasting 5 seconds each. Every time you hit the target, remove one bloodseeker debuff and heal 2k HP. No base heal.

These are all stupid little ideas I thought about in the past 5 minutes but IMO all seem to have some use and are much more exciting than the crap that we are getting

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Signet Passive: Generates life force Life Force per 1 Second: 2%
Signet Active: Gain Life Force based on Current health %. Lower your health, the more Life Force gained.

I like the concept of this idea. Would be useful and would really have to think about when to pop it

It should work out of combat as well. Insta-fix. Not op, not up. Decent passive, decent active.

EDIT: I didn’t realize it was currently 1% every 3 seconds. Jesus, that is terrible. To make it not suck, change it to 1% every second and make it work ooc

RaynStargaze.6510:

Dalanor.5387:

Lily.1935:

Imagine if our utility skills actually did something different while in death shroud then they did while outside of it?

Like engi toolbelt skills?

kitten off.

How about you lose your weapon swap as compensation for having a third full set of skills at your disposal at all times.

Seems fair

Engi toolbelt skills are 70% crap btw. Unlike yours….

kittening faceroll necros

Haha this guy. Such animosity

Julie Yann.5379:

Sepreh.5924:

Stealth is not a fun mechanic to play against. It never will be. It isn’t that it is op, it is just that it is not any fun for the person who doesn’t have stealth

I would be fine with it if every other class had some form of counter to it.

Yeah, agreed. Right now the counter is to spam skills in hopes of hitting them. That’s just not fun

Stealth is not a fun mechanic to play against. It never will be. It isn’t that it is op, it is just that it is not any fun for the person who doesn’t have stealth

So, I know I have a skewed view but…

It may not be the best solo roaming build but the most fun solo roaming build IMO is a berserker 30/10/0/0/30 build

What is fun?
1. Compared to s/d staff builds, it feels much less spammy
2. With the current focus on condi necros, enemies don’t expect it
3. It really utilizes death shroud
4. Using wh, spectral walk and training spectrals, I have close to 100% swiftness uptime
5. It is not the “best” build so when you die, you can use that as an excuse

The idea behind the active on the signet was good but it looks like the implementation is going to be crap. How could they fix it?

1. Get rid of the “team helping” part of it. We have well of blood for that. We dont need another team heal skill
2. Get rid of the fact that it is a signet. It does not need a passive and this passive is basically not a passive heal because it sucks so bad
3. Make it a heal skill that “marks” your target and heals you for about 2k health every time you hit. It is risk v reward. You mark them and you risk the chance of them stealthing, dodging, etc. Risk. You do it at the right time and potentially heal for 10k health. Reward.

I love spectral walk and it has a permanent skill slot in my build. I have also used locust but find S. walk to be so much more useful

Background: Berserker necro running axe/focus and dagger/wh

Benefits to Spectral walk in my build:
1. With traited decreased cooldown on S. walk and my offhand warhorn, I have close to 100% swiftness uptime. 33% > 25%
2. I get a stun break which is huge for our class
3. It can be used to great effect for position in a fight. I dont know how many times I have fought people who thought I was running away when I had planned on S.walk then teleporting and bursting them the whole time
4. It allows you to overextend and have a way out
5. You can jump from any height and survive
6. LF generation

There are a lot of other things I am not thinking of off the top of my head. If Sig of Locust had a stun break, I might consider it over S. walk but for now, especially running OH warhorn and traiting for decreased spectral cooldowns, S. walk wins

It is risky but I use superior rune of the scholar

Sigils are:
Axe – force
Focus – accuracy
Dagger – accuracy
Warhorn – doom

Haha maybe it would be OP if you were getting hit by a bunch of mesmer clones at the same time

Aw, don’t start insulting us and our class now….

In my eyes you are losing some of your Swagg

;)

I play an almost full berserker build. I primarily roam and do small group stuff. It can be frustrating at times and takes a little while to get used to but I love it

It is a standard 30/10/0/0/30 build

Check my signature for some videos I put up. I will eventually upload a build video although the build is not original

Haha at this point getting posts from Bhawb, nemesis or rennoko is our version of a red post

Ceallach.8740:

The skillpoints becoming do-able again seems like an issue. Your character already visited those places and got those skillpoints – shouldn’t that be taken away ? And you get experience for visiting all those places… shouldn’t you lose that, too ? It seems like you would HAVE to lose that experience somehow or people would abuse this option – they could park somewhere (it wouldn’t have to be a main, it could be an alt specifically created to abuse this) and keep resetting and getting easy skillpoints and xp, et cetera.

Thanks for the feedback I think I can address some of the concerns.

There is already a system where you can gain XP and skill points from doing the same things over again. Dungeons, champion farming, etc. This would open up another option for gaining those things and I think that overall it would be less farmy than those other options.

The fix for people abusing this option would be to only allow people to reset world completion when they have finished world completion. Want that easy skill point again? Now you have to finish the whole thing again, including WvW.

Because of this, I do not think that they would need to take away anything that you already earned.

Ceallach.8740:

I’m just trying to think this through and the impact it would have on the game as a whole. Also of mention it’s something people could accidentally reset or have reset if their account was compromised – and would become yet another thing people send ANet tickets about to have resolved – meaning they’d have to store two sets of data – your pre and post reset maps and that seems like a bit much to me – that’s quite a lot and now it’s being doubled.

That is a good point. My guess would be that there should be a confirmation where you enter your character name prior to resetting. Like when you try to destroy Box o’ Fun. The account comprimise thing I can see happening less often.

Ceallach.8740:

A radically different solution would be to have a different way to obtain a “Gift of Exploration” after you’ve already gotten them once. I don’t agree with just being able to get one like an achievement skin, necessarily – but maybe also receiving a recipe to make more with them – something that would be no doubt as long and arduous as map completion itself.

Something like this would be great if they spent the time to do it. For some reason I think giving the option to reset world complete would take less time/energy from the devs, but I could be very wrong about that

• edited to put a smilie in to convey tone

Redenaz.8631:

There are plenty of reasons why we, as individuals, might not want to do it, but is there any compelling reason to not let those who want it do it?

(Besides developer time. This is the kind of quality of life change that has a small audience and small downside, so I’d say its biggest obstacle is whether anyone could be spared to implement it instead of working on something else.)

Agreed. If it took too much dev time it would not be worth it. I would imagine that it would not be that difficult to implement but if it did, efforts would best be spent somewhere else

Necromancer Balance Suggestions (concept):

2 conceptual changes

1. Tone down the condition necromancer’s condition damage and ability to burst damage with conditions

2. Increase survivability of all necromancers

This opens up the playing field for the non “damage-dealing condi” builds, tones down an over the top build and would still allow necromancers to be viable by increasing their sustain

Farming Flats.5370:

I bet that you a want world completion reset but not a reset of WvW maps right ? ….hehe

Haha, nope. WvW is a part of world completion so it would definitely be included. I am somewhat partial because I mainly do WvW these days but it would not be fair to have a reset apply to everything but WvW.

Stramatus.5219:

I really did not enjoy hearts in PvE. Why would I want to do that all over again when its already been achieved on my main?

You wouldn’t have to. It would be an option for those who want to.

Reasons why I would want to:
1. I only like playing my main
2. I like continuing to develop the muscle memory for my particular class
3. I do not want to spend money on gearing a same-class alt just for world completion
4. It might be fun to go through world completion again having a new outlook on the game after playing for so long

There are probably others I have not thought of

Odin of Ark.4860:

With a class that has high mobility wouldn’t take that long at all.

Point taken, but if you could only reset world completion when you have finished world completion, you would have to complete all the low level maps before you could go back for a second round at the high level maps.

For example:
Reset world completion
Redo Malchors, Frostforge, etc and get some exotics. Will take a decent amount of time
Cannot repeat cycle until you have completed all the low level areas again because you will not have world completion

Zelyhn.8069:

They reset fractals, dungeon paths, pvp ranks, gaming philosophy, then hell yeah why not world completion!

Haha, it would be an option that the player can chose. Not a game wide reset. If you want to reset, go for it. They would have to make it so that you can only reset if you have world completion or else theoretically someone could keep resetting and skill point farm a low level skill point.

Odin of Ark.4860:

Sounds kinda stupid to me, would give people easy exotics because you can just reset and do one of the end areas.

There are relatively few areas that you can get exotics from and the map completion in those areas would probably take just as much if not more time than it would to farm the quick paths of dungeons and buy an exotic with tokens.

Hey everyone.

I just wanted to pose a quick question to the community to see what people’s views about this idea are. I have a necromancer main. I did my world completion months ago and received 2 gifts of exploration. I used them both to craft legendaries. I would like to start to work on a third legendary.

I have several alts who are level 80. They are alright, but I like my necromancer. I also made an alt necro and leveled him to 80. I understand that I can do world completion with another toon to get the second set of gifts of exploration but that toon is not my character. Its not the one I have put all the time and energy into.

What if there was an option to reset world completion for a toon. This would mean you lose your easy access to all areas of the map, lose your little world completion icon, etc. It would also mean you get to explore the world again and do the events using the toon you care about and are used to playing.

This would not only allow for obtaining a second set of gifts of exploration with a given toon but also allow for an alternative way to gain skill points.

I might just be qqing because I dont want to do world completion with a different toon, but would people be open to this idea?

Wait – so the passive on the potential new heal will reward dire condi necros who can stack toughness while maintaining obscene condition damage but won’t do anything for power necros who have to pick between actually dealing damage and toughness?

No way

I understand that the active is supposed to be for team support but we already have WoB for that.

EDIT:
I know that a passive like this would benefit high toughness “zergmancers” during large WvW battles but those builds already do well in those settings. I am selfish and want a heal that will benefit power necromancers in small scale WvW.