Guild Wars 2

I think with the reaper, the need for improvement of axe and scepter will be even bigger. Currently, we can use DS if we want damage at range since staff is quite lower in damage (but amazing utilities). Now with a melee shroud, we will use more often our ranged weapons so if we want some variety and not be locked with staff as we currently are, we need some axe/scepter love.

nearlight.3064:

meow one twenty.4376:

I think Gravedigger will be just fine considering it’s a 5-target Backstab, it might not be amazing at single targets but for PvP that’s pretty useful. It also looks like Nightfall might somewhat hide the animation from CttB, which would probably be used before it anyway.

Can someone test to see if Reaper’s Onslaught increases attack speed of Wells and Dagger 5 while in Reaper’s Shroud?

I expect it to function similarly to malicious sorcery, the mesmer trait that makes scepter 15% attacks faster , which only applies the attack speed bonus to the autoattack portion of the weapon, hence condi mesmers take ineptitude instead.

As for reaper’s onslaught, I only expect it to work for the autoattack, and maybe the other skills if we’re lucky. I don’t see it making wells tick faster at all though, since the 15% attack bonus seems to only effect an individual skill(s?).

I don’t know why you say that. For mesmers, malicious sorcery increases the attack speed of ALL skills, including off-hand, utilities and even for some reason stomping (maybe even rezzing, I don’t remember for sure). The stomping (and rez) is likely a bug though. But I strongly expect that ALL reaper’s shroud skills will be affected, and the leap would probably be faster too but same distance.

It’s annoying how sometimes you think right but say wrong. So in this case, I wrote it wrong: dagger AA is 50% more than dagger 2 (which is thus 33% less). Yes, you gain more from the DS, but first, the DS degenerates so it’s not really 4122 health + if you have no LF you’re still alive, if you have no life, you’re dead. This healing is rather strong if you can land it (you rarely get all of it).

For dark pact, I agree with you, it is clumsy to use.

Aaesuhla in her unoriginal yet beautiful nightmare’s dress.

@Aerrin
I think the necro forum is full of constructive feedbacks and suggestion for the core necro but unfortunately sunk beneath a mass of other posts.

As for the reaper, I think a lot of people are already criticizing without having tried it yet. I personally feel a strong potential both in terms of fun and efficiency (except in PvE), but keep my actual judgement for this week-end.

Fay.2357:

I have an…idea. I don’t know if the tech even exists for this yet, but may as well mention it.

Gravity well would cause an aoe pulling effect. This effect would not interact with stability at all, it wouldn’t cause a disable. Instead, it would be as if you were on a treadmill that was pointed towards the center of the aoe area. This effect would scale up towards the center, so if you were at the outside, you could just walk out reasonably easily. If you got to the very center, it would be pulling you faster than normal running, so you’d have to dodge and then walk out. At the end, the normal float.

This way it’s still an interesting suction, but doesn’t actually lock you with hard cc.

I love this idea. It would really feel unique.

But as you said there is probably no tech for that, so in the meanwhile, I still think the first pull should have remained. This way, you put all people in, and if they have no stun break, they will probably take the large damage and the float at the end, while any stun break would give you enough time to go out.

PS: I am super happy that Robert Gee has been super active on both necro and mesmer forums today and that this was somewhat triggered by one of my post

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The thing with the dagger is that it needs buffs, too. Life Siphon should do twice as much damage (or 1.45 more damage and a 2.5 second channel), and Dark Pact should have a much shorter activation time.

Currently life siphon is not that much lower DPS than dagger AA (about 50% less), so considering it also heals + has a longer range, I think its DPS is just fine. Dagger 3 is somewhat underwhelming (useful but underwhelming) …

Ok, I know this is the necro forum and I agree that mesmers are currently stronger than necro but I have to say something here.

Sororita.3465:

Why does chilling darkness have a 5 sec ICD but a trait such as Mistrust ( cause confusing on interrupt) does not have an ICD and is near spammable? Not to mention hitting 5 targets, not to mention if you interrupt all 5 of those then all 5 proc the trait.

Did you even see someone using mistrust? Because I’m sorry to say that, but this is not a good trait and I don’t think it is much used. Interrupting is not so easy in the first place, and this trait would only have value in a group (because it gives AOE confusion), but conditions rarely live long in a group. There are discussions on the mesmer forum on how to change it because IT IS BAD.

It was stated that having necros having an up time on chill of 100% was overpowered. So why isnt it overpowered for a mesmer to have the same on confusion? Confusion, in my opinion, being the harsher of the two. Go fight the current cheese mesmer , 100% uptime of blinds, confusions and torments that constantly apply themselves. As well as having insane access to stealth, blocks and invulnerabilities.

Confusion is essentially the only condition that mesmer can dish decently. Chill is not meant to be your bread and butter condition but more of an addition. And between chill and confusion, I would probably prefer confusion. It may do a lot of damage but reduced speed + massively increasing CD is very potent.
For the stealth: yep I agree, that’s super cheesy and I hate it. Invulnerability is good (and I would love necro to have some) but if you except stealth, that is mesmer’s only survivability tool.

Not to say that this broken design of mesmers( its not a build, no programmer in their right mind would think it’s balanced) isn’t unbeatable but it sure shows the difference in some classes.

I am very surprised you’re here attacking condition mesmers (I guess you’re a WvWer) because

• The OP mesmer was power mesmer able to 100-0 from stealth. But this one has been tone down quite a bit in the last patch. This was much needed although I think they partly missed the core of the problem (the stealth and the guaranteed stun).
• As a necro, seeing a condi mesmer should put a smile on your face. Necro hard-counters ANY condi build especially the bursty ones (burn guardian, shatter condi mesmer).
• Mesmer is meant to be annoying to fight against. Its core aspect is the lockdown: preventing you from playing or punishing you for doing it. But there is another one who has a similar design philosophy… a necro sends you back your condition, corrupts your boon, effectively returning your actions against you.

So yes, necro needs some love and mesmer needed some nerf (but I feel the last patch already did its job), but you seem to point at odd places.

Ara.4569:

So is it better to go Balthazar or Ice/Svanir ?

I would say between those 3 (or even including Grenth): Balthazar. We will most likely make more damage from burning than chill. We have access to chill both in and out of shroud (in shroud if you take the traits blind -> chill, else only RS 5 but high CD), so higher chill uptime BUT we can stack burning much more in shroud.

I love that Robert answered my suggestion and is now more active in the forum
I just hope he won’t get bored of us too soon

To be fair, chill is punishing enough without the damage. The extra vuln + dhuumfire from the faster RS1 + AOE fear of RS3 + insane poison stacks from RS4 already voted for a condi reaper. Chill is just a nice toping, and makes the GS still useful in a carrion build if you so wish (I actually think I prefer GS to scepter for my carrion build).

WEXXES.2378:

Silverkey.2078:

I would love a corruption which would be an upkeep skill which increase the damage of the whole party (but as you said not through might) but you loose life/life force for the whole duration. This would fix the problem of necromancer to be “too tanky to have a high DPS”.

Making it use life force instead of applying conditions would be awesome as well, but I didn’t want to deviate too much.

I know, it is just completely different. I just assume the devs don’t want to give us high DPS because of our sustain, but this sustain is just redundant in PvE. Corruptions are a nice (and thematic) way to pay our extra damage by sacrificing our extra sustain.

Vizardlorde.8243:

Most of us never expected the GS AA to beat the dagger’s in dps but most of the damage will be packed in the 2-4 skills like every other greatsword .

Even if the GS has a lower overall DPS (which still does not make that much sense if you consider the cast time making it easier to avoid/blind/block) at least the “burst” skills like gravedigger should out-DPS the AA of dagger. I would have expected that a gravedigger spam (below 50% health) would be a better choice over dagger AA:

• it is super slow (1 attack in nearly 2s)
• it is conditional (only if enemy below 50%).

I actually didn’t do it myself because I didn’t try to estimate the cast time of gravedigger.

Dagger AA is 2.8 coef in 2.1 s, so 1.33 coef/s.
Currently gravedigger is 2.0 coef. The tooltip activation is 1.25 which would make 1.6 coef/s but it seems the after cast is nearly 0.5s which brings it down to 1.15 coef/s.

Since GS has about 10% higher weapon strength, this makes 1,26 “effective coef”/s. Still below dagger.

Also worth noting is that while using a dagger, you have often a warhorn which adds some DPS, while there is no higher DPS skill on the GS…

After the changes. From the wiki, it seems it was 328 + 0.25 *Condition Damage before. So the chill is about half the old burning.

Hi

From the video http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/v/9901352
it is easy to extract the approximate chill coefficients.

Damage above threshold: 97 + 0.08*condition damage
Damage below threshold: 145.5 + 0.12*condition damage

As a comparison, burning is 131.5 + 0.155*condition damage

So chill seems fairly potent. Of course, the drawback is that you cannot stack it in intensity, but having a near chill uptime while still having burst terror, burning from Dhuumfire and many poison sources, I think condi necro is back, but this time wielding a giant scythe

I would love a corruption which would be an upkeep skill which increase the damage of the whole party (but as you said not through might) but you loose life/life force for the whole duration. This would fix the problem of necromancer to be “too tanky to have a high DPS”.

spoj.9672:

Yeah the problem is they have to be very careful with that. People will be outraged and they will destroy something thats fun about ele. And in PvE its only meteor shower and ice storm that are broken for damage. Glyph of storms is an elite level utility but its not broken. Its better than pretty much all elites and regular utilities in the game.

Yes, I think the nerf should be subtle and well-directed and not a massacre like a-net has done sometimes (I can give some recent examples for the mesmer).

I think another problem is that the low passive sustain makes the class a bit punishing for beginners. Since a-net is balancing not only for the top tier but for everyone (which makes sense) it is even more difficult to deal with the elementalist.

spoj.9672:

No amount of damage will make necro one of those options unless it outclasses icebow + meteor shower + glyph of storms. But that would be beyond broken. So as Bhawb said PvE needs to change and we need some of our core issues rectified to bring us on par with other classes.

I also think a nerf to elementalist DPS would make a lot of sense… They are currently the single top profession in all game modes. They were designed as squishy powerful, but they are squishy only in terms of passive defense, not active defense. So they end up being bunkers in PvP while keeping a rather strong DPS. There are basically always 2-3 elementalist in top PvE and PvP teams, OUT OF 5 PEOPLE!!!!

Misguided.5139:

Well, maybe it’s just me, but I think the real issue here is that we could use another main hand option for phantasm builds. I’m shattering all the time, so scepter works for me.

Yes, because we have many main-hand weapons available….

Everyone is using sword in efficient group PvE. However, we are among the classes which could have an essentially as (or slightly more) efficient setup using conditions. However, we are still stuck with the sword currently, which is not an amazing condi weapon

I am just trying to promote build diversity in a game mode where there is close to none.

@sebradle
Yes but the non-execute dagger executes better than GS since the damage of GS (even gravedigger) is lower than dagger (not by much).

I think the GS is meant as a more than 2 enemies weapon. It has scalable LF generation, many 5-enemies skills etc… And chill IS punishing.

I still feel that gravedigger should at least out-DPS dagger AA since it is only spammable for execute (and not even fully spammable any longer it seems)

More footage
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Gamescom-2015-necro-footage/page/3#post5353655

Misguided.5139:

Silverkey.2078:

you also cripple yourself by overwriting phantasms (PvE mostly).

Only if you have three phantasms out, in which case you certainly wouldn’t want to use the AA, that is true.

Yes, but that is kinda silly. Saying you don’t want to use skill nr 2 because of the generation is sad but ok, this is something you know. But saying you can’t AA while 1) it’s an “AUTO-ATTACK”, sure you can deactivate this, but the AA is not supposed to punish you 2) you may have no other CD to use at this moment, so are you supposed to wait and do nothing? or just trying to interrupt your AA every 2s to make sure the chain never passes after the second skill?

The problem of course is that the developers probably didn’t expect that 3 phantasms up would be a thing (because if PvE was hard enough, that would never happen). But it currently is and while a condi build would be otherwise very potent with duelist, we cannot go for it with the scepter…

@Khristophoros
Well, necro has probably the best passive survivability of the game (I think even higher than warrior). But the lack of damage negation out of the dodges can be punishing. Thanks to the slow attack speed of enemies, dodges are usually enough anyway, but it is still a strong problem of necros.

I think we should wait and see before starting threads like this (especially since this has been discussed elsewhere already). I do think the damage is a bit low compare to dagger but it hits more target, has vulnerability on it, has a slightly higher range (small but it does matter for such a melee weapon) + has chill which is very punishing (mobility + CD) and can do damage etc…

My damage concern was mostly for PvE since I thought the GS will be part of the necro redemption. I still think reaper’s shroud will be very good for PvE though. In PvP, necro damage is quite fine.

It seems they are increasing somewhat the underwater support (new aqua breather announced, more support for underwater weapons in the specialization lines etc…), so it does not seem unlikely. To be honest, the flesh golem case in particular is really easier to fix than some (there is not intrinsic thing in it that cannot work underwater).

Embolism.8106:

Drgori.5724:

Scepter AA is just good on condi builds, that clone also cast ether bolts which applies torment too.

It really isn’t. The Staff is far better than the Sceptre if you’re just looking at the AA. In fact Ether Bolt probably scales better from Power (no number-crunching, feel free to prove me wrong) than condition damage.

I confirm that, with no power and full condi, you would still do more direct damage than condition damage with this skill.

Drgori.5724:

Scepter AA is just good on condi builds, that clone also cast ether bolts which applies torment too.

Except this is very weak even in condi build. Scepter 2 and 3 are amazing in condi build, the AA is… bad. This could be fine as it is since 2 and 3 make up for the lack of damage of the AA. But because of the clone generation, and because of how bad those clones are (since they do the AA, and not even all of it), you don’t only do little damage when you AA, you also cripple yourself by overwriting phantasms (PvE mostly).

To keep PvE and PvP balance, a higher damage would need to be at the cost of survivability. I think the “corruption” skills could be a good example. If you add a skill or a trait that boost your damage at the price of life force consumption or health reduction or a condition, you can keep a decent balance.

Also, a big part of PvE is not only damage but team utilities. Necro is also weak on that, but it has potential. I often cite boon corruption: imagine bosses had boons they could apply to themselves from time to time (like dredges but go deeper in the concept) which contribute to their strength, necro could then very fast not only remove a bunch of them but return them against the boss as conditions. This mechanics would favor mostly necro (but also to some extent thieves and mesmer) and make them a valuable addition.

I suspect that the new HoT PvE will have some of that, and hopefully they can add similar things to the current PvE without needing a full rework (just protection and might will do).

Already, in fractals, they announced an increase crit chance of bosses in higher level, which will make “weakness” more potent and necro is good at that.

Zalavaaris.5329:

Robert Gee.9246:

Sigmoid.7082:

I gathered they would nerf chill duration on some things because the way it stands with runes, sigil, and food along with the cold shoulder trait you can hit 100% chill duration or 60% in PvP.

This was indeed a big reason for the reduction in chill. It was pretty easy to make a build with the previous version that kept an enemy chilled 90-100% of the time (even in PvP without food). The current iteration is shooting for something in the area of 50-70% in order to provide windows for counterplay.

Wouldn’t the counter play be condi removal and the ability to dodge the initial application? Having 90% chill uptime is good punishment for the lack of ability to dodge a super slow weapon.

There are fast chill application (for example staff 3, fear etc…) so you can set up the chill chain very fast. And if your chill also tick (it seems fairly high) damage, this is very potent. 5s ICD is already good, if you time well your blinds, you can still have high uptime. It just prevents blind ticking like Plague or the well to really destroy you.

You do realize this is the necro forum

I think the necro forum is a good place. The only other place would be HoT sub forum, but I think necro is a better target audience.

I do think you are asking too much. It seems the only drawback of Pooka as you mention is an “average DPS”.

Anyway, trying to be somewhat constructive, since you seem to mostly want health regen, I feel what you ask is not too far from what I’ve been working on those past days

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chrono-bunker/first

The DPS is on the low side, but still decent. Definitely not bursty. The health regen is huge. The mobility is ok (and no stealth), but it is designed to hold points, so mobility is not so useful. With blink and sword 2 you have some gap closer, with blink and phase retreat you have gap openers. It is melee.

In the link, I use it with chronomancer because I feel that this will be useful, but I currently run the build with chaos-insp-illusion and it clearly not the best build ever, but it is ok and does its job.

Well I would say this footage looks way more promising. I don’t think the second build (condi) is dull, that’s actually close to the one I theorycrafted and the main PvP build I will try from friday.

@Mikkel
I did try boonshare during time warp, and I saw my allies who instead of going from 1s to 0s quickness every seconds went from 2s to 1s every second, so it does stack in some way.

@thetarot
Most of the time is not really spent fighting trash but running from trash to trash. Chronomancer is now plain faster than guardian. During a 2-3s trash fight, the time gained by a higher DPS is very close to 0.

Also, on some bosses, slow is powerful like the example DnT gave where it prevented Lupicus to go in its second phase or something like this I believe.

Xstein.2187:

At the current state, Mesmer elite <<<<<<<< Guardian elite, which I believe should not be the case.

That is only true in PvE. In PvP the slow is amazing also, so mesmer elite is a temporary game changer while the guardian elite is more of a utility (for stomp and rez mostly) than an elite.

If you are in an organized team with heavy conditions (burning in particular), epidemic is really amazingly powerful.

The one thing which is “unfair” is that it is now blocked to 25 stacks max of each condition transfer, which is somewhat weak for bleedings but super strong for burning.

Actually conditions were often the thing that killed me. But the build I used has less cleanse than my plan with chronomancer + I assumed a big part is me playing bad. Since then I put null field to make up for it and it went better.

The problem with our condi cleanse is that it is on our shatter which are already in very strong use and on our healing, but apply AFTER the heal. So if you have poison + a few cover condis, you suffer. So I am looking forward to the cleansing wells.

So in summary, we’ll see in 2 days how it effectively work. It currently worked quite ok while missing the features of chronomancer which I think will improve it greatly, so I am optimistic. Do you also intend to try a chrono-bunker?

I would not go that far, there are really bad AA in this game. The sword on ranger for example is very good at screwing you (yet quite strong)… Overall I feel all of our weapons have a good design except the scepter which is not awful bad but somewhat clunky.

Mesmers have always been blessed with all our elite being quite good in their own merit. This one definitely does not seem to follow this trend.

Honestly, before they nerfed it, I already thought I would rather use TW. But I thought that in some situations it could be useful (WvW to break stability for example). Now… I just can’t see any use for it (WvW is still the only possible place to help the frontline with some stability, but I’m not sure it is worth it even there…).

Do you think soldier is best? We have quite many (AOE) healing sources so I decided to go for cleric (also I am somewhat keeping the bunker guardian as a reference). It feels like higher regen with smaller health pool would work better as long as your sustain the burst. I also tried celestial a few times, since we have both power and condi…

With the perma regen + heal on shatters and weapon swap, a 1v1 is really a joke. Earlier today I did spirit watch, and everyone else was busy elsewhere, so I took the orb. An enemy tried to kill me on the way to the point… ahaha. I was just shattering a bit to keep my stability up and walking comfortably

Well the clone production could be in theory valuable if the AA did more conditions. For example, if the scepter AA produced staff clones, people would love it because staff clones are useful. But scepter clones… meh

An easy way to make everyone happy is making sure the clone AA never overwrites any phantasm.

I don’t think the shield is a PvE weapon (at least in current PvE). In general, I think alacrity can be a nice bonus to PvE, but will not be strong enough there to justify taking a skill slot.

Thank you Robert Gee for your comment
You see, not much is needed to make a (naturally gloomy) necromancer community happy.

As a few have mentioned, blood magic rework was amazing, so if anything like this is applied on our other problems….

The future looks bright, in a dark green sort of way

@messiah
I have been refining my idea by playing chaos-insp-illusion bunker these past days.
The well you mention, I would be tempted by well of action. But then we don’t have any sort of stunbreak. On my attempts without stun break, I was just push out of point and it took me too long to go back to it so they decapped.
I like the evade on the sword which is why I went for it instead of scepter, but going on condi can make sense (staff). Also scepter does more clone which is useful for the heal+cleanse on shatter.

My build on the current iteration (still need to actually try it)

• sword-shield/staff
• Well of Eternity, Well of Action, Blink or Mantra of Concentration, Signet of inspiration, Time Warp
• Illusionary defense, Chaotic dampening, Bountiful disillusionment
• ?, Restorative illusion, Illusionary inspiration
• All’s Well that Ends Well, Illusionary Reversion, Seize The Moment

I was tempted by chronophantasm but I just feel phantasms don’t last enough in 1vX. To make up for it, I add Illusionary Reversion to be shatter fodder. I have never shattered as much than with this build… Even without null field, we have more condi cleanse uptime than bunker guardian, but we have less “burst” cleanse. For the inspiration minor now that I have given up phantasms mostly, I lean towards Medic’s feedback.

I disagree with you thetarot. It seems that with wells + time-warp-F5, we can have an amazing quickness uptime! If you want more, you can shatter and boonshare. Then you can boost somewhat damage with alacrity (more hundred blades?). Even if we reduce our DPS to 0 (which we won’t, we are “only” half the DPS of the best professions), the DPS increase from the 4 others will be higher (less than 50% higher). Technically, assuming we are half the DPS of one other toon, by maintaining quickness on both of you, you would already mostly compensate for the DPS loss. So with 4 other people in the party…

I intend to use the greatsword in a hybrid build (hoping the scaling of chill with condition is good). But as I have mentioned a few times, I think it should have higher average DPS than dagger to make up for its slow cast time, but currently it is lower. And for some reason they nerfed gravedigger. Probably having a skill that you can chain only if the enemy is below 50% health and hitting less hard than the dagger AA was OP…

It reminds me of the last update of harmonious mantra for mesmers: requiring more efforts than before the 23rd update for less damage output.

Bhawb.7408:

Silverkey.2078:

Later in the stream Jebro is playing much better, but he’s still not a necro expert as far as I understand.

Jebro isn’t known as a great player period, he’s a caster primarily, and doesn’t play Necro on top of that. Blackmoa apparently was playing just as it got cut off, hopefully he’ll come on skype or here so we can hear from here.

But he still did a much better job than Grouch…

I think that the chronomancer is just a very different way to play mesmer. It is much more utility-driven and area control. It can offer damage boost, but not by having damage trait but by providing quickness and slow (quickness on shatter sound strong!).

Personally I decided to try a bunker build (which I had never done before) to prepare for chronomancer because that is where I see the most PvP potential (see https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chrono-bunker/first ).

Context
There is a lot of frustration in this forum. Part of it is simply the human nature of always thinking that the grass is greener elsewhere, but part of it is that the grass IS greener elsewhere (and if one class should be green, it’s necro!).

Now I won’t claim that the necro is low tier in all game mode, because this is not true. Necro is meta in WvW backline, and has an average place in competitive sPvP. But this “decent” place should not eclipsed the many problems the class has. To name a few: terrible scepter and axe, terrible condition application in general, hardly used corruptions, lack of scaling defenses which added to the lack of team support makes necro usually bad in group.

And the frustration is that most players feel that necro has just been abandoned by the devs.

My point
I really like how Roy has now started to be more transparent about the revenant. I am well aware that browsing through the forums is time consuming and that any post commented by a dev becomes suddenly assaulted by hundreds of messages. But if only there was a constructive discussion with Robert Gee, explaining some of the changes that most of us in the community do not understand, or explaining the lack of changes in things that all the community has been agreeing on for years.
We are not developers, we may miss sometimes the big picture. They have probably data for the build usage. So maybe we don’t see that some things needs to remain like they are, but at least they shoukd tell us!!! On the other hand, we are many necromancer players including high tier players, so we have also a big part of the understanding of the necro so the devs would (and probably do already) benefit from us.

So please Robert Gee, try to answer some of the exasperation of the community. As a mesmer main and necro second, I can say I love what you brought to the class, but we would all love constructive discussions to improve the class and the diversity of viable builds.