Guild Wars 2

I know they don’t do the sex thing. I’ll fix that post mentioning “asexual” when really I meant “aromantic” sorry. But still, I find it odd that there’s a plethora of homoromanticism in Sylvari we can find in game but an absolute lack of heteroromanticism. Probably means nothing…but what if it does? I mean I can think of a few good reasons it might actually be preferable for sylvari to be homoromantic: namely a sylvari of the same gender as you will likely have more things in common. Without breeding to worry about, what’s stopping you from shacking up with the most similar person you can find?

I’ve found four homoromantic sylvari so far (all female). Quite obviously so too: Caithe, Faolain, The Festivalgoer south of the mystic forge in lion’s arch, & her lover. I can’t recall ever seeing a heteroromantic sylvari. It seems like they’re either aromantic or homoromantic….What’s the deal with that? Anybody know of some heteroromantic sylvari so my guild stops poking fun of me being a lesbian? And is this just a coincidence on the game designers’ parts or is this supposed to imply something about lore pertaining to sylvari?

I imagine endless possibilities with this. There’s the betrayals, the backstabs…a server turning on their allies and wiping them all out. All is fair in love and war. And we could have the peaceful equivalent of the commander tag; a popularly elected diplomat tag and the people with this tag would represent your server and those select few with the tag would be the only ones with the ability to communicate with all servers in a map through /map chat, instead of just their own server.

I do understand there would need to be restrictions, like preventing the largest server from allying with a smaller server to completely crush a third…Maybe make it so the winning team cannot form alliances? And you couldn’t just have “friendlies” from other servers waltz into your keep then flip it on you without going through proper channels, so perhaps disable turning off/on friendly fire inside a keep? And what happens when two servers together capture something? Maybe let it be counted in both servers’ scores and if one of those servers enters the lead, neutralize the dual captured territories and put them on a 5 minute timer. Until that timer hits 0, the territories cannot be captured. The two servers that captured it, can come and go through the portals freely, but the one that did not has to besiege the territory to gain access to it. Maybe let that third server capture it before the 5 minute timer is up. And then when the timer does end, let the territory be captured, but only by one server this time (no dual capping).

I think it’s a good idea… And I’m throwing it out here because you people would best be able to tell me what you think of it. As the fans of the game, we have the power to make it happen if you think it could work. And I’m not saying this idea is perfect (there could be tweaks made here or there), but I would like some feedback from the WvW community. Would you like to see a system like this implemented? Do you think it would be good for WvW? Are you just going to turtle back into your shell as soon as someone mentions change? Let me hear what you think.

tldr; Introduce the ability to toggle friendly fire for servers you’re temporarily allied with to aid in WvW balance and chaos. Perhaps introduce a diplomat tag (similar to commander tag) to allow for easier communication between the servers through diplomats. Put in safeguards to ensure no keep flipping from people posing as friendlies, having a giant server make their fight even more one sided through annexing the second place contestant, and have a system for dealing with dual-captured territories. What does the WvW community think?

Bear with me, this comes with a story so you can understand where I’m coming from, you can skip it if you want and there’s a tldr version at the bottom:

How about an option to toggle “friendly fire” for certain servers? You could even keybind it. Imagine the possibilities; no longer would you have one sided steamrolls between larger servers and two smaller servers because the two smaller servers could agree to a truce and disable friendly fire so they could zerg together.

This is probably going to sound stupid compared to the other things on this forum…regardless, it is something that a lot of people get wrong and it does sort of bother me: when to use affect and when to use effect. You affect something. It produces an effect. You should have that *E*ffect wherever you go. Not that “affect.” It’s not grammatically correct. I couldn’t think of a better place to put this, so it goes here.

I was going to say Balthazar…but then I read the Dhuum comment and I realized Dhuum wins. See, Balthazar was happily swordsmanning away when Dhuum banned him from Tyria for god mode (it’s what Dhuum does). Grenth was beyond angry (him and Balthazar were good buddies) so he pwnd Dhuum in the face. Then all the gods ragequit Tyria together to go be with Balthazar: The Exodus.

DRUNK TYRIAN HISTORY!

@Kraviec: Palawa Joko defeated Turai Ossa? Wat?

My vote: Shiro Tagachi.

Quote from Eilif (Son of Svanir in Hoelbrak)“Begone, woman. The Sons have nothing to say to you or your fellow skirt-wearing wenches.”

Sounds like Jormag doesn’t try to recruit females. Or at least he doesn’t have his followers trying to recruit them.

Why wouldn’t the Jotun make sense? That’s who I always assumed built it since we’ve already heard from ArenaNet that the Jotun were one of the (if not the) most advanced races on Tyria with magical understanding rivaling that of the six human gods before their collapse. Seems perfectly logical to me that a race with such intelligence and magical prowess created something as powerful as the HoM.

Just like thief stealth though, our stealth-in-plain sight would be wrecked with some simple AoE. In fact worse for us since AoE would essentially OHKO our illusions effectively destealthing us. And yeah, I don’t particularly think phantasms need to change. They’re not around for distractions, they’re around as our 1v1 hammer.

Resolution is 1920×1080 in game for high settings. As for other programs, it does this when I have nothing open. It worked perfectly smooth on my other computer, and my other computer had a craptastic GPU & processor. Plus I’m overclocked to some 3.5 GhZ/core with top of the line nVidia graphics card on my new PC. So even with GW2 running, I’m only using like 40% of my processor power (due to three really heavy threads & ignoring the other 5 cores + bottlenecking the processor and ignoring the GPU lol).

Usually about 5~10 seconds. Not terribly invasive, but enough to be an annoyance. And it’s usually about 5 seconds of clicking whether I start clicking after the launcher pops up or if I start clicking after 3 minutes of the launcher being up already.

@Crossplay, yes, I meant just the animation. When I’m fighting another mesmer on my mesmer, it’s as easy as waiting for them to dodge roll to establish target, then popping phantasms once I have the real mesmer because phantasms will not get lost in the clones. Then watch the target drop with little to no effort, shatters scattered here or there as needed for burst.

But if all their clones dodge rolled too, then I couldn’t so easily establish a target. And if you’re not a fan of the in-sync dodge rolling…how about just a randomly spaced dodge roll…perhaps every 5~10 seconds (2.5~5 with vigor). As long as the clones are dodge rolling somehow, it will make it more difficult to differentiate them from their master. And yes, random movement would be a neat idea too. Any kind of movement really.

As for being “OP,” it doesn’t really affect our ability to work in PvE (mobs ignore clones) and it doesn’t really work on more skilled players (for reasons stated previously), it certainly doesn’t improve our damage or give our clones more health…it’s just there to make it more difficult to identify the real mesmer instead of immediately going “Welp. There she is. That took all of two seconds.” Also, even with a crappy AI, it would still be an improvement to have them moving. Even if it bugs out and doesn’t move as it should, or stops attacking or something. It’s not like we’re going to miss that extra 10 damage (unless you live off of staff condition clones…then maybe you would be more concerned, but ranged clones are less likely to bug and miss their target than melee clones, so it’s a moot point).

I normally just keep clicking it until it works.

I can run the game at 60+ FPS on high/ultra settings in 90% of the areas in the game. But the game launcher (the thing with the login/play buttons) runs at 0~5 FPS consistently. Sometimes, because the launcher is running at 0 FPS, I cannot even log in because clicking the “log in” button doesn’t register with the launcher. So why am I able to play the game so easily but the launcher seems to be so terribly slow?

I offer today, two simple changes to clone AI that could vastly improve their viability as decoys (instead of just cannon fodder as we see them now). I was wondering what the mesmer community thought.

Change #1: Make clones move. Ideally, they would calculate your position and movement relative to their target, and mimic that movement on their current position. Such a calculation could be done by simply rotating your movement/position around the target to line it up with the clone. This would make clones indistinguishable from the mesmer as they’d all move in an identical pattern. Of course this would mean clones wouldn’t be able to attack with melee attacks unless you moved into attack range of the target. But I’m sure the clones could break their mimic of your movement long enough to attack then move back into position or just not attack at all while out of range. I’m also sure no one will miss the added 10 damage per clone hit. Such a change would not be simple though, so an easier alternative would simply be circle kiting AI. Make the clones keep a certain distance from their target and run around in circles, only closing the gap if they need to for a melee strike. Immobile clones easily identify a mesmer, even if all they’re doing is running circles, it would create enough chaos to assist in the distraction.

Change #2: The other thing that easily identifies a mesmer is their dodge rolling. So, if we make the clones able to move, I suggest making all the clones dodge roll at the exact same time as the real mesmer, and make them dodge roll relative to their plane of motion. Yes, you could still identify the real mesmer by looking for the one that spawns clones on its dodge roll, but it’s harder than looking for the mesmer that does dodge rolls in a crowd of statues.

While I cede there are still things that skilled players could do to easily identify a mesmer (look for the one with conditions/boons/missing chunks of hp/chaos armor/etc), making our clones do more than stand there could definitely help our clones distract our enemies . Wasn’t this the point of clones since their inception? Make your enemy swing at air? Our clones shouldn’t just be fodder for shatter.

Just reduce cast times. That ought to work. Elementalists get so many combo fields, but due to excessively long cast times, it’s difficult if not impossible to benefit from most if not all of them. Furthermore, having a nice 1~2 second cast on every single skill means that a thief can pop in, say hello with a burst of 10k damage, and stealth before you even get a single attack in. Yeah. That’s nice. This is why d/d is better. Most of their skills instantly cast while on the move.

Staff ele just feels so clunky since you can’t really kite effectively (no blink type attacks, mesmer staff #2), no extended cripples (necromancer scepter #2), and of course, you have to give up your kite to cast any of your strongest skills (meteor shower, healing rain) which your enemy can simply walk out of to win.

If you give up on the ability to 1v1, though…You can just run super heavy AoE zerker monofire build and pound capture points while a charr meatshield takes the hits for you. People ignore elementalists that hide while stuff is going on.

Fortus.6175:

any major buff is because they excel at WvW. Sadly they are a victim or their own strength, if there was a way to give it power without gutting their WvW potential then we would finally see fulfilled the long-range mage-archetype nuker……. at last.

From shooting pea in sPvP to an actual glass cannon, like they were intended to be.

My suggestion: Make AoE damage divide among targets, the more people the less damage, consequently, in a 1v1 or 2v2 scenery the damage is INCREDIBLY increased (to the point it is actually worth going 30/30/0//0/10)

Or

Make Fire and Air traits just as good as water/arcana, there is no real reason to go any other way when these two make up for the low hit points and armor and actually have good synergy/good traits.

I see two options here:

First, ANet could make fire/air/earth traits 4x better to compensate for the 1/4 time we get to use them or second, ANet could make fire/air/earth traits affect other attunements.

The trait that is +10% damage while attuned to fire could become “Fire’s power increases the damage of all your attacks by 10%” or “Deal +40% damage while attuned to fire”

Granted the 40% may be a little excessive, but yeah…you get the idea. Power them up or spread them around, they’re not worth the points as it stands now.

Tuluum.9638:

For me, I feel the ele is one of the harder classes to learn. But one of the easiest to master. Once you have learned how to stance dance, individual use of the skills is just common sense. Basically, once you have learned how to use the class, there isnt as much room for improvement beyond that.

Classes like the thief, warrior, and guardian are all very, very easy to learn how to play. However, there is a significant amount to learn beyond that. It is comparatively easy to succeed with a low skill level, but there is a lot of room for improvement. Still though, the amount of skill needed to succeed is, on average, less than an ele.

With the ele, once you have turned the stance dance into habit.. thats pretty much it. Using utilities, etc is only secondary to just moving through your attunements. You might be surprised how effective you can be in WvW by literally just hitting 1-2-3-4-5 then switching attunements that are off CD. Then just rinse and repeat. I was a little taken aback when I tested it. I was less effective than when I was carefully picking and choosing what to do and when/where to do it, but it wasnt by nearly as much as I predicted.

In my experience, the hardest classes in this game are the ranger and engineer, with maybe the necro in there as well. They are not particularly hard to learn, but being able to use their skills effectively can take some time and effort to master. These are also the classes that I do believe need some work, but I dont think they are nearly as bad as they are made out to be.

They are more difficult to master, meaning that most will find them utterly ineffective even though they know the basic rotations. The same doesnt really stand true for classes like thieves, warriors, and eles. Its just that the basic rotation is a bit more complex on the ele with the addition of attunement changes.

Still love the ele! But I have to admit, my ranger has been getting much, much more playtime recently. I just feel there is so much to learn and improve on, and I never really felt that way with the ele once I got past switching attunements constantly.

This. The elementalist is significantly easier to master. I don’t know that they’re harder to learn though. Most classes have a few different builds that work. Elementalist has one. That takes a lot of the difficulty out of learning a class when you can just say “There is but one effective build, and only slight variations on it; 0/0/10/30/30 with D/D, cantrips, & ether renewal.” Go make a mesmer, go make a warrior, go make a ranger, look at their traits, look at their slot skills. There is no immediate build that jumps off the page at you, and there is actually more than one viable build. If you have your build handed to you, and you’ve got lots of room for error since you’re building a bunker…what’s hard about an elementalist? You just have to learn what your skills do. Once you do that, there’s not a whole lot extra you can add on to that to push yourself over the skillcap wall.

Also, glass cannon ele? Please. Such a thing does not exist, or if it does, it cannot do small skirmishes. Glass cannon ele screams “Hit me once and watch me die.”

daphoenix.4283:

Simplicity.7208

My only problem with shatter based mesmers is that they are squishy, although you can counteract that by planning out all your moves in advance. I know what a mesmer is capable of doing at its full potential, and I haven’t really had any trouble taking one down. Taking a tanky elementalist on the other hand just doesn’t sit well and neither side wins.

My point here is that a shatter mesmer is prone to dying much more readily than what I run on my elementalist against highly skilled opponents. At the same time, a mesmer can deliver a much higher burst. So there is a trade off between survivability and DPS, which is not really a suprise.
Although my DPS is lower than bursting mesmers, there are many ways you can enhance your bursting DPS as an elementalist. These could include pre-emptive might stacking, swapping weapons before combat starts, using underwater CC’s on land, FGS fire trail bursting with walls or teleports, exiting and swapping to arcane blast/wave.

My biggest peeve is to be able to handle any situation I come across, or at least survive from it. Mesmers don’t offer as much flexibility as the elementalist when it comes to this vs. very high skilled opponents. Most of the time mesmers win due to a combination of skill, and a lack thereof skill from the opponent (you’ll see this when enemies wander around whacking clones when the real mesmer goes invisible). People just don’t know how to predict a mesmer’s location upon stealthing/unstealthing, or re-targeting to the real one.

My last peeve is being useful in a team fight. A D/D elementalist does a great job drawing aggro in large fights, can dish out incredibly large amounts of DPS using the fiery great sword, and can actually harass an escaping zerg army / cut it in half through cripples on the FGS 3rd ability. A mesmer can do similar feats using Glamour mass confusion on an army, but again doesn’t have the survivability that I like to handle any situation.
When a situation gets too tough, I leave the battle with ride the lightning. For a mesmer, when the battle gets too tough, you pray that someone doesn’t know how to recognize stealth/unstealthing right off the bat, or go all out and hope that someone doesn’t know how to dodge a spike.

I’d rather have squishy with an ability to burst than tanky with no ability to burst. Tankier builds tend to be kinder to newer players, then the better you get, the more glass cannon you can build (this is due to numerous things like understanding how to use your skills for defense instead of relying on your armor, understanding how enemies play, understanding other class skills, etc). With an Elementalist, there is no glass cannon build that isn’t total failure, so this progression doesn’t exist. You’re stuck with a tank and as your skill increases, you rely on turtling less and less without gaining the damage you’d normally gain from going more and more glass cannon. This creates a disparity between your skill and your damage output that causes you to get walled by certain classes.

As for using might to make your attacks hit harder, that only goes so far. My ele with a berserker amulet and 20 stacks of might on a burning enemy critting a fire grab will only deal a max of around 8k~12k. My mesmer with her shatter combo will deal 12k~20k+. If you find a glass cannon elementalist build that is actually playable, I’ll definitely hear you out, but this bunker nonsense is a big no-no for me. It lowers the skill cap which is never good.

daphoenix.4283:

Simplicity.7208
I did kill a few enemies in that video. I would have possibly killed more at that instant where the guardian fully healed his team. All 3 of those enemies were down to ~50% HP, and I had the upperhand most of that battle.

But yeah when your fighting enemies at once, they can always decide to peace out and exit the battle.

I’ve seen what shattercat mesmers can do. They can definitely deliver a much higher burst than an elementalist, but can’t handle as many enemies as an elementalist can at the same time (Assuming that the enemy knows how to play to a fairly decent degree)

I was just watching the sigils of bloodlust and the counter stayed at 7 the entire time so I assumed you didn’t get any kills. Could’ve just been on your staff instead. Regardless, I have an elementalist and I know it’s easy-peasy to kill some people…my problem comes when it’s impossible to kill others. I hate stalemates. Even if I lose, at least it’s not a stalemate. So when I fight a bunker guardian I get upset because we just fight for 30 minutes and neither of us even comes close to dying. So I ragequit to my shattercat memser which actually can kill bunker guardians and when played as to use terrain to your advantage can even take on upwards of 5 people at once and kill them all.

I guess I just miss the lack of a glass cannon build for elementalists. There is just too much glass and not enough cannon on any build you can make. The closest I’ve found is staff nuker, but then you kind of fail in small skirmishes where you can die to one thief stealing and heartseekering you.

I guess the question then becomes; continue to play with my current crappy computer on low graphics until computers catch up to GW2/GW2 is more optimized then buy or buy now and hope for something better. My current rig is:
8 GB RAM
Intel i7 Quad Core 1.6 GHz/core
nVidia 230M
It’s pretty terribad…but all I’ve done since release is sPvP on low graphics so I am actually getting sufficient framerates.

I know 16GB of RAM is more than I’ll ever probably need, still, it doesn’t cost much to get. Also, I know it’s better with desktops to get the best single graphics card you can afford and later down the line pick up a second if you need it, pop it in, & add SLI to get the equivalent of a next gen graphics card…but can one do that with laptops? My understanding is laptops are less flexible, so unless I get a laptop that can take two cards now, it will never take two cards. As for the power supply, that’s not a giant concern as 99.9% of the time my laptop is plugged in.

As for Sager, I read lots of reviews and checked them out on the BBB…apparently they are a very poor company for buying computers from. It sounds like their parts are sketchy, their service is terrible, and most of their machines have a very short lifespan. I’m inclined to believe those reviews since Sager notebooks tend to be around 10~15% cheaper than an identical counterpart from another brand. You get what you pay for, you know?

Moving on, would it be possible to run the entire game on high with WvW on medium then on a laptop? If so, what would the specs be to make that happen? Should I go single or SLI graphics? How much processor power should I aim for since the game tends to rely on that a fair bit more than most other games?

red.2387:

The real reason that, in the end, no matter what they do to traits, all elementalist builds will trend towards bunker builds is because we’re the only class in the game to have the worst armor AND the worst base hitpoint totals.

You can’t do anything if you’re dead.

That and elementalists can’t burst. Thieves share the lowest hitpoints and I think comparable armor, but they can backstab heartseeker down you in under a second or two if you’re not careful. Elementalists can’t spike you into the ground before you can attack, so we have to prepare our collective anuses to get hit. While preparing to get hit, we look at our HP and armor and go “welp. it’s either bunker or death” and so bunker it is.

Oh yeah, and traits for everything suck kitten. You’re giving up too much to gain too little if you don’t use water or arcana. Personally I run 10/10/10/30/10…It was the most offensive build I could make without derping myself…and I still can’t kill bunker guardians. Oh you better believe I’m kitten.

All classes need a burst. All weapon sets need a burst. Now hear me out on this, I don’t mean a “lulz ez mode heartseeker spam button” for every class. I mean a skill that maybe is hard to hit but lets you hit more than normal or do what you’re already doing, but over a very short interval.

If you’ve ever played a D/D elementalist, you know they simply cannot kill a bunker guardian. Period. They have no burst. Fire grab and churning earth (skills that should burst) don’t hit enough to ever down the guardian when they get low. All DD classes need a skill that perhaps is easy to choreograph, on a long cooldown, or difficult to hit, but hits significantly more than their other skills. That way, when you see your opponent make a mistake, or get low on health, you can line this up to drop them. Otherwise you end up with stalemates. Nobody likes stalemates.

“What about condition builds?” you may ask. Compare a condition thief and a condition necromancer. A condition built necromancer has no method of quickly applying numerous bleeds to a target. This makes it easy for the opponent to stall out their condition cleanse and shake off all the stacks a necromancer has worked so hard to put on. Compare that to a thief, the thief is biding his time, slowly applying bleeds and waiting until you use your condition heal. At that point he can drop some caltrops and spam some stealth pistol #1 or D/D #3 to quickly put you back up to 25 stacks. Even though there was little to no direct damage, he just spiked you with conditions that will inevitably down you because you blew your condition removal skill. Without some way to burst conditions on someone, a condition built character is easily defeated by stalling out your own condition removal skills.

What about bunkers? Well, I feel like some kind of burst would be useful. A damage reflection separate from retaliation for example would be great. That way a bunker could actually kill something dumb enough to continue attacking while they’re turtling. Alternatively a burst heal, condition removal, or some other powerful support ability could be nice.

Now you might be thinking “giving every class a burst will break the game.” However, you must consider that if done in such a way that a skilled player could avoid the burst (choreography, long cooldown, difficult to hit, etc), then it would be which player could capitalize on the others’ mistakes best. It would stop things like hard counters bypassing a difference in skill (bunker/DD ele, etc) and give the game a higher skillcap.

Thoughts?

daphoenix.4283:

+1 Kaleden.9386 for clarifying everything

Here’s my newest video showcasing my current skill level

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcprP81h4dk

Hopefully this serves as inspiration to everyone :P

Looks good on paper. Looks good in the video. Until you realize that during that entire fight you didn’t kill a single person. Anybody playing an elementalist can just kite around and heal incessantly. It takes skill and a burst to get kills in the face of insurmountable odds. And this is where Elementalists are lacking. No matter how skillful you are, your burst is just too weak.

Can’t overcome a damage gap with skill mate, not unless your opponent sucks. If you want proof, go look up some really skilled shattercat mesmers.

After browsing through around 40 pages of tech support and endlessly researching benchmarking tests, I decided to just make a thread and ask you all.

The game is so pretty…it’s an affront to God to play it on low graphics settings (as I am forced to do now with my “pro” nVidia 230M). So I’m looking to upgrade my computer. I am hoping to run it on Ultra everywhere except WvW which I should hope to get at high settings. I want it to have 45~50+ FPS on these settings at these places…but there’s a catch. I need to be able to use it in bed.

So then my question becomes, would I be able to find a laptop to make this happen? I was looking at getting:
2x nVidia GeForce GTX 670MX 3GB GDDR5 SLI enabled
16 GB DDR3-1600 MHz RAM
Intel Core i7-3630QM Mobile Processor (4x 2.4GHz/6MB L3 Cache)
750 GB 7200rpm Laptop Hard Drive

Would that be sufficient? If not, would this be sufficient?
2x nVidia GeForce GTX 680M 4GB GDDR5 SLI enabled
32 GB DDR3-1600 MHz RAM
Intel Core i7-3940XM Mobile Processor (4x 3.0GHz/8MB L3 Cache)
750 GB 7200rpm Laptop Hard Drive

How would the game run on med/high/ultra for each of those in PvE, sPvP, WvW, & DEs?

How would your solution work with burning or poison that can only have one source? In the case of two people using burning/poison, the one with the higher condition stat erases all damage done by the person with the lower condition stat. It removes their burning/poison damage and simply puts theirs in its place. The only reason I think this isn’t the #1 problem is because bleed is a more common type of condition than burning.

Also, you realize that a great number of DD builds have bleeding as a secondary effect? Warriors bleed on crit 33% of the time (my warrior bleeds on crit 100% of the time due to weapon runes) and my warrior has a 70%ish crit chance. So my DD warrior gets a condition slot in your solution, even though her conditions barely hit for any damage and have a very short duration? What about the other 20 people that may proc conditions with their own DD builds? They all get condition “slots” as well? Capping at 25 condition sources has many problems and ignores confusion, burning, and poison. But it’s the best solution I’ve seen yet.

EDIT: A thought occurred…How about this; if you hit a monster that’s at 25 stacks of bleeding then either all or some portion of the condition damage you would’ve done from your “blocked” bleed is dealt immediately? This would mean excessive amounts of condition users wouldn’t be working against each other as your bleed damage would be converted to DD until the stacks start to go down, at which point you start applying conditions again.

EDIT2: You misspelled “solution.” Thought I’d bring that up.

You shouldn’t have too much trouble surviving with an ele. My ele has constant protection up. Protection turns that 14k health pool into an effective 21k health pool. Not to mention all the knockdowns, stuns, interrupts, heals, and mobility we get. If things start going south, run. It’s one of your biggest strengths; being uncatchable. You can’t be engaged to the death unless you want to.

Thieves have it just as hard, but like eles their biggest strength is also being slippery.

TWMagimay.9057:

Last I checked(5 min ago), staff didn’t have minimum range, did that change since then?

If you’re a non-bunker staff ele and a warrior gets up in your face and uses 100B, you’re not going to try to put some distance between you? Yeah. Tell me how that works out. Tell me how a close range staff ele fairs against 100B. Meanwhile, I’ll be the ele lmao @ the noob who just got pounded into dust by a burst warrior.

As for my comment on nerfing them and letting them toggle…If they didn’t get nerfed, we could essentially have 8 weapon sets to freely rotate around and like established before, some conjured weapons are quite overpowered in niche situations. They need to be good in those niche situations, and they need to cover the things that our regular weapons do not.

They’re not meant to be the be-all & end-all for our DPS. They’re meant to support our DPS through adding different methods of assisting our team or providing different ways to cover our weaknesses. If we’re a D/D ele, a toggle ice bow would be a good method of getting some range. If we’re a staff ele, a toggle greatsword would be a good method of hitting something in our face hard. If we’re holding a point or attacking a keep, an earth shield would be a good method of bunkering down. They will inevitably be inferior to our regular weapon set, but the point should be to ensure we have a chance when fighting somewhere our regular weapon set is ineffective, not to ensure we have another equally effective alternative to play with…That would be identical to adding a weapon swap to an ele.

That being said….perhaps eles should have a weapon swap…Maybe on a 60+ second cooldown or something. All ArenaNet is doing by taking away an ele weapon swap is making us break combat, open our hero panel, and weapon swap manually. It still happens, it’s just a pain. The 60+ second weapon swap would allow us to do this without the hero panel thing, but it would also mean that we usually have to pick one and stick with it.

I say nerf them & make them toggle like engineer kits…Maybe disallow usage of more than one or keep some part of the cooldown or something. Since an elementalist can’t switch weapons, we’re stuck at whatever range we initially chose. Staff? Long range. Dagger? Short range. Scepter? Mid range.
If another class notices which skills/weapons we’re using, all they have to do is go where our range is not. For a staff that’s as simple as getting in our faces. For daggers, keep some distance, for scepter, pick a place that gives you an advantage. Since other classes have a weapon swap, they’re able to adjust positioning like this…Elementalists are not. If they could be used indefinitely, they would provide interesting ways to compliment builds and add different distanced skills to an elementalist.
As it stands now, they’re very situational at best, and even then don’t really merit a spot on 99% of builds.

Olba.5376:

Burning and Poison stack duration rather than intensity.

I know. But if they hit their cap, then no other burning/poison users will be able to use those conditions as a source of damage either. Although burning/poison have more problems than bleeds apparently, I was not aware of this and alternative action should be taken.

Olba.5376:

Contribution is based on the damage you deal. So, by increasing the damage of the condition builders, you’re taking it away from the non-conditioners. Also, by removing the cap, you’re allowing the bleeders to basically increase their damage indefinitely, thus taking away indefinite amounts of contribution from the non-conditioners.

By increasing the damage of condition built characters, you are taking away some from non-condition built characters. However, the loss from the non-condition characters isn’t enough to affect their contribution level, so why should they care? While at the same time, condition users will finally be able to fight a boss without getting a bronze every single time because their conditions were nullified. As for bleeders increasing their damage indefinitely…You realize bleeds expire after a certain amount of time, right? This means that each person can only maintain so many stacks of bleeding. There is no indefinite about it. Eventually it will cap. It should cap when the players do though, not when the game decides to shut off the ability of certain builds to do damage.

Olba.5376:

And no, adding HP is not the solution. Adding HP is your solution to the increased damage from conditions. But the damage of the non-conditioners has not increased, so by increasing the HP, you would be handing out free contribution to the condition builds. And you would effectively switch the situation to a point where condition damage is supremely effective and non-condition builds struggle to get contribution in longer boss fights.

No, right now contribution is split like 80% for DD and 20% for condition. If you increased HP and removed the cap, you could balance it at 50%/50%. Yes, DD loses 30% but they still have enough to get golds fairly easily. And condition built characters won’t have to struggle with their 20% to get a silver. Any non-condition build has nothing to lose from this. In fact, they stand to gain considering their condition friends (such as necromancers) would actually be helping to kill the boss instead of just standing there pretending to help. (Note: that 80:20 split was an arbitrary number pulled out of my kitten for the sake of an example. In reality, it’s affected by the number of people attacking a boss and their builds. For most world bosses, it’s much, much worse than an 80:20 split)

Olba.5376:

Oh please. Hundred Blades and Backstab are mostly overly popular in PvP.

I took the first DD builds I could think of to use as an example. I just so happened to have been playing PvP before I wrote that post. If you would prefer, I could go back and list every single DD build in the game, but I feel like using specific examples would save everyone’s time.

Olba.5376:

I can foresee two ways to solve it. Either you remove the cap and add a notable reduction in conditions once they get over 25 stacks. That or you make the game keep a count of the bleeds that your character potentially applied to the boss. So for example, if you use a Flurry on a boss with 25 stacks on it, you still gain the contribution of having applied all the bleeds. Since you’re not dealing any more damage, you’re not taking it away from the non-condition builders and you’re not making the bosses themselves require tweaking in terms of HP.

About 20 minutes before you made your post, I said this. I’ll quote it for you;

Simplicity.7208:

I guess an equally acceptable system would be to make it so contribution for champions and world bosses is based on the potential for damage you would’ve done in the absence of a condition cap, and not damage. I say potential for damage over “number of attacks” because it prevents things like really under-leveled characters getting full contribution just because they tagged a mob enough times to get gold, then power-leveling. It also takes into consideration the fact that attacks like cantrips for thieves probably wouldn’t work too well in a “per hit” situation.

You should read the entire thread before jumping in blindly mate >.>

Lol’d at the 20 fire comment. ArenaNet can create a trait that turns us into godzilla. If they just put it as 20 or 30 fire/air/earth then nobody would use it. Jolly good when three trait lines are useless beyond the 15 point.

In all honesty, I never had too much trouble without the falling trait. You have permanent, passive swiftness. Lightning flash, ride the lightning, mist form….You go around mountains faster than most classes fall down them.

Yeah, it’s really what’s puzzling me when I think about what to do in PvE. I love conditions and I destroy with them in PvP, 1v1, or even groups without other condition users…but it’s very annoying to have to always be wary of other condition users that might wander into my group and take away from my contribution level. Don’t even get me started on world bosses…That right there is an automatic bronze medal.

I guess an equally acceptable system would be to make it so contribution for champions and world bosses is based on the potential for damage you would’ve done in the absence of a condition cap, and not damage. I say potential for damage over “number of attacks” because it prevents things like really under-leveled characters getting full contribution just because they tagged a mob enough times to get gold, then power-leveling. It also takes into consideration the fact that attacks like cantrips for thieves probably wouldn’t work too well in a “per hit” situation.

Clearly the current damage based contribution calculation situation isn’t working. I think this damage potential system would be better, albeit difficult to implement. Any objections?

Oh, yeah. That would work too. Keep the caps in place, but make the stacks on damaging conditions limited to 25 for each specific player, instead of one giant pool that all conditions have to fight over. That would require more coding that simply removing the cap, but I do agree it would be greatly beneficial to poison/burning users. I wasn’t quite sure how burning/poison mechanics worked.

This is why I said just remove the cap from burning, poison, & bleeding (forgot about confusion, but that should be removed as well). Things like fear, vulnerability, blindness, etc. don’t need nor should they have their cap removed. They work just fine the way they are now and are not drastically hurting the playstyle of those who inflict them.

Also, if you’re arguing in favor of the condition cap as a way to slow down boss fights, then your argument is fundamentally flawed. The problem is that DD builds don’t suffer from a DPS cap they can output, yet condition builds do. If you want a boss to take a certain amount of time, then give it enough hp to tank through a certain amount of damage without a condition cap. Yes, the percent contribution of each DD character will be less, but the percent contribution of each condition build will be exponentially higher. Furthermore, the length each boss would take to kill would not be changed in any way and DD builds would not get bronze medals despite trying their hardest like is the current situation with condition built characters.

Why should you punish some builds with less contribution simply because of build choice? You’re funneling all choices into a 100B warrior instead of a sword/sword warrior. You’re forcing backstab thieves instead of unicorn thieves. You’re making necromancers incredibly unpopular due to their primary build choice being not viable in PvE.

Remove the 25 stack condition cap for bleeds/poisons/burning. The only thing this does is injure the game play and atmosphere you’re trying to cultivate here.

First, in a 1v1 situation, it doesn’t affect too much. All classes cannot hit and maintain that 25 stack limit. So removing it would do nothing to alter the current game.

Second, in a 2v1 situation, you find two people fighting over conditions in order to deal damage. In the case of the two people both being condition built, you have them only hitting as much damage as the 1v1 situation since each can only maintain half their conditions on the enemy at once due to this cap. It in effect, makes them half as strong as a DD counterpart. A punishment for playing in a group.

Third, as the X in Xv1 increases, each condition built character progressively deals less and less damage until they are essentially contributing nothing due to more sources for bleeds and more quickly reaching the 25 stack cap. DD doesn’t have this problem; if you have 100 warriors use 100B on a monster or player, the monster/player doesn’t cap out on the DD it can take per second…Why should you punish condition builds by capping out the damage they can do per second? All this accomplishes is the cultivation of a kill-steal mindset where condition builds rush to be the first one to apply conditions so theirs are the ones doing damage.

Furthermore, it’s not like removing this cap would drastically alter champion fights (where prolonged beating on by multiple people frequently happens). If the game is balanced, then the damage a condition build can put out in a certain amount of time shouldn’t be that different than the damage a DD build could do. The only difference would be whether this damage is front-loaded or back-loaded. In this situation, having 10 people with DD builds wouldn’t kill it any faster or slower than 10 people with condition builds.

ArtemisEntreri.4138

The technique this thief could have used was a steal + mug, CnD, Assassin’s Signet + Backstab. Pretty sure it’s well beyond that 0.1 second you gave but let me see if I can get closer…. Steal + Mug + Hidden Thief + Assassin’s Signet + backstab. Pretty sure it still takes longer than 0.1 seconds but we’ll just say it’s 1 second. Health helps with burst but higher toughness also helps and that’s something you’re neglecting, by a lot. My guardian has 13k health and 3k armor in spvp and I can take this combo and get away if I don’t see him in time. BTW you can see thieves coming unless of course they used blinding powder to get close enough. Regardless, he’s using 2 utilities to make sure he can hopefully kill you and then the signet is on CD for 45 seconds and Blinding powder is on a 60 CD. After that he is spent and it comes down to using a rendering issue and hitting CnD every 4-5 seconds to try another attempt at backstab.

No. It was 0.1 seconds. It was literally over before I could move my finger from the S key to the X key to dodge. It was faster than that 1 inch finger movement. I couldn’t respond, dodge, do anything. I just got 1 hit. Respawned in 15 seconds, tried to attack. Got 1 hit again. I couldn’t even touch him. So apparently that ability to just 1-shot people doesn’t rely on those cooldowns you mentioned and it doesn’t take 1 second otherwise I could’ve dodged. Still not seeing how this is fair. Also, I tried like a 3rd, 4th, and 5th time using 1900 toughness and 1300 vitality, still got killed before I could use a single skill, dodge, use a utility, or anything. Literally 1 hit killed every single time.

Other than that guy though, I was unkillable for both the hour prior and the 10~20 minutes or so afterward, so it leads me to believe it’s a problem with that guy’s specific build. Not my skill level. Or, you know, everyone on my server sucks. That’s possible too I guess.

Thread is tldr because I have to go to school…However, I think backstab needs nerf. I have a char with 2000 vitality & 1200 toughness. I get 1-hit killed by backstab. I’m not a glass cannon. I get 1-hit. How’s that fair? Even if it’s not a 1-hit kill skill (I’ve certainly never abused it on my thief), how is any skill fair that can take a player from full health with no conditions down to 0 health in under 0.1 seconds?

The answer is not “Oh yeah, see the stealth-ed thief coming and plan accordingly” by the way. That is the point of stealth.

I rolled a thief last night. If you still don’t think condition necromancer could use some tweaking, I suggest you go make a condition thief. They are an easy button in comparison. It’s ridiculous. Thieves can extremely quickly put on around 90 seconds of poison and 12 stacks of bleeding (in under 2 seconds), then just stealth and hide/run until the conditions from the first two seconds kill you. If you don’t die from the bleeding, they can pop out and do it all over again. Did I mention their bleed-stacking skill makes them invulnerable? Yeah. There’s that too.

As for finishing people off in plague form, didn’t know that…but still, wouldn’t that be kind of inferior? Use a 180 second cooldown to finish one person…I guess it beats nothing.

3) Burst is an quick, one time damage lump aimed to quickly down your opponent. Conditions wear your opponent down over time. You’re right. But the ability to quickly stack conditions is still not considered a burst, and most condition built characters have some method of accomplishing this. Necromancers do not and they’re supposed to be condition masters.
4) I’ll give that a shot, it’s still inferior to a dodge/invulnerability/block mechanic, but maybe that will be enough.
6) 1.2k is essentially nothing. If you’re using the plague signet for that 1.2k there’s something wrong with your build. Even necromancers should be able to build a better power build than a single 1.2k hit.

Chronocook.8937:

I love PvP and wanted it to be the endgame for my ele but it is horribly frustrating and i always feel weak and pitiful compared to other classes, not the experience i’m looking for from a game. I’m currently leveling a warrior instead so that i can enjoy WvWvW. What a shame, hopefully the elementalist will be fixed (there are about a hundred bugs in the profession that might make the difference) but until then i’d advise against PvPing with one.

Rolling a warrior for WvWvW….What is wrong with you? While elementalists may fail at sPvP, they were literally built to be monsters in WvW. You have AoE literally coming out of the kitten which will shred through zergs like nobody’s business. This is extra useful considering most people don’t move out of AoE circles while defending/attacking a keep so you can get tons of kills. Furthermore, an elementalist is the most mobile class by far with a d/d build. So if you want, you can roam around and pick off people then flee like nobody’s business when things get too dangerous. The large open spaces mean no one can catch you unless you want to be caught.

Warrior, on the other hand, has no real long range AoE attacks. The only thing he gets is longbow (which is vastly inferior to an elementalist’s AoE ability) so they’re already losing when we’re talking about zergs, and a warrior’s ability to escape is nothing compared to an elementalist. If things go south on a warrior, expect death, not escape.

Warriors do win in sPvP though…so you got that for you at least.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and your AoE circles kill siege equipment faster than anything else in the game.

Andele.1306:

Simplicity.7208 –
1) 30 SR is for me at least a must if going any kind of non condition build, since it gives you a easier life force generation (yes the +30% life force and the 5 point trait are bugged, but everything else works perfectly and never helps the enemy, unlike in every other trait line) also since they didnt actually change the 25 point trait it still gives 20 power pre 20% life force instead of being a 5% damage boost (as in it actually does give more damage pre life force instead of being a damage drop if you are under a stupid barrier like life blasts mechanic is)
3) Jon said necro conditions aint ment for burst from the design standpoint, cant really argue with that sadly
4) Hydromancy sigil on dagger or warhorn and one on the staff (or the energy one for more dodge if you dont like bursters) helps
5) As said with MH Dagger and OH Warhorn life force generation can migrate more damage than a blind/weakness from OH Dagger and is less situational, but wastly weaker for anyone who has more than 10 points in curses thus a thing of preference

Spite signet – That was kinda the idea, since its kinda more for the power builds because of the passive, thus making it a power variant of epidemic (as in damage dealing but with a selected amount of aoe conditions) kinda made sense..

Undead signet – ment it, dead allies get to be a minion for 15 seconds with 5 skills being able to help the player for a while, not as a actual minion summon (they should have worked on it and fix the reanimator to be dead enemy comes back as undead, not just bone horror shiz (ofc not working on champions and bosss).

1) But that doesn’t change the fact that for any other build, you simply cannot get stability. Additionally, every other class has a stability utility and we have a few skills that could have stability effects added to them without becoming too powerful. Also, aside from that really high level trait, there is absolutely no method of acquiring stability to finish someone.
3) But even having a signet doing a condition burst wouldn’t be burst damage. The idea to have a signet do 10 stacks of bleeding, burning, and poison for 10 seconds wouldn’t have any burst damage. The only damage that signet would do would come from the condition damage over time. It would only act to make the skillcap higher and the strategy of stacking conditions less easy to counter (right now it’s really, really easy).
4) Except it doesn’t really help when you consider that most bursters have some method of immobilizing, knocking down, or stunning you. I’m thinking, in particular, about 100B warriors. They can simply bull rush you then 100B and you lose 70% of your health. Now you have to fight at an extreme disadvantage and the fight has just begun. Even if you do manage to avoid the bull rush, it doesn’t change the fact that if they catch you at any point, you’re guaranteed a giant chuck of health missing. Other classes have some way of negating that giant chunk of missing health other than a dodge. We should have some way of doing this as well, other than death shroud because that requires charging and is much more difficult than a simple cooldown and often absorbs much less damage as well.
5) I guess warhorn does have its uses, but for most players, the dagger will be a superior option.

Signet of spite – If you make it deal damage + the AoE thing, then it could be utilized on some power builds, but since right now the conditions it deals are weak for both power builds and condition builds, I was thinking of making it like a powerful single target condition thing.

Signet of undeath – Oh, I see now. That would also be cool. Pretty much anything like what we’ve brought up would make the skill both more usable and more profession-unique.

Pendragon.8735:

All your stacks increase while the might buff is active, including ones started before it was used. When the buff ends, all stacks revert.

What he said. If you want to test it, go to the heart of the mists and hit a training golem with some bleeds.

Each tick of a bleed is calculated based on how much power you have at the time of the tick.

Corvex.5196

4) We have wurm…. its great stun breaker/escape we have , ofc it has problems…if it would cleanse all chill/cripple it would be great, tho now we usually end up stuck in a wall or not planting it in right place. Also…. we have 2nd escape….DS 2 ability… in wvwvw target a random mob , use it , BAM insta teleport , quite OP id say… but yea it has problems too… not very reliable… but atleast we have something , not like guardians…

That wurm teleport has too many issues to be utilized fully when trying to retreat. If anything it’s used to quickly go between points, not get away when things go south. Not only can it be killed (effectively removing your escape option), but you need to know that there will not suddenly be tons of enemies coming from that direction before you place it. Furthermore, you would only have that one escape option which doesn’t help if you need to run in the other direction (which you may need to do). As for the DS #2 ability, that’s assuming you can get it off before they break your DS. Because it has a long-ish cast time, you’ll often have DS broken before you can actually cast it. Furthermore, using it on an animal to escape aggro’s that animal so now you’ve got another thing chasing you (in addition to all the people). Plus, in sPvP, there is no way to use that as an escape since the only thing to target would be the other players (that you’re trying to avoid) and wasting your DS like that would be foolish.

If you’re a condition necromancer you’ve got it easy. If your opponent is an in your face mesmer, cripple him. Keep distance between the two of you and he can’t do squat. Blood is power is your friend. Use it before the fight begins and your opponent will bleed throughout the duration of the fight. In case you havn’t figured it out yet, this means you can always tell who the real mesmer is (he’s the bleeding one). Even if you don’t get blood is power off before he starts popping illusions, just look for the one with the most conditions, that’s your guy. Just keep your distance, keep applying conditions, and when you start getting your own conditions, throw them back at him. To put the final nail in the coffin, turn all his boons into conditions.

Added bonus; if he tries to run, you can just casually walk after him until your bleeding downs him. YOU CANNOT RUN FROM BLEEDING.

As for finishing a mesmer off; add one stack of bleeding before he uses his skill #2 and wait for the two mesmers to appear. The bleeding one is your finisher target. Additionally, you can look for the mesmer that appears second or the mesmer with the skull over his head. Those both also indicate the real mesmer. Wouldn’t rely too much on the skull/2nd to appear thing…That seems kind of like the type of thing that ArenaNet will fix in the near future.

Finally, if you go down before a mesmer, you still have hope. As long as the mesmer is down to around 20% health or lower, you can down it before it can finish you. Your downed skills are really quite powerful, especially against other downed opponents. You win a downed vs downed fight.

War Mourner.5168:

You say we only have one stun break. Last I checked we have three, spectral walk, spectral armor and the signet.

You’re right…my bad…I was writing it at 3am, so cut me some slack…but still, our three stunbreakers are quite horrible.

Schnitter.9857:

1) I agree about the lack of stability. Invulnerability would be excessive, since we can go for DS to help at damage mitigation, but an stability utility would be good. 30 Points at Soul Reaping to get 3 sec of Stability is not so reliable depending of your spec.

2) In fact, Condition specs are really good. The major problem is people just stack like there is no tomorrow, and forget that the enemy have a condition removal. The idea is make some stacks to pressure your enemy to use his removal, an then make your massive stack.

3) In power builds you can get some good damages with it. Problem is since you use your 2nd life bar like a damage source, you are giving up of use it in a defensive way. Also Condition Builds can benefit of DS, since the 2nd DS Skill is a blink like that chills and causes 3 stacks of Bleeding, using fear like an interrupt or 4th DS skill to maintain the bleeding stacks.

4) We really dont have much escapes, but the reason is the necro playstyle. This may seem weird, but see Necro and Guardian like a Turtle Playstyle. They equalize their lack of escapes and movement with their superior resistance compared to other professions.

5) We have, but sometimes if you dont see where the burst is coming you cant avoid. In our case, we can avoid making use of Fear, Well of Darkness, Necrotic Transversal and using DS to mitigate damage.

2) As I mentioned above, we don’t have a massive stack skill. Our only method of giving conditions is slowly over time. We should have one way of giving them a massive stack.
3) But power builds are vastly inferior to a power build you could run on another class, and vastly inferior to a condition build you could run on a necromancer.
4) Try to catch a guardian when he uses that utility that gives him swiftness then traps you inside a bubble where you can’t escape. They’re much better off than necromancers, those area denial things are great for escapes.
5) Other classes get much better burst mitigation skills; ele has mist form, warrior has endure pain, thief has stealth, guardian has many blocking/area denial skills, engineer has knockdowns & elixer S, mesmers have moa (or if you dislike the idea of using an elite to stop a burst) the illusions they can swap places with at any time in addition to the ability to mirror disable conditions (like knockdown), and rangers have protect me. Necromancers get protection and death shroud. Neither of which work as well as an invulnerability skill at blocking a burst meaning necromancers are really easy to slaughter if you burst them properly.

Andele.1306:

Signet of Spite- just needs to get the recharge halved and 480 radius around the target too
Signet of Undeath – good as it is, would be cool if it revived actually defeated players as minions for 15 seconds depending on class (shade for light, wurm for medium, golem for heavy)
Spectral Grasp – Make it ignore terrain, i really wanna be a krait!
Signet of the Locust – just balancing the fact that it life stealing skills should scale their damage and healing both of healing and damage each.
Plague Signet – make it a i eat conditions for life force and instantly take all conditions to you and its kitten, ok right now (kinda stupid that if a enemy aint targeted you dont get the break but still ok)

About the right numbers and DS adapting to equipped weapons, true.

Lich form wind should be a aoe aura chill and cripple that would if activated be a pbaoe knockback on demand (maybe making it a signet with it). For else you got Plague (that should get a 4th skill trough).

Signet of spite – It shouldn’t be fixed the way you talked about. I thought about it a lot, and doing what you said would just make it an inferior version of epidemic. Instead, signet of spite should be our spike condition skill; aka the skill we can use to spike tons of conditions on someone in a short amount of time. As eluded to in #3, we have no method of very quickly applying many conditions. Our best bet is corrupt boon but that’s unreliable at best since smart opponents avoid booning themselves with tons of things while fighting a necromancer lest those boons be used against them. Signet of spite should do something along the lines of 5~10 stacks of bleeding for 10 seconds, poison for 10 seconds, & burning for 10 seconds. Then we could do like that other person said; load them up slowly with conditions, wait for them to blow their condition removal skill, then pound them with our heavy hitting condition skill…It’s a shame all we can do now is transfer conditions, transform boons, and apply 1~2 stacks of bleeding per attack. It’s a very slow way to build up conditions and often they’ve already got back their condition removal skill before we can get it to a deadly point.
Signet of undeath – Love it. Love everything about it. However, for a 180 second cooldown, it should also allow us to utilize opponent corpses. Or if they just removed the 15 second lifespan thing, then it would be all right. The current problem with the term necromancer is that in practice, they don’t really do any death magic. Minion masters are kind of weak in comparison to conditionmancer, and if you’re not going to go full out minion master, most minions don’t even deserve a skill slot. It would be nice to have one utility (like signet of undeath) that could be used to grant temporary minions to a non-minion master build. Added bonus; it’s more unique than just copying that elemental glyph of revival.
Signet of locust – at the time of writing, I didn’t know that life steal was glitched to not scale properly. I guess I’d be willing to rethink my stance if they did fix it depending on how viable a life-steal build would be. Added bonus; a life steal build could finally be our non-condition build. Make it viable pleaaaase. That would be so grand.
Plague signet – I agree. That solution would make it usable, but as it stands right now, it’s definitely not one of our better skills. Something needs to be adjusted here.
Finally, can’t say much on the elites, I never was a fan of them. I much preferred the flesh golem on pretty much all my builds since it would help maintain distance from spike-y builds such as 100B warriors & p/w thieves.

Sorry it took so long to respond, I kept getting an error 503 on the forum…Well, here’s my responses~

Andele.1306:

1) 30 point SR trait gives 3 sec of stability (while not great at least something, still would be better if it actually broke pulls, knockbacks and knockdowns as other stability sources do or to be perma stability while in ds that cannot be removed/effect stability)
2) Conditions work well, people just go for carrion instead or rampager or rabid and get slaughtered because of lack of toughness while the conditions tick off, we are pretty much immortal for 20 seconds with plague if its cast while over 50% hp
3) Kinda true, but DS can be used in a supportive build filling way for now (it should either get a 5th or even up to a 8th skill since right now it cripples us most of the time, i like my Staff 3-4 into Grasp to Doom and Dark path into Dagger swap procing hydromancy and even more chilling and transfusion heals for friends), sadly LB will always be the cripple because of the stupid do half as much damage when under a arbitrary limit.
4) Again same thing as 2 and will be the same for the 100B thing, depends on build, honestly unless the enemy had a kitten cheating trick cough moa or 4v1 with my skills down_cough_ i can always get away, especially because of our nice chill skills.
5) Warhorn is, IMO at least, our strongest offhand, at least if you dare go melee, the LF generation is great and the daze is much bigger than the animation, combined with dagger main hand, you can go from 10 to 70% LF in no time

1) If you have 30 points in SR, you’re doing something wrong. No necro should ever have more than 10~20 points in SR. It’s an awful traitline. And even if (for whatever reason) you do have 30 points in SR, a 3 second stability is hardly worth giving up your major grandmaster trait.
2) Conditions do work well, but unlike other classes which get a burst, necromancers cannot burst conditions. Even rangers with a condition build can burst through use of sharpening stone & quickness to quickly (under 1 second) apply 10+ stacks of bleeding. If ArenaNet would allow us one skill to quickly put 5+ stacks of one or more conditions on an opponent, that would make conditions less easily counterable. The current problem is stacking conditions to a dangerous level takes so long that any opponent worth their salt has plenty of time (and skills) to counter. Also, you’re missing the giant problem with PvE condition builds.
4) This is a problem, I’ll explain in more depth why. If you’re fighting only one person, you can probably manage to escape through chills and cripples. However, this is assuming they don’t have a condition removal skill (which we have established earlier are very common) so it’s extremely unlikely. Furthermore, without a cripple or chill, they can just use leaps or teleports to close the distance between the two of you and negate any cripple you might try to pull since you have no leap or teleport yourself. This situation becomes even worse as you consider your odds of escape get lower and lower the more people you’re fighting. You’re not going to be able to keep 3+ people crippled and in that situation, you just plain die with no escape route. Compare this to an elementalist who can simply RTL (one skill) and escape from any number of people. Now, I’m not expecting something as grand as RTL, but any form of a teleport or leap would be monumentally useful and unlike relying on cripples/chills wouldn’t be less effective when facing higher numbers.
5) Warhorn would be great if death shroud had some application other than damage sponging, but since it doesn’t, it’s not really useful for anything, mainly just granting swiftness. The dagger offhand is usually far superior as it offers a counter to other condition builds as well as a way to kitten melee classes through weakness on skill #5. Furthermore, weakness is a difficult to come by condition for a necromancer, and having a skill that can do it is usually much more beneficial than a cripple (which is #2 on scepter, #3 in plague form, and a passive of both the bone fiend and the flesh golem).

There are simple solutions to these problems however, these are just my answer:
First, give us some form of stability that we can slot into a utility. You can remove a useless (or less useful utility) like:
plague signet – only one stack of all conditions and only for 5 seconds is hardly worth ever activating, and the passive power is not beneficial enough to merit a spot on most builds
Signet of undeath – unable to revive dead players? Only downed ones? While that might be useful in certain situations, a 180 second cooldown is unacceptable. You mean to tell me that certain game-changing elites like lich form are just as good as the ability to pick up a downed player? No. Not even close. While the passive effect is nice, the active effect & cooldown is trash and the passive is not good enough to compensate for that.
Spectral grasp – I hate to say it because I love this skill for WvW, but other than pulling people off keep walls or jumping puzzles. This skill is completely useless. If your goal was to introduce a skill that could catch a fleeing opponent, you kind of picked the wrong class to give it to. Since most necromancers are condition necromancers, we have plenty of chill and cripple already to ensure an opponent doesn’t escape. My necro has a 9.6 second cripple on the scepter skill #2 (10 second cooldown). I can prevent escape without ever looking at spectral grasp.
Signet of the locust – One I also hate to say, but it’s also not that useful. 10% movement speed is nice for getting around faster (especially in light of the lack of uber swiftness), but when you’re trying to chase someone down or run from someone, a 10% movement speed increase hardly matters. More often than not, a cripple, chill, knockdown, blowout, leap, immobilize, pull, teleport, or rush will solve this problem than swiftness or movement speed. I think we can all agree life steals are worthless so the active effect is worthless as well.
Plague signet – I can see this has niche uses. But in all honesty, it’s not usually worth it. Even if you’re trying to help your team…we’ve already established every class has tons of excessive, easily accessible condition removal, so why should you worry about taking conditions onto yourself? The passive effect just moves conditions around, perhaps when you’re not prepared for it. Having 1 stack of bleeding on 25 people would be preferable to having 25 stacks of bleeding on you. As for the active effect, it’s essentially the same thing as skill #4 with dagger/staff. It’s nice, but I don’t think it merits a spot either when there are things like epidemic, corrupt boon, or blood is power to consider.

Second: This is just a matter of finding the right numbers for axe/dagger main hand, death shroud, and adjusting traits to support some kind of burst build instead of most our traits being tailored to some kind of over-time wear down of our opponents. I won’t tell you how this should be done, but something does need to be done here.

Third: This is another issue where you just need to change the way skills work for death shroud. I’m sure there’s ways you could adjust attack speeds or damage, change skill effects or life force pools to make it work. I, again, won’t tell you how this should be done.

Fourth: Give us a leap. Give us more fear. Give us a blowout, a knockdown, some area denial. Anything. Just give us something we can feasibly use to get out of tough spots if used correctly.

Fifth: Either adjust the way the life force pool works, or give us a utility skill that can stop a 100B 2hko. The correct answer is not “oh, you just just always have a cripple active, that should be how to stop a burst.” Because that’s now what you expect of other classes. You expect less of elementalists and eles are really quite squishy. Eles have mist form and arcane shield.

Whew. If you made it to the end, you deserve a cookie. That was a mouthful.

Fourth: Escapes. Every class has a method of getting away when things get too spicy for the pepper. Elementalists and thieves are perhaps the best at this for obvious reasons. However, other classes have methods of escape through stability or stability equivalents (see first point), leaps, and immobilizes/knockdowns. A necromancer only has a very few number of skills to escape with, and most are not utilized due to the fact that a necromancer must focus on more offensive or defensive things to be able to even survive a fight. Yes, we get fear. But fear is easily countered and incredibly hard to come by. We essentially have no get out of jail free card. Even with fear, we at best have two skills that can cause it, and only one is AoE. Furthermore, we only have two skills that can grant swiftness, one of which is a utility that very few people even end up using. The only other thing we could hope to use is the flesh worm which is unreliable at best, and useless at worst. Flesh worm doesn’t work when your range exceeds 1200 which means we had better have pretty kitten good prediction skills on exactly where and when we’ll need it. And that’s assuming it doesn’t die from something else killing it while you’re off doing your business. Moreover, we have only one stunbreaker (which is also fairly bad), and absolutely no blowouts, knockdowns, or leaps. Now this wouldn’t be such a giant problem if other classes didn’t get swiftness, blowouts, knockdowns, leaps, or stunbreakers either. But, every class does, and their ability to pursue is vastly superior to our ability to flee. This means if a necromancer gets in a fight, they either win or die. There is no retreat. That doesn’t hardly seem fair either.

Fifth (last): A way to counter bursts. All classes have some skill that lets them block, evade, take zero damage from, or interrupt a burst. A necromancer does not. We have no blocks. We have no evades (outside of dodge). We have no take-zero-damage skills. We have ONE interrupt, and it’s a daze that we can’t even take advantage of (this is due to the cast time of the skill equaling the daze duration). Oh yeah, and that skill is on a warhorn which is a very, very unpopular and weak secondary weapon. Our only answer to burst builds is death shroud. However, unlike other classes which can survive a burst or two then wait for a cooldown to happen to do it all over again, our burst survival skill requires charging. It’s vital to our survival and often times one burst is enough to take it from full to 0 and then still get some damage through to the necromancer. Death shroud effectively does not counter bursts all that well, plus it’s much harder and takes much longer to charge than a simple 60 or 90 second cooldown.

First: Stability. A necromancer has no stability or invulnerability. Every class has at least one utility skill that can be traited to give stability, invulnerability, or an equivalent…sometimes all three. Warriors get balanced stance, rangers get rampage as one, thieves can stealth (while not stability or invulnerability, it does stop around 90% of CC), guardians get stand your ground, elementalists get armor of earth, engineers get elixer S, and mesmers get mantra of concentration. If a necromancer wants stability, the necromancer must either 1) trait for death shroud to give it or 2) use an elite transformation skill. Now that’s fine and dandy except for the fact that one of stability’s primary uses is to avoid finisher interrupts in PvP and you cannot use the finisher while in death shroud or transformed. How come necromancer is the only class that cannot have a utility skill for stability? How come the necromancer has no way to finish someone without letting them first interrupt us?

Second: Conditions. Necromancers can’t really run a build other than bunker or condition (perhaps minion master….but probably not in light of minion AI). I recognize that most classes only really have one or two builds, and that’s fine…however, making our only viable offensive build conditions has numerous problems. First, in PvE, there is a 25 stack limit to all conditions meaning if you’re in a group event, the monster will acquire his 25 stack limit very, very quickly. This means that once a champion has his 25 stacks of bleeding, all your conditions will not do damage. Since necromancers rely so heavily on conditions, this essentially equates to not doing damage ourselves which results in bronze or silver rewards for an event we fought just as hard in. How is that fair? At least let us have a trait in curses that lets us bypass the 25 stack limit so we can contribute. Second, in PvP, every class has condition removal. Now while this isn’t so much of a problem (I can understand putting counters in for other strategies), no other strategy is so hard countered by one thing. If you run a burst build, your opponent had better be extremely fast in his blocking of your initial burst, or he’ll be nearly dead, forced to heal, and already losing. Even if he does block your intial burst, most burst builds don’t have that long between bursts…100B warriors only require 6 seconds of stalling between their burst skills, and they’re guarenteed to get you at least once with it unless you’re a bunker. However, condition builds are delayed in their effects. This means if your opponent simply waits until conditions begin to become dangerous, then cures them, we’re completely helpless to fight against them. Furthermore, there are excessive amounts of skills to purge, transfer, or transform conditions making it much, much easier to counter than a burst build which may only have one or two skills on long cooldowns to counter.
tldr; conditions are way too easy to counter. If you intend to keep it that way, at least allow us another viable offensive build.

Third: Death shroud. I have never seen a build work that doesn’t use death shroud for anything other than an extra damage sponge. We have a whole trait tree dedicated to improving our death shroud, but our skill #4 is the only thing that can really hit any damage. I know some of you are going to go “but you can crit X,XXX with life blast through yaddayaddayadda.” Yeah. Sure. You can crit an impressive number with life blast. Of course that’s assuming you crit and your life force bar is full (as life blast gets weaker the lower our life force gets). Furthermore, that’s just one damage amount and life blast has a long cast time. Compare it to some other burst builds (hundred blades, pistol whip, mug+backstab+c/d) and you’ll see that your little Xk/second falls very short. My point here is that death shroud should either have some offensive options to take advantage of all those traits, or it should have more defensive traits associated with it to make a DS build possible.

ArenaNet could make it so attuning to an element grants a permanent boon as long as you’re in that element. Example; attuning to fire would grant might until you swapped out of it.

This way, we’re not encouraged to spam our attunement buttons to constantly maintain our boons because we can maintain the boons we need just by sitting in one element. Added bonus; it wouldn’t remove dancing through attunements as the trait that allows attunement bonuses to linger would still be there to allow us to grab tons of boons if we’re willing to dance.

I cede that perhaps earth would need to be looked at….permanent protection sounds fishy.