Guild Wars 2

Frigzy.8731:

So let me get this straight, even with 2 daggers it’s only 15% and the Locust Signet doesn’t stack with it?

Sounds like crap design if you ask me.

I believe it’s 25% if you use double dagger, 15% if you’ve got main-hand only. (No boost for off-hand dagger only) To my knowledge movement speed bonuses never stack, the only one used is the strongest one.

It’s iffy as a trait, especially in the face of Signet of the Locust’s existance. But maybe you really need all three utility slots for other things…?

Anyways, it doesn’t seem like a good choice for a trait, which why I think it should be combined with the other dagger trait, so that it’s just a clear “I use daggers” option.

That 15% recharge reduction on dagger skills looks lonely. Maybe these two should play together.

Berullos.6928:

Is it intended that Signet of Locust disables while in death shroud? Causing moving slow in shroud bothers me when I’m using signet if locust. The 15% movement trait while in DS is terrible and not worth picking up.

Also golem even though given stability during charge. If it is cc’d while you give the command it doesn’t queue up the skill and attempts to do the ability ‘while in the cc’ and it won’t charge.

Minions ‘thank god’ don’t desummon while in shroud so why should Signet of Power/Signet of Locust not have their effect. I’m not sure if the other signets work in shroud either.

Since minions are utilities and are permanent effects until killed, wouldnt it make sense for signets to be working in shroud as well?

The other signets also lose their passives. I’m guessing this is intentional since DS is being classified as a transformation, and others like Lich Form and Plague also make you lose passive effects. Those ones explicitly mention that they desummon minions, so minions staying up during Death Shroud doesn’t quite break the rule.

I’ll add a note about this since I could very well be wrong with this reasoning.

I’m not sure I understand what you mean by the Golem charge. Does it go on full recharge if you activate it while the Golem is CC’d, or just not activate at all? Because giving stability isn’t a stun break, so it shouldn’t be able to escape control effects with it.

The actual drawback May Lyssa confound you! of Prayer to Lyssa is hearing May Lyssa confound you! your character chant the May Lyssa confound you! prayer every 12 seconds.

Edit: I guess they don’t yell it every time, my mistake.

For the uninformed, there was a point in history that death shroud / downed state worked a lot like this for the necromancer. It was removed, probably because fundamentally it conflicted with what downing your opponent should do. A downed necromancer could still run around freely, attack fairly well and I think they still had Doom for a bit of control. It was far worse than mist form elementalists ever were.

I’m also pretty sure it’s the historical reason for not being able to receive healing while inside of it, the natural degeneration of life force while using death shroud, and was also probably the cause for the Necro’s reduced downed state HP (still present in PvE and WvW).

My point is, ArenaNet has been down that road already, and it didn’t work out.

Like smoke, gun oil and ink.

Stop this

just

stop

I just checked this, and while I’m not getting the combo indicator, I am getting the additional weakness from the blast finisher. In fact, I’m getting it from both of the minions separately, without needing to place the minion inside a pre-existing poison field before detonating it.

Edit:

I’ve been experimenting with this a bit lately. It appears that the actual blast finisher from each bone minion occurs about 1 second after the minions visually explode, which I assume is a bug.
(…)
This is probably why I’ve been thinking it hasn’t been working since you don’t get the effects until 1 second later. Also the little marker that shows a combo always shows up when I’m by myself. I think it wont appear if there are too many combos going off at the same time in the same area.

Yeah, it’s been like this for a while. I believe I have it included in the bug list.

I can’t remember the exact rules for how it works, but when you combo with another person sometimes the indicator shows up at their location, rather than yours or the location of the field. So if someone is throwing combo fields / finishers and they’re off camera, you won’t see the indicator.

I run a half-venom share, so to speak. Right now I’m playing a P/D & Shortbow with 30 in Shadow Arts, so whenever I run a dungeon I slot in Venomous Aura and start tapping basilisk. I don’t have the trait that gives an extra use for venoms, but it seems to work fine without. I just make sure that, like jportell references, I save my use of basilisk venom for a second after the boss un-stones. So we often get a solid 4-5 seconds of disruption.

As it is my build usually carries spider venom no matter what, (Poison damage and weakness, plus the most applications of Leeching Venoms in a single slot) and I carry blinding powder + shadow refuge to try and save others. It’s nice: my damage isn’t nearly at the best, but I tend to play in pick-up groups, so every once in a while when things Go Wrong, the added safety of stealth escapes / revives is very helpful.

So yeah, I’ve been playing a venom share / stealth build, and it’s been working out pretty well for me. I know that I don’t really like doing the max damage builds on a thief though, I can’t handle walking the razor’s edge like that.

Personally, I’ve never seen anything like this. Are you shooting at things much smaller than yourself? The auto-target has a frustrating habit of shooting into the ground if you’re playing a tall character (Charr or Norn for example) and attacking a tiny target.

To work around this make sure that between the two mobs you’re trying to hit, you always have the one that’s further away targeted.

Skyro.3108:

I’m using sigils of geomancy on both weapon sets, with a minor corruption on my offhand. There is no sigil interference. Trust me, it is a bug with the transformations because I have absolutely no issues when I run Flesh Golem instead of Plague, using the exact same equipment/trait setup.

I think if they make swapping in/out of transformations not trigger/interact with weapon swap sigils at all that would fix whatever weird coding issue is causing this.

Alright, I’ve added something about it. My apologies to MarcusGood, whom I sort of brushed aside when they brought it up the first time.

Danama.1462:

Bug: Flesh golem dies when the player enters the water.

I know the skill reads terrestrial only but it is a completely unnecessary annoyance that deters me from crossing rivers to chase people in WvW. It used to work under water in BWE.

I’ve added a bug about this. To be consistent with other minions, Flesh Golem shouldn’t die until a Necromancer goes underwater and procs the underwater combat mode. As it is, the golem will drown upon entering water deep enough to trigger swimming mode, and is actually capable of drowning itself without the Necromancer ever swimming themselves. There seems to be a short grace period (3 or 4 seconds) before it expires, but other minions can swim indefinitely.

Obviously using the golem underwater is a different story, but I agree that it should be able to cross water if the Necromancer is careful. Although crossing a river to escape a Necromancer does sort of fit the vampire thing…

In other news, I played around with Signet of the Locust, Life Siphon & Bloodthirst some more, for formality’s sake. I don’t know the whole story there, but something is screwed up with Signet of the Locust. For the record, it’s screwed up in the Necro’s favour, generally, (woo power scaling! But the heal scaling seems a bit subpar?) but it’s still acting weird.

As for Life Siphon + Bloodthirst, its heal is short about 5 health per pulse of what it should be after the 50% bonus. The scaling seems to work correctly though.

I pruned the list a little. One I hesitated to remove, but ultimately did, was:

• Spectral Wall will not apply protection to allies who already have protection from any source. (28 Mar, 2013)

Since this is actually a fairly common limitation in various skills. If I’m not mistaken, Temporal Curtain, Symbol of Swiftness and Veil also will not stack with allies already under the benefits they provide. So while I really don’t like this behavior, it is possibly an intentional limitation, or a system limitation to prevent people from getting the same full duration buff from the AoE multiple times, and is also not profession-specific to the Necromancer.

HiSaZuL.2843:

Otaking.4675:

" Virtue of Courage, and about 600 per dodge roll. "

Oh but wait! We have Mark of blood on dodge! Which gives regen! IF they trigger it and IF you didn’t try to use it twice in a row and IF you’re still in the area!

Umm… you actually roll out of marks range with that dodge. So you’d have to back peddle a bit :P

Mark of Evasion puts the mark at the end of your dodge, not the beginning of it.

Honestly? Screw the haters, Lich Form is a powerhouse. The massive boosts to Power and Precision alone practically guarantee it. 2-5 are largely circumstantial, which is an accurate description of 85% of the game so why should Lich be different?

Saying “You couldn’t have won without using your elite!” is such a pointless complaint. Why else do I have an elite skill, if not to win with it?

Edit: Man I just cannot get over that someone would actually whine at you for using your elite skill. Because what, you’re supposed to go easy on them and let people kill you?

Something interesting is that while comparing toughness to healing power is difficult (depends on how much toughness / armor / healing power you already have, how do you account for condition damage in all of this, etc) comparing healing power to vitality alone can be pretty simple. Basically, add up the healing ratios of the heals you give yourself in a typical fight. Once a fight is long enough that that ratio adds up to more than 10 health per point of healing power, you’re better off putting points in healing power than in vitality.

So add as much vitality as you need to last long enough to get to that point, then put it into healing power. Obviously how much starting health you need varies from fight to fight, but the “best option” is always relative to whatever you’re fighting. If you’re up against something with a lot of poison application / uptime for example, you might as well change that goal ratio from 10 to 15.

Edit: This also assumes that you never over-heal, or that at the very least you don’t do it very much. I’ll admit that can be a questionable assumption.

Alpha.1308:

let’s put it into simple terms since clearly nobody reads the whole post before answering:

what if i apply 10 second bleed for 100 damage/s and someone applies 10 second bleed for 50 damage/s one second after my application

for 9 seconds how much damage are they taking

200/s or 100/s

150 damage per second.

Edit: I have no idea how this relates to the opening post, but Answering Questions!

After stacking 1 minute of revealed, your character gains a spotlight shining on them.

After stacking 10 minutes of revealed, they gain their own personal swarm of paparazzi.

The paparazzi periodically blinds you. (Camera flashes)

Terrahero.9358:

TooBz.3065:

Arkanfel.8403:

Few things are quite so savory to me as thief tears.

There’s finally a hard counter to stealth and now they are going to lose their kitten. Oh, your core gameplay mechanic has a counter now? How bad that must feel. I main guardian—my core gameplay mechanic is boons and I have a low health pool. You know what counters my core gameplay? Boon stripping and conditions.

So welcome to the club of the rest of us. We meet in the gym after AA on Wednesdays. Bring donuts and paper plates.

It’s not really a “counter” so much as it is a removal of the “core gameplay mechanic” for 30 seconds.

It’s like creating a trap that strips all boons from guardians prevents the application of boons for 30 seconds, or a trap that prevents elementalists from swapping attunements, or one that prevents the use of utility skills.

But here’s the thing you, and other Thieves, are crying about. “ow hurrdurr, make traps counter other professions core mechanics!!” Why? There are already plenty of NON-traps that do.

(…)

And the same applies to other comperable mechanics. Everything ingame already has a counter, Stealth was litterally the last thing in this game that did not have a counter to it. And its rediculous it took this long.

There’s definitely a point in here! But how do you counter 30 seconds of revealed, in a build focused on a stealth 1 attack like backstab or sneak attack? Those skills have been essentially removed from your bar, for 30 seconds. Along with all of your On stealth / While stealthed traits.

I’m actually pretty fine with the possibility of being stuck visible for 30 seconds, but losing access to those tricks is pretty painful, and unless I’m missing something there’s no way to get them back.

Raf.1078:

TooBz.3065:

Arkanfel.8403:

Few things are quite so savory to me as thief tears.

There’s finally a hard counter to stealth and now they are going to lose their kitten. Oh, your core gameplay mechanic has a counter now? How bad that must feel. I main guardian—my core gameplay mechanic is boons and I have a low health pool. You know what counters my core gameplay? Boon stripping and conditions.

So welcome to the club of the rest of us. We meet in the gym after AA on Wednesdays. Bring donuts and paper plates.

It’s not really a “counter” so much as it is a removal of the “core gameplay mechanic” for 30 seconds.

It’s like creating a trap that strips all boons from guardians prevents the application of boons for 30 seconds, or a trap that prevents elementalists from swapping attunements, or one that prevents the use of utility skills.

Everyone else is already dealing with that. Necros strip all our boons and turn them into conditions. Its called “corrupt boon”. To make that equal to this lil trap….the trap would have to cripple, chill & weaken you too.

Thieves…..lol…..

Except Necros only get to use that once, at which point you can try and counterplay the conditions and reapply your boons. There is no way to remove revealed.

Personally I’m not concerned with people specifically countering a stealth thief with this. People have already pointed out the channel time, the cost, etc. So on that count, I’m fine with someone dropping a trap to finally stop that one thief that keeps stabbing them once then running away. What does worry me is that a thief caught in this trap as collateral damage in a group fight at a tower or something can be hobbled severely for 30 seconds, both in offensive and defensive capabilities.

I don’t think thieves should be immune, but I don’t think adding 30 seconds of revealed is perfect. If they could add something that kept the player visible, but still let them proc traits / skills related to stealth, I’d be a lot less concerned.

Vermintide.5023:

Hmm… Yeah I knew something didn’t sound right there. I will admit, I’m no expert, but if after 8 months the community STILL hasn’t found a way to make the thief useful OTHER than as a stealth assassin… Maybe they should be looking into that too?

What I’m saying is, people need to stop crying about nerfs to their class, but equally, I think it must be taken into consideration WHY people are so defensive. Stealth is a very contentious issue for the thief, and I guess it revolves around this question: Is stealth the only thing that makes a thief worthwhile?

This is my concern. It feels too much like you just can’t match the defensive power of stealth with anything else in a thief build. Up until now it hasn’t been too much of an issue, because 1) investing in a defensive option is good & necessary and 2) that defensive option (stealth) did work pretty well! But the natural adaptation to having that option removed from you (like what these traps can do) is to find another. And I’m just not sure there is one, yet. Maybe (hopefully!) there is a strong defense that a thief can invest in that isn’t stealth that is equally powerful with similar investment, but I’m very worried there just isn’t.

Welp. For all my previous posts, this is gonna hit thieves hard. Much harder than I thought at first.

I’m sure that it is based more on stopping things like Veil zergs, but this will hit a large percentage of thieves very hard, because of how much thieves are incentivized / forced to build into stealth. So if they hit a stealth trap, any build with stealth as a focal point (including Stealth 1 attacks) is going to be hobbled for 30 seconds.

It’s the 30 seconds that gets me. It just seems way too long to force a build out of a fight. I thought it would be area-based (Revealed while you’re in this 1200 radius area) or a lot shorter.

My condolences go out to others hit by this change, but I figured I should eat crow here.

Edit: I know stealth isn’t exclusive to thieves. I’ve argued that point with others recently, in fact! But I also held that thieves probably had the best access and benefits from using stealth. So it makes sense that a thief forum would be watching this particularly closely, since while they’re not the only ones affected, there’s a larger portion of thieves that will be affected than any other class.

Axiom.6490:

It was realy confusing, cause the devs said in their latest state of the game, taht the upcoming patch will focus on bugfixes (no balance changes, rennoko). Maybe there will be another “bigger” patch in a couple of weeks

I can’t say this was a direct quote, but I think they referred to it as “next month’s patch”. They tend to release a big patch at the end of every month: I expect that was the one they were referring to in SotG, and we’ll see it in a few weeks. This one was definitely more to push into the next phase of the Living Story.

Infernia.9847:

Maybe in the future the pics, spreadsheets, data, & video explaining how to reproduce the bug, will be the new norm for reporting.

I’m trying to decide if I should start trying to do this for the bug list. If I can find a way / process to quickly make videos I could start doing this for some of the bugs. Collecting and checking them (and a lot are overdue for checking) is work enough as it is though.

Teamkiller.4315:

My bet is on Larcenous strike.

To be honest, it’s deserved. It’s bugged so it’s much more powerful than it is supposed to be, at least according to patch notes.

I anticipate capped durations for the stolen boons.

Other possibilities include reducing it to one boon stolen, or increasing the initiative cost of Larcenous Strike to 2.

Lansfear.6390:

A fix for this is not to up the stack of bleeds, but let the critical hit, again traited, in the grandmaster slot, and ONLY for necros.

It seems like you missed something in this sentence?

As for how the PvP community would react? The same way it responds to most changes: poorly.

Daecollo.9578:

Flesh of the Master – Minions have 50% more health.
Minion Master – Minion skills recharge 20% faster.
Protection of the Horde – Gain +20 toughness for each minion under your control.

All need to be one trait, IMO.

I was trying to come up with something about minion traits a little while ago, tell me what you think of these:

Flesh of the Horde – Gain bonus toughness for each minion you control. Minions have 50% more health.
Reanimator – Minion skills recharge 20% faster. When a minion you control dies, summon a jagged horror.

Protection of the Horde is a minor I’ve enjoyed the idea of, but couldn’t let myself love because it was a minion-only trait on the minor slot. Since it’s focused on the defensive aspect of minions, I figured mixing it in with the bonus health trait made sense.

Reanimator would further push the goal of always having minions running around, even if they’re of poor quality. As I would hope is obvious, it wouldn’t apply to jagged horrors – once they drop dead, there’s nothing to be salvaged.

Jagged Horrors would probably need to have their hp cut / degen boosted though, since they’d have the potential to pop up much more frequently than they do now. For extra funsies, if the degen is high enough maybe starting with 5 seconds of retaliation could be justified? Also, they wouldn’t be allowed to proc Death Nova anymore, because you’d basically be getting a grandmaster trait twice as often.

Both of these would be major traits, leaving the adept and master minor slots in Death Magic open and waiting to be filled. Which may or may not have been the plan all along.

Skyro.3108:

Weakness if very underrated in pvp. Even if a player has 50% crit and 50% crit dmg, 1/3 of their damage direct damage is from non-crits, which means it reduces their DPS by 1/6 on average. Plus the reduces energy gain is pretty big as well.

But IMO both weakening shroud and mark of evasion should have no cooldowns. Anything that ups the synergy of DS traits to make the near death trait more appealing is a plus IMO, it will open up more viable builds. And why mark of evasion has a 10s cooldown I have no idea since necros can only dodge once every 10s anyway since we have no access to vigor.

In that scenario, weakness would reduce their over-all damage by 1/12th, or 8.3%, not 1/6th. (50% reduction to 50% of non-crits, so 25% * 1/3rd = 1/12) For reference, someone with 5% crit chance and no bonus crit damage takes around a 23% reduction in their output damage. The reduced endurance gain can be pretty big though, less dodges, less big spells (epidemic, for example) whiffed.

I have no idea what the logic is behind Mark of Evasion’s internal recharge. It’s also one of the few “on dodge” traits that triggers while out of combat.

I like a lot of Death Shroud, but I’ve got problems with it as well. I could go into more detail about why I feel this way but I’ll just spare you some time and give a quick list.

• Death Shroud makes itself out to be a Super Mode, but really isn’t.
  - #2 & 3 are excellent utility, but rarely feel powerful.
  - #1 is useful for a lot of things (900 range safety or might stacking), but is often a lower-damage choice than staying out of Death Shroud. And it becomes strictly Bad at under 50% life force.
  - You can be forced out of Death Shroud without your opponent really changing their strategy in any way (deal damage).
  - Unlike other defensive tools (evasion, stealth, blocking, protection), Death Shroud prevents the Necromancer from really recovering due to the way it prevents healing.
  - Generally, you don’t want to stay in Death Shroud for more than 4 seconds.

• Death Shroud doesn’t feel like it ties to the rest of the Necromancer well enough
  - Life force had the chance to be across the entire Necro, but is only on 1 weapon skill per weapon, (or none, in the case of offhand dagger) and a selection of utilities.
  - Most skills and traits that reference life force just generate more of it. Only two of them are empowered by its presence (Life Blast & 5% damage when above 50%) None of them really play with the idea of consuming it for other benefits than Death Shroud or short term-benefits from ‘over-generating’ life force.

As it is? I’m okay with a lot of the game play that DS provides. It guarantees a few useful skills on your bar, can soak some damage (especially in builds that generate life force well) and can give plenty of nice treats just for tapping in and out of it. I just think the concept should have gone so much further, but didn’t have time to recover from when the original DS As Downed State was removed.

Sunflowers.1729:

We have the best defense against other Thieves – stealth. Going invisible means no stealth #1 attacks can hit you unless they are very lucky.

I’m now imagining two dueling thieves, both running around invisible hammering the #1 key and backstabbing empty air, praying they will hit the other before the other hits them.

One Foot in the Grave would have to be an active ability of some sort. Constant degen while in combat is just too much trouble to choose as a trait.

Reversed Deterioration looks interesting. There’s a few classes that have traits that proc in response to conditions: having the Necromancer convert poison to regeneration (and possibly something like weakness -> might or chill -> swiftness) similarly to Well of Power could be an interesting trait.

Lust For Blood – this looks pretty interesting, a variation on things like “heal on applying a boon” or “heal on attack”. Maybe this could be a siphon though, instead of a heal.

Marked for Death is fine-ish, except that we already have like 4 Marks traits. I realize this would replace powerful marks, but I just mean that there’s already so much Stuff in those traits it’s getting into “Great with, useless without” territory.

Corpse Explosion is basically turning every minion into a Reaper’s Mark on death. To call it too strong is the easy way out, but I think it also just doesn’t quite fit. In my mind, Necromancers are lots of ‘soft’ control (chill, weakness) with a couple hard CCs, and this is just piling on the interrrupts.

Consume Essence is a buff for a skill that doesn’t need a buff. It’s also pretty specific, only applying to one of three healing skills, rather than an entire off-hand weapon or even to a death shroud skill that every Necromancer has with no investment. And honestly, I don’t find it that interesting; it’s just mimicking Contemplation of Purity.

Mikemad.2495:

OreoWolf.9564:

Its like giving warriors a mainhand warhorn.

I can just imagine, “Oh god here comes a warrior dual warhorn one-man-band build!”

:O

Bard class is real!!!

Mesmer builds that rely on stealth are as much a thing as thief builds that don’t utilize stealth.

Personally, I wish stealth was a wider-ranging mechanic. I also wish that thieves had more options instead of stealth, so that people would stop thinking the two were equivalent.

Yeah, part of the trick is that your entire group needs to rush/port across in about a 10 second window. If only one person makes it across, the 3v1 (Is there only 3? I can’t remember) will kill them anyways. But if your allies are there, it’s not too hard to rally you and win the fight.

Hiding behind the door is a good idea, what with their complete immobility. Fighting from behind the door I’m not so sure of, but a quick hiding spot to use your heal and such is valuable.

I don’t think Endure Pain works on environmental traps. :c

I’d wager a reason for this is % HP triggers. Certain events / states of bosses begin when they reach a certain percentage of their total health, and knowing exactly when makes bosses even more predictable.

There’s other fixes for that of course (% ranges so you don’t know the exact moment they’ll switch for example) but I’m sure there would be problems with that approach as well.

I’d kind of like a % indicator for my own health pool, while we’re at it. Traits that proc at 25% life can be kind of unwieldy to use, since it’s a bit harder to guess at where 25% is. (50% is pretty easy.)

Just tested this again in PvE and WvW. When I multiply the number shown as a degen tick by 40, my thief tends to have triple his base health when downed. My necromancer, by the same calculation, has an equivalent amount of health between downed state and regular.

Comparatively 1/3rd health of other classes.

When I pointed out those stun breaks before, I didn’t mean to imply a thief would be running all of them. What I want to imply is that if they’re running any of the first three (Infiltrator’s Strike → Shadow Return, Shadowstep → Shadow Return, Roll for Initiative) once they hit the stun breaker they’re already half-way out of the fight, and anything from blinding powder to infiltrator’s arrow will take them the rest of the way there.

I’m honestly of the opinion that a thief should be able to run from most anything, and should be exceptionally good at it. I’m also of the opinion they already are, so mission accomplished, I guess.

Sunflowers.1729:

With that being said, here are a few ways:
Stun the Thief – The most obvious way is to chain-stun him. Depending on which class you are (I don’t know a lot about Rangers) it may or may not be possible. Thieves don’t have a lot of stun breakers.

The rest of your post is great, but this bolded part is extremely untrue. Shadowstep, Roll for Initiative and Infiltrator’s Strike are all stunbreaks that also create distance between you and the thief. That first one actually breaks stun on two activations for its 50 second cooldown, and that last one is a weapon skill that costs 3 initiative for the strike, and 2 to go back and escape.

This doesn’t include Haste and Infiltrator’s Signet which both try and drive the thief into an aggressive counter-attack. Or any traits relating to receiving control conditions.

Basically, the thief has access to very good stun breaks for escaping a fight.

Wait, really? This happened to me the other day… On my thief.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

But how do you get past the tunnel with the ranged bandits, and all the spikes coming from the ground? Suppose you are playing a class that doesn’t have access to deflection or blocking? Those spikes instantly down you, and the enemies do a lot of damage. There’s no way to shut down the trap, and you can’t pull the enemies, not even with pull-skills. Running isn’t fast enough, the enemies and the spikes get you before you reach the other side. Some ranged attacks hit them, but they do far more damage than you. But they are out of range of ground targeted attacks.

Honestly, what is the intended strategy for this bit? I’ve completed it myself through trial and error, teleporting and speed boosts, but that was pretty dodgy every time I did it. (Plus I had to hide behind the door opening once I got to the other side, just so they wouldn’t instantly kill me) Is there something I’m missing here?

This hallway is a problem, in my opinion. Especially because the trap activation pattern looks like you might be able to run through the hall with swiftness if you time it right, but you often can’t. And if someone gets downed in the spikes, trying to save them is Dying Pointlessly. (Plus the three mobs at the end tend to see you coming and drop you before you get there…)

The best solution I’ve got are long-range teleport or invulnerabilty skills. Your group sacrifices 1 utility each and makes a coordinated dash from about half-way through the spiked area (you can usually travel that far quite safely.) Whoever is leading the charge will optimally also have a way to deal with the first two shots / bombs from the mobs at the end of the hall.

Classes that I know can do something like this: (Range in brackets)
Guardian – Judge’s Intervention (1200)
Mesmer – Blink (900, 1200 if traited. A mesmer can also Portal their entire group across!)
Necromancer – Flesh Wurm / Necrotic Traversal (1200) if you have fast fingers or
– Dark Path (900)
Elementalist – Lightning Flash (900)
– Ride the Lightning (Might work. I’m pretty sure the traps can still hit you, but you’ll be moving fast enough to make the window?)
Thief – Steal (900, 1200 if traited.)
– Infiltrator’s Arrow (900)
– Shadowstep (1200)

Which leaves Rangers, Warriors and Engineers. I honestly don’t know if they have options there or not. What really irks me is, even after some people in your group make it to the end of the hall, they can’t deactivate the traps.

Mordicon.4530:

Ascalonian Catacombs path 2

So now you have killed anything fun about this path, now you have made the ghost eater AOE SO hard and do a DD that does so much damage I don’t care what kind of group you have mixed with you your going fail

So they fixed it??

This is exactly how I remember the Ghost Eater, when it wasn’t glitched and staring off into space ignoring the players. Ghost pools tended to stack and down people in seconds, and that hepta-vapor-blade was no slouch either. That it’s actually being active & a threat now is great news.

Vargamonth.2047:

Glitches on bosses, like safe spots, are much more annoying than skipping to me.
I stopped doing CM with all the mountain climbing, I stopped doing TA with the safe spots on wurm and final boss, I stopped doing Arah P3 with the safe spots on the first two bosses … I pretty much stopped running dungeons with PUGs because of how many encounters were glitched/exploited.
For someone that runs dungeons just for fun, dungeons consisting on a sequence of skips and exploits is extremely depressing and I’m really worried on how long is taking to shutdown those things.

Seconding this sentiment. While I’m 50/50 on skipping mobs (Mostly I’m against it because people do it to ‘save time’ even when the group is not actually capable of creating a safe skipping run, and decides Every Man For Themselves is a legit group tactic that will totally work on the fifth attempt) I am 100% against the way bosses are trivialized. I can’t really blame the players for this: taking the easy / safe route makes sense, even if it is a slightly slower, boring choice. This is especially true because the alternative can be very difficult and no faster. Plus, if it requires too many attempts it often becomes even less fun.

What I’m trying to get at is, if doing a dungeon the ‘right’ way is difficult and painful, then maybe I don’t want to be right and will settle for just being wrong and bored.

Skyro.3108:

There seems to be some weird interaction with transformation skills (i.e. Plague Form) and weapon swap sigils. Exiting transformation skills triggers weapon swap sigils, but sometimes it bugs them out so that they no longer work at all until you load into a new map or you de-equip and re-equip your weapons.

The key word there is “sometimes.” Testing on the dummies in the mists I cannot seem to reproduce the bug, but it happens quite often during the course of actual game play. The reason I believe it has something to do with Plague Form (and more specifically, transformation skills) is that I have no issues with my sigils of geomancy not working when I run Flesh Golem.

I only sPvP however, I do not know if this is an issue in PvE/WvW.

… Okay. Someone else mentioned something very similar to this before, and at the time I dismissed it as a conflict with their bleed on crit sigil. So first of all: what other sigils are you using in your weapons? Because if you’re getting the issue without other sigil interference, then we’re on to something.

Stand The Wall.6987:

when i am immobilized and try to pop putrid mark immediately, the skill will highlight but not trigger. is this happening to anyone else? also my death shroud fear is missing, so im guessing this attack behaves as a projectile? would be nice if it didnt as i often rely on that to get some pressure off me.

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘highlight’ but not trigger. As in you get the targeting reticule but putrid mark won’t allow itself to be placed?

I think you may get a ‘Miss’ message if you try and Fear a target that’s in an evasion frame (dodging, Mesmer Distortion, certain attacks) besides the usual blind / no target selected stuff. Otherwise though, I thought it acted like a projectile in the same way scepter auto attacks did.

Dasorine.1964:

stealth attacks are a class mechanic,

Yes.

stealth is the only way to access that mechanic,

Yes.

therefore stealth is utilized as part of the class mechanic

Yes.

thus its a class mechanic,

No.

not exclusive

Kind of a critical point there.

but still a core part of the class

Yes.

just like boons aren’t exclusive to guardians but are still a core mechanic to them.

Core, but still not a class profession mechanic.

I’m not arguing stealth is unimportant to thieves. All I’m saying is, it is not their profession mechanic. So equating it to attunement swapping is fallacious.

Kind of done ‘arguing’ this point.

Edit: As for the actual thread -

OP does not understand that even if you would build your thief dodge specced, there is no good reason to leave stealth out. It’s best to bring both.

This is my concern about the thief right now. Your defensive options are rather limited unless you’re using stealth. You don’t have to be 100% stealth, but I’m not sure a thief can keep up a strong defense without it, no matter what they build.

I only prefer Well of Corruption if I’m trying to be based on wells anyways, or if I’m against enemies that do AoE boon application. The dredge are probably the #1 time to switch in well of corruption, since their gong skill can be flipped to change the difficulty of the fight so drastically.

Most other times, corrupt boon is just as good if not better.

Edit: The other time well of corruption could do well is if you’re against someone who keeps reapplying one particular boon, like, say, regeneration. Corrupt boon will turn that into one (short) stack of poison that’s fairly easily cleansed and then they restart the regen train. Well of corruption will keep stacking / reapplying the poison after a cleanse unless they stop getting regeneration, something they may not be able to control if traits are involved.

Daecollo.9578:

I mean, people were talking “Why all the boon management” Mostly because of things like AOE retaliation.

Oh, I see. I think Well of Corruption alone would be more than excellent punishment for that (assuming it can get to the retaliation, and not just get stuck on a reapplied regeneration or something…) but I am a sucker for confusion.

Really your Well of Suffering would just give an extremely long stack of Retaliation on yourself, which isn’t all that special in my opinion.

Alright really taking a break now later.

Daecollo.9578:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/This-video-is-disheartening/first

Necromancers deserve good utility like other classes have, they are a joke for support compared to most classes. Necromancers need to be Feared.

Yes, it would have great boon denial, but many classes can just shove on boons as soon as you remove them and keep up there rotation.

AOE RETALIATION

With the ability to simply move out of the well, your not left with much choice.

It gives the Necromancer the ability to take things back!

Your delusions of grandeur (megalomania?) are showing.

For one thing, I still regard what you linked as a joke of a thread, crying out for one profession to be made more like another. Because profession identity is just terrible, I guess?

Necromancers could stand to get slightly better support capabilities: I don’t think making all wells be permanent uptime is the way to do it. Maybe if you wanted to increase the proportional uptime of Well of Power and Well of Blood alone?

Otherwise, I think there’s changes to be made for other Necro skills, like Plague Signet, to encourage group support. The game needs more clear ways to support other players besides healing and boons. Allied condition transfer could be one of them. As it is AoE condition cleansing is a bit too strong / easy, which is probably pushing the Necro out of that role more than anything, but a few more skills to facilitate that role would do wonders as well.

Also AoE Retaliation out of nowhere, woah. Honestly I’d like the Necromancer to have slightly stronger self-based retaliation (It’s already quite good, probably on par with Guardians), but I want them to limit retaliation availability a little further so that they can boost its damage. (I recall hearing a few dev comments about how they want it to be more ‘reactive’ rather than ‘keep this up all the time’.)
Allied retaliation can stick with the Mesmers and the Guardians, in my opinion.

Keeping allies in wells is part of the job, either for you or your team. Immobilize, chill, stuns, even cripple can help. There’s a lot of counter-play on both sides there, which strikes me as a good thing.

Heh, I think I’m more just talking about whatever I want now than focusing on the thread. I should probably stop for a bit.

Daecollo.9578:

I nerfed the protection to 1s, and “Longer Durations” is 5s from 10s.
The two wells both get rid of boons, but both different ways. They both destroy bunkers, however one of them is up a lot faster. One of them is for when you need to bunker yourself while fighting a bunker, the other is when you need to destroy a bunker.

The 1s protection / pulse seems more fitting, even to the current wells now that I think about it. (Current trait provides 3s but the freedom to leave after, new version would give 5-6s of it, which is more, but requires the player to stay within the area) Edit- Well of Blood lasts 10 seconds… It would probably have to be an exception and not apply protection for the full duration or something.

I still don’t think you should add longer durations as a trait if you’re going to make the base duration be 10s. You’re creeping up over the 50% uptime ratio, and that will require the wells to be less directly impactful to make up for their extended presence, rather than their current impact for a shorter duration.

I see the differences between the two skills, but they’re still far too similar in my opinion. And giving the option of stacking two skills to deny boons in an AoE with over 80% uptime is too much, and won’t go away while you can simultaneously have two skills that do such a similar thing.

Edit:

My Idea for wells is to make them three things.

Aggressive!
Keeps Pressure!
Support Support Support!

The idea is to make a Wellomancer “ALWAYS” able to have atleast 2 wells up at any given time, this just makes them amazing for applying pressure as well as group support.

I just straight up don’t agree with the idea of having 2 wells up constantly. Even a guaranteed 1 well at all times just seems iffy: I love the way that wells can be strategic turnarounds, and making them have that long of a lifetime means that would have to change.

Basically, I can’t justify allowing them to be aggressive and constant pressure, and I’d rather take the aggressive they currently are. I just think it’s more fun.

I sort of resent the Well of Suffering change, since I like the straightforward “I do damage” nature of the current WoS. It also creates a conflict of purpose with Well of Corruption.

I suspect dropping the recharges to 30 seconds, increasing the duration to 10, and including a trait that allows those numbers to be further augmented (24s recharge, 12s duration at least) is too much. As it is, wells are very much about making a pivotal moment in play, rather than having high uptime on their effects. That’s a piece of their design I’d like to keep.

I like Well of Blood as a water field. It would help secure Well of Blood’s place as a group support heal, much like the Ranger’s Healing Spring.

I really like the change to Ritual of Protection. It rewards allies keeping the fight inside your wells, or at least staying in the wells themselves. With your new durations it would be overpowered (20 seconds of protection applied over 10 seconds, per well is 100% uptime with any two wells) but the idea of it pulsing protection for allies instead of a one-shot application is great.

Vampiric Rituals now draining endurance for the Necro just makes me think “Oh. That’s what Necromancers should do in their endurance / dodge trait line” and has huge potential.

Crawling through the forum and organizing all of that sounds like the fifth circle of hell.

I mean do you remember this thread? It is seventy two pages long.

Skyro.3108:

@Softspoken

I tested Reaper’s Protection on the mid node on Legacy. The radius I eyeballed it to be roughly twice the size of the gtAoE marker of 240 radius skills, which is why I said it is roughly 480. I do know for a fact it is between 240 and 600 radius however.

Okay. I’ll admit I don’t have much personal experience trying to measure its range, so I’ll split the difference between 360 and 480 and from now on just tell people it’s around 420 (Fear noobs erry day) radius or so, probably bigger.

Auesis.7301:

Softspoken.2410:

Miserymachine.7512:

Stealth is a class mechanic. To nerf it and make it harder to access would be like having them put a trap that stops Elementalists from switching attunements.

No it’s not. It really, really isn’t. Thief has the best access to and rewards from stealth, but they aren’t the only ones that can use it, so it’s not a profession mechanic. Mesmers spring to mind immediately, but did you know Engineers can stealth without assistance too?

The thief’s profession mechanics are initiative and steal.

Note its emphasis here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/thief/

It’s as close to a profession mechanic as something can get without being exclusive. There’s an entire trait line for it, an entire set of skills that benefit from it, a plethora of skills and traits that grant it (far more than any other profession) and it features on the profession’s official page. It’s close enough.

It is very strongly emphasized in the thief’s kit. In fact, I’d say the thief has the best access to and rewards from stealth.

But that doesn’t make it the profession mechanic any more than minions are the necromancer mechanic. Frankly I think thief design needs to get over that, and provide better ways to build thieves at the expense of stealth.

Edit:

They don’t just have the “best” access and benefits from stealth, which almost implies that there is some sort of contest at all. The integration, access and benefits are LEAGUES beyond any of the professions, not even coming close.

Probably! That still doesn’t make it the profession mechanic, or even profession specific, any more than confusion and mesmers.