Guild Wars 2

WoW set the trend for gear treadmills. It isn’t the best method nor the most desirable method to increase the longevity of a game. Saying that we need it to prevent stagnation is just laziness.

Start associating cost (gear grinds) with desirable activities (PvP, dungeons, etc.) and you’ll see a rapid decline in population. The casuals will move on, the WoW players are fickle, and the diehards will feel betrayed.

Generally I see people using 6 undead runes or 3affliction/3krait runes.

Death shroud mastery, herobrine, whatever you want to call it the OP has it.

Ascii.9726:

Terok.7315:

This is actually wonderful news. It’s about time we necros are able to be on equal footing, stat wise, with the other professions.

Other classes can use these too you know its an set buff for everyone not just Necromancers, if anything pistol Thiefs & Engineers will love this more.

I was being cynical, but I really am happy about this.

Considering both the dynamic complexities involved with A.I. and the skeleton crew they have working on fixes for all the professions, it wouldn’t surprise me if we didn’t see any A.I. improvements for months or even years.

This is actually wonderful news. It’s about time we necros are able to be on equal footing, stat wise, with the other professions.

Ascii.9726:

As for the skills projectile traveling faster, it does feel/ look like it is but i think the new FoV and being more zoomed out might have something to do with it.

Yea, I think that’s about right. Any perception of increased speed is probably a placebo effect due to lingering hope and more likely, the new FOV.

Do you mean a build centered around the use of staffs auto-attack (necrotic grasp)? If so, staff is generally seen and used as a utility weapon. As much as I would love for it to be a primary damage weapon, it is not. It applies and removes conditions. The auto-attack is basically a glorified battery for life force. Conditionmancers can get away with using it for long periods of time due to MoB’s spammability. Aside from that, it’s a backup.

I’ve been waiting for this change since beta. Finally, I can now create an effective and competitively viable build for my engineer. Now excuse me while I go and swallow the stuff under the sink.

I stay in the higher level zones for the karma and loot. Properly balance a way that entices me to return to lower level regions with that in mind and the problem is solved.

samkong.2719:
I’m not trying to be confrontational, but why is it obviously not intended? Obviously until the devs come out and flat out make a statement on it we cant be for sure either way, but I’m curious as to why you think it’s not intended.

If this is really happening. it seems unintended that a minuscule amount of life force is able to shield such a high amount of damage without it bleeding over into the necromancers actual health pool. Especially considering the ease of getting the little amount of LF required. Just doesn’t seem balanced…

Gah, I had trouble writing that last sentence considering what the OP plays.

Edit: You know what? The hell do I know. The devs said we are suppose to be the “attrition based” class, right?

It’s obviously not intended, and I hope it’s milked for everything it’s worth until the developers notice it. Every dog has their day, right?

Engineers, Guardians, Thieves and Elementalists (i think) don’t get a pet UI either. If the AI was working, it wouldn’t be an issue. As long as pets keep up with target switching, we don’t really need a UI.

JonPeters

It does not give a free res. These guys can’t rally you. Also they die in about 11 seconds, not 2 seconds. I would like them to have a bit more survivable, but the real problem is obviously them aggroing. Necro minions are supposed to aggro based on what you attack only, so if this particular minion is not following that rule that is the real problem. We are currently investigating it and will make any changes we think are necessary.

Perhaps I’m reading into things, but the way you worded this post makes me think you don’t know that every last minion necro has is currently broken. You do know that minions only sometimes engage what the necromancer is attacking, right? Like they do NOT work most of the time, right?

I’m not trying to be snarky, I’m seriously worried you didn’t realize this.

I was ecstatic at first as I thought this was a stealth fix to the zoom, was very sad to learn it was just a dungeon bug. I get that some areas (Inquisition comes to mind) require camera distance limitations — but at least let us use a proper zoom distance for general play.

Situational awareness was through the roof, gonna be hard leaving it behind.

Anet,

You did a fantastic job with this event. I’ve never seen anything of this scale before in a week long holiday event. The Inquisition is probably the most fun I’ve had in PvP in a long, long time. My heart races as I navigate the labyrinth trying to outwit my pursuers. I had a lot of fun, leaping to my death, fighting the Mad King. All this candy corn is going to make me rich after the event, and I’m looking forward to crafting my exotic Halloween staff within the coming months.

There’s a lot of negativism out there from the lottery that’s polluting people’s perception of the event, don’t let that bother you (and be careful with lotteries in the future, lol)! I can’t think of another game that’s had this much content as a permanent addition to the game, much less a temporary event.

Despite how miserable I am over different aspects of the game (necromancer, WvW, culling, overpowered classes, etc..), I didn’t let it dilute the fun I had. You deserve all the praise you get.

GJ! Can’t wait for Christmas and this mysterious November patch!

P.S. There’s a special place in hades for the developers that made the clocktower! :P

XXVI Red.5718:

I agree. Personally, as I just stated in a post not 5 seconds ago, I do not understand how arenanet is making balance calls and adjusting classes mechanics when they haven’t seen a proper match up against each other with “full working, non bugged, appropriate class mechanics.” How do you compare utilities,traits, skills when certain ones are broken and others are not?

Yeah, I’ve been wondering the same thing. It does no good to buff and nerf all these classes when you haven’t even seen what they’re capable of.

The entire NBC soundtrack is appropriate, Levian. Never cared for any of the covers though.

Little geeky, but come on! It’s perfect for WvW when running with a zerg. :P

Summoning 50 flesh wurms is intended, but only once you’ve mastered DS.

Can’t have reward without risk, if anything I think the cost should go up for armor repairs.

I have two geared level 80’s, working on a third. I honestly can’t understand the negativity towards end-game. I’m usually overwhelmed by the amount of dungeons, character customization, exploration and the plethora of non-combat activities to do. I can see myself playing this game at least for the next year exclusively — only occasionally making time for minecraft.

I will say, however, that WvW needs fixing. At least the matching system and server transfers. Most PvP I’ve seen on Blackgate this week in WvW was from costume brawls.

Having an event of this scale after two months of release is simply amazing and it alone deserves praise. People are upset about the lottery and are letting it pollute their perception of the entire event.

It’s a shame, really. I’ve been having a blast. You get all new non-combat activities that are permanent additions to the game, new recipes for crafters, new life breathed into starter areas and some pretty fun event non-combat activities. To top it all off everyone gets a souvenir to take home, the book backpack.

Equipping the axe or minion utilities will now correctly apply a dunce hat to the necromancer to properly publicly shame the player for not using the scepter/dagger combination.

To properly balance the awesome power of death shroud, all classes now have access to it.

The Jon Peters tutorial has been removed from necromancers, and given to all other classes. This is being done to properly inform other classes about their new ability and to remain consistent with our information blackout towards the necromancer community.

Implemented various bugs fixes that caused even more severe problems with the necromancer class.

Removed necromancer as a class option at character creation. Our meta data shows that some players can’t take a hint. All current necromancers will be unaffected and continuously ignored.

Necromancers have been barred from the Halloween event. Again, this is in line with our commitment to troll the necromancer community

Additional necromancer bug fixes will be delayed until after the next patch. We’re currently bug fixing and testing the new flight ability being added to the guardian and warrior classes.

@Lettucemode

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_mesmer_skills

What’s all this talk about three builds? Since when did we get a third viable build?

The problem with necromancer is that another class can do it better. Whether it’s conditions or (and especially) direct damage — it’s always a better choice to take class X over necromancer. This has been the problem since the get-go and it remains such.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Terok.7315:

Is anyone else offended at the blatant favoritism that warrior and guardian are receiving? Two classes that simply don’t merit any substantial buffs or fix focus? I’m fine with being patient, but the amount of resources and time they devote to buffing classes that don’t need it instead of buffing and focusing on the classes that do is getting pretty irritating.

Actually, this has gotten rather obnoxious.

Guardians were also nerfed, and one of their current buffs was to compensate for a harsh nerf in a previous patch.

The harsh nerf in the previous patch didn’t make a dent in my guardian GS/retaliation build. =/ In fact, it was really negligible.

Is anyone else offended at the blatant favoritism that warrior and guardian are receiving? Two classes that simply don’t merit any substantial buffs or fix focus? I’m fine with being patient, but the amount of resources and time they devote to buffing classes that don’t need it instead of buffing and focusing on the classes that do is getting pretty irritating.

Actually, this has gotten rather obnoxious.

This is simply adorable. Now we’re directly helping our enemies.

If a GM randomly flew through the maps once in a while, 80% of the bot problem would be gone. It’s not like the bots are hard to detect or farming in some remote location.

Necromancer is the epitome of the phrase, “pigeon-holed”. Every builds uses staff because it offers the best utility (albeit, on long CD’s), every build also uses scepter/dagger for conditions unless you’re really trying to convince yourself that power builds are any good.

There was that one naked dancing ET guy at their spawn, he was kind of fun to play with. But after an hour and a half of that I just went to bed.

I know you guys are just letting off some steam with the “you have more” arguments, but it really goes deeper than that. TC are easy kills, and FA zergs can be taken down with half their size.

As for wasting resources, why has no one mentioned our 4 golem suicide on the Greenlake door last night? I want recognition for that 4 gold down the drain! :P

@ Rizach

Blind is pretty weak, especially when people figure out that you can just auto-attack nothingness to remove it. This isn’t even a shot at WoD, but the condition in general.

Schnitter.9857:

@Terok
The damage of Whirlwing Wrath is really good, but is very easy to avoid. What probably can most annoy you is the retaliation guardian if you dont remove it.

LT is easily avoidable as well.

BionitechBeta.5268:

Is it all really based on personal preference? Here I am all focused on building end-game gear to maximize my condition damage, and yet I have never attempted to focus on either the minion or power builds.

How different is the damage? Do power builds offer just raw burst damage in comparison to sustained damage over time that conditions offer?

Which do you prefer?

Condition builds inherently offer better survivability and damage application even before considering numbers and abilities. It applies all its damage at range and keeps the pressure on the enemy even after you disengage the fight. Power builds present you with more risk and very little reward — even glass cannon specs are woefully underwhelming. Minions are a bit of an enigma right now. Because the AI is completely broken, not many people have been able to really nail down all the pros and cons — simply because they only work about 15% of the time.

Even if they did work, I have a sneaking suspicion that conditions will end up producing higher dps with a minion build.

Power necro is completely viable. the survivability and dmg that DS offers is very good, and the AOE dmg you can do id say is even op

Guardian Greatsword:
Whirling Wrath
Damage: (9x) 2,547
Range: 600
CD: 10 (8 sec traited)
Cast time: 3/4
Spits our projectiles and allows movement while the skill is in use.

Death shroud
Life Transfer
Damage: (9x) 1,818
Range: 600
CD: 34 second traited
Cast time: 3 1/2 seconds
Spits out projectiles and allows movement while skill is in use.

It’s not OP. Forgetting other classes with similar abilities, it’s not even comparable to conditionmancer.

Edit: I should note that these numbers are based on power specs, with the necromancer having about 100 more power than the guardian (whose spec’d more for tank/virtues).

The actual karma you get displays on the character, not on the reward popup at the end of an event.

I encourage mocking emotes, they foster hatred and vengeance which creates community and great fights.

Don’t die.

A big part of raiding is morale damage, don’t give them any confidence boosters with your death. Be prepared to run away and use every dirty trick in the book.

Kayotik.5790

You can view them all in 3d here

Deathwish has an incorrect model on that site.

Elronor.4571:

I dont really wanna get all exotic gear and then just realise that a ranger/warrior seems to outdps me in both AoE, bleeds and burst damage…

We quite literally do not have burst, we excel at condition micromanagement (but not necessarily application) and I’m of the opinion that we have the widest selection of area effect abilities (that deal more in sustained and condition damage).

@terok

Thieves have power/condition/mobile/precision builds
Warriors have power/condition/precision builds
mesmer have power/condition/phantasm builds
Eles don’t have much of a choice to go toughness and still be glass cannon sorta
which is condiiton/power. They still lack options
necro has conditon/power but power isn’t to good and condition is the only remotely decent build. we lack options
Rangers have power/condition

Rangers seem fairly pigeon-holed into using the crossbow.

Irregardless, whether we are the most broken class or not still leaves the matter of other pressing issues amongst the different classes. I agree that necromancer has it’s problems, I’m of the opinion that if you’re interested in competitive play there are better classes to choose from than ours.

But I think my point still stands, whether we warrant special attention or not — the developers are most likely not going to make sweeping changes to our class in a single patch. It’s going to be slow, painful and heavily scrutinized by those in charge of balance.

I’ve put more hours into this game than I did Skyrim, so it’s been worth the purchase price. The game DID live up to its hype as far as being refreshing. Very little about this game is recycled designs choices we’ve seen for the last decade.

Love it or hate it, GW2 has become the industry changer it wanted to be.

AOE mitigation is something that’s absolutely needed for a minion master build. I don’t even care of its not innate, but some sort of minor/major trait.

Thresher.3049:

We bagged one of them dev varmits the other day, had to chase him around half the map and murder a few clueless zerglings along the way, but we got him eventually!

Slightly more seriously though guys, I know all too well how bugged, busted and pootacular this career is, but at least the people making it have the decency to play it (even if the above case was our nemesis, the guardian) and they are fixing it. Fairly much no other MMO I’ve played in the last 10-12 years or so seemed to really invest much interest in the community past selling the box and collecting the subs, so I will give them credit for that.

Now I have more reason to hate Storm bluff. :P

Anyway, I’m with my fellow Beastgater. Given enough time and the class will get it’s due. I suspect the only reason power builds haven’t been bufffed yet is because most classes are in our same situation. Having a ton of bugs and only a single competitive builds. The only classes exempt from these problems are warriors and thieves (Not sure whether or not thieves have any bugs, don’t really care tbh). They can’t solely focus on us and I’ll guarantee you that we’ll never see a single patch with sweeping changes/fixes. They’re gonna take it slow and monitor the results.

It sucks, but guardian makes an enjoyable alt for the time being (and engineer if your looking for a little complexity).

Hype.9361:

There is almost no resistance and extremely low player skill on those two servers.

I’m thinking you equate player skill with massive numbers rampaging across all time zones. I have far more respect for the individual skill of Janthir enemies than I do Storm.

Thieves.

Sucks being killed by a player you know is terrible.

Greatsword is still fine for guardian, the nerf just messed with some builds a little bit. The only thing guardians have a right to complain about is the scepter.

I think the popularity of the thief class, the amount of complaints against it, and our collective experience with “2 second deaths” at the very least tells us that there IS a problem with thief.

And all the videos of various classes being one-shotted consistently, that might be an indication of a problem. Course, we do have this dodge mechanic.

=/

Seriously, no idea.

Let me start out by saying that I main a Necromancer, a profession that supposedly has a high-skill cap (it really doesn’t, you just need to get use to it). I like to think I’m fairly good with that profession, despite it’s many flaws I can still bring the hurt to cheesy-classes like thief (Well, the really bad thieves). Now logic dictates that if I’m playing the highest skill cap class, I should be able to tackle a lowly meat-head flamethrowing class like engineer.

Well, the truth is that engineer has to be the single most complicated class in the game to me. The micromanaging of weapon kits, rifle skills, tool-belt skills, utilities, elites and basic dodging/situational awareness makes this class a headache to get good with. I’m not saying it’s bad, per se (I’m sure many of you engineers enjoy this level of complexity) — just that it’s difficult to get a grasp of.

A good example are grenade/bomb kit specs. Forgetting that it’s like a game of chess anticipating the movement of your enemy, the swapping of kits doesn’t help the formation of muscle memory. My eye’s are more on my skill bar than they are on the actual fight — and even then I’m making mistakes. I did try turrets for a bit to make up for my lack of skill, but they seem pretty useless with the exception of the CC turret.

My latest two builds after blowing the dust off my level 30 engineer was an elixir condition build and a rifle power/crit build. The elixir gun doesn’t seem to do conditions all that well and the rifle doesn’t seem to have many skills that support a power/crit build. I really want to enjoy this class, but I’m not sure where the water is to get my feet wet. Everything I try ends with me not putting out any real damage and a thief/warrior/guardian eating me for breakfast.

TL:DR
I’m a bad, with no sense of how this class works. I’m seeking advice on how to play it (preferably with nades as I intend it to be a WvW class).

Also, I have great respect for all you engineers out there. This isn’t an easy class to play, and I’ve taken a whipping more than a few times by engineers in SPvP. I’d much rather die by your hands than some no-skill thief.