Here’s a how the bare-bones skills would look like:
Life Blast loses the ability to deal more damage with more Life Force. This is returned with the Grandmaster Soul Reaping minor trait, Strength of Undeath. A Master Curses minor trait, let’s call it Corrupting Blast (and let’s also move Furious Demise, which is good but unfit for Curses, to something like Blood or Spite), grants this ability a 1 second Poison. An Adept trait in Death called Lifeward (let’s pretend Reanimator doesn’t exist) could grant 400 toughness while casting Life Blast. Master Blood trait could be Life Gift, and could give 1s regen to allies it flies through.
Dark Path is kind of tricky. I would like to remove the teleport and make the conditions on-target only, with a bleeding reduced to two stacks instead of three, but the ability is called Dark Path. Not much of a path if you stand still, is it? If I could ignore the name for now, I’d have an Adept Spite trait return the teleport functionality, an Adept Curses trait to make both the chill and bleeding AoE and a Master Death trait that would immobilize the target for 1 second. A Grandmaster Spite minor could inflict 10 stacks of vulnerability on the target for 5 seconds.
Doom cooldown would be increased to 30 seconds, and a Master Soul Reaping minor trait would bring this back down to 20 seconds. A Grandmaster Curses trait, Frozen With Fear, would inflict a two-second chill on the target, while an Adept Soul Reaping trait could make the fear (and only the fear) have a small radius around the target, ~200 or so.
Life Transfer wouldn’t be changed much. 60 second cooldown by default, reduced to 40 by an Adept Blood trait. A Grandmaster Blood minor trait could make this skill heal your actual health bar with each tick for each enemy it hits, but not by much; two targets would be needed to match the healing of Life Siphon. Spite could have a Master minor trait that makes each tick on each enemy apply 1 stack of vulnerability for 6 seconds.
Death Shroud itself would have a single change through the traits; the Death Grandmaster minor trait would cause the caster to grant 1s of regeneration to all of his minions every second while in Death Shroud.
The themes should, I think, be quite clear:
Spite likes to be up in your face with pokey stabby slashy death, teleport and vulnerability help with that.
Curses apply boatloads of conditions to many targets, so area effects, poison and chilled conditions help here.
Death is about minions and tanking. Often combined with Spite for up close and personal stabby slash builds.
Blood revolves around healing, both yourself and your allies. More of both.
Souls seem to have a fear vibe, and as the current Death Shroud upgrade line, it makes sense that it would increase the main DS skill dramatically.
You will notice that I did not touch the underwater Death Shroud at all. That is because of two reasons; it’s easy to extrapolate what the traits I’ve mentioned would do to the underwater DS skills, and I think the underwater DS skills themselves need some tweaking themselves.
So there, that is step one towards making the Necromancer awesome. Step two is tidying up the trait lines, making sure they thematically make sense, and then just fixing the bugs.
In this thread I shall explain why I think the Death Shroud mechanic is not working as it should, and why the Necromancer is not balanced properly partly because of this.
The title is “I never asked for this” because, as Adam Jensen said, he was given something powerful that he never asked for, and was then forced to use it or die. With Death Shroud, we were given something powerful, but also something clunky, and not always applicable, and we paid for it in all the other aspects of our class. Death Shroud, the trait lines and the minor and major traits are at fault here.
Let’s begin by analyzing the Death Shroud abilities one by one, starting with Life Blast.
Life Blast deals great power damage. It can pierce, apply vulnerability and give you might. What happens when you’re running something other than a power/precision/critical damage build? The ability does no damage, is slow to cast, and you maybe use it as a source of might for your conditions, or for stacking more vulnerability for your minions. Sadly, the adept major trait that increases your minion damage is not in the same line as the adept major trait that applies vulnerability, and neither of those is in the trait line that is all about enhancing your minions.
Dark Path has good sides and bad sides. It inflict bleeding and chilled, both are great for condition centric builds. It also teleports the caster to the target’s face, which is not always a good thing. As a condition necro, you have no idea why you would like to be in melee range, unless you’re about to activate Plague. You can use it in rare circumstances as an escape, but that’s iffy. This is great only for a dagger build and chasing people down in WvW.
Doom is nice. It’s an instant cast ranged fear. The duration sucks, but the cooldown is low, so you can use it often as an interrupt when you really need to. The ability can be somewhat upgraded, but not by much, and it costs valuable traits. It can fit in any build, really.
Life Transfer is the Death Shroud Panic Mode Button. If you have a good power value, it can deal enough damage and increase your life force by enough so that you can successfully turn the fight in your favor. Without power, you just buy time to run away while doing some minor damage to chasers. It can be traited to heal nearby allies, and that trait is beautiful.
OK, so now we know the basics of the Death Shroud skill bar. It is easy to notice that any build will, at most, benefit from two of the skills, mostly because it’s hard to not be able to take advantage of Doom alone. The abilities are not weak, they’re just… disjoined. Kind of like the trait lines and the minor and major traits; I think we can all agree that most of our minor traits are either weak or don’t quite fit. So here’s my big idea: remove most of the unwanted aspects of Death Shroud, reduce the skills to bare bones, and then give us minor traits in suitable lines that give some useability to the skills. That way we don’t pay for what we don’t want, but don’t have to spend valuable major traits to get more out of what we already paid for.
Axe is horrible.
Now with that out of the way, axe + focus and staff are “great” for a minion master, you get both regen skills and both vulnerability skills in one package.
Lawl, now THAT is a noob. Going from Ranger to Necro? Really?
You have access to a five-second AoE fear with a 1200 radius, and the cooldown on it is only ten seconds! You just need to make use of your Death Shroud like a pro.
Tooltips only include the highest bonus.
Not trying to insult anyone, or call anyone out, but I would like to make an observation about the forums and their moderation: It isn’t nice to punish people when they possess the mental faculties required to spot a troll, and the benevolence to warn others.
A: In no way at all.
Two-handed weapons have the same stats as a one-handed weapon + offhand, but they have only one upgrade slot. This kinda bothers me a little bit.
It’s also kinda daft that a one-handed weapon or an offhand costs the same as a two-handed weapon. And no these two do NOT cancel each other out, because PvP.
So it’s OK for every other class to play several roles, but necro MUST be a one-trick pony with a lame trick?
Instead of targetable wells, we should get wells that are stuck to the caster.
I’ve only been playing for hardly a week but here’s the way I can see it having played plenty of Necro and read most of this thread…. bla bla…
So EVERY other class gets to have diverse builds, several playstyles, multiple roles, but the Necromancer is left in the dust with just one build, and that one role is done better by Engineers and Mesmers consistently?
It works, but the numbers are rofltastic. Thirty HP/S with a dagger. Yeah. Impressive.
It’s not hard to realize how that is not the problem here. In the other class forums, if someone says “I think this class is UP and broken and unplayable”, a maximum of 40% of the posts will agree witht he OP, and at least half of those will be the OP bumping his topic and defending his argument.
On the necro board? 97% agree we’re broken.
Hell, necro is the ONLY CLASS that has NO “That class is OP” thread in any other class’ forum. They’re also the only class with no “this class is kinda OP” thread in its forum either.
So no, it isn’t ironic, we’re not overestimating what other people do, and this is not just a huge case of the greener grass effect. This class needs help.
You forgot traits. Both minor and major traits are either random, non-sensical, or just don’t work. I can think of maybe three that are unique to the necro, helpful and functional right now.
Lol, obvious troll is obvious.
Too bad your powers of deduction didnt apply to obvious TP fees.
How does “I see the TP takes a large cut and think this is unfair” equate to “I have no idea how the TP works”?
…and what are you going to do as a tank? Be ignored in PVP? Take pride in being the last man down in a full party wipe on a dungeon boss? Take ages to beat regular mobs while laughing at their already pitiful damage?
Lol, obvious troll is obvious.
Question for the Dev team : whats the Design philosophy behind MM changes from GW1
in Necromancer
Posted by: The Boz.2038
Flat out wouldn’t work in 60% of the content. Of the things that changed from GW1 to 2 for the necromancer, the MM changes are one of the rare good ones.
My main is necro with over 200 hours of playtime. I made four alts hoping that I’d slowly level them up, discover more of the different parts of the story, get some crafting done, etc., but firmly set in my decision to play Necromancer as my main class, the same as in GW1. I only started to make alts when my necro hit 80.
I never visited any of the build forums or sites, preferring to do my own research in-game. As an opportunity or an idea came up, I tried to capitalize on it as best as I could on my own. “Oh look, daggers could be fun in melee range with my boatloads of health and healing and condition control.” I thought, and went out to try a dagger/dagger + axe/warhorn build. I wasn’t impressed, but I chalked that one up to gear unavailability. I then tried dagger/warhorn + scepter/focus well support, thinking that pbaoe fields would be effective in buffing the front line and creating combo fields for the engineer, ranger and warrior I often partied with. Wasn’t impressed. The minionmaster with a scepter/focus + staff for both minion heal skills? Yeah, minions are ineffective if they live, are easily killed by stray gunfire, and only ever get me into trouble. A few builds later, I finally came to the scepter/dagger + staff condition spammer. 104 damage bleeds, now we’re talking! Bleeds that last for FIVE whole seconds! With a bit of set up, some preparation and a short window of being left alone, I could even max out 25 stacks of bleeding for a quarter of a second, and then spread the ~14 or so stacks out to multiple targets, plus the poison, chill, blind and whatnot. I thought I was doing good, being effective.
I’m always on TS with my guildies when we’re doing a dungeon. It took about three minutes for me to realize that what my entire build revolves around, massive-damage stacks of conditions, is easily achieved by the party engineer and warrior as an afterthought. “Hey guys, check this out, I can keep 15 stacks on a target PERMANENTLY!” I said. “Yeah. OK. So?” was the almost unanimous response. The warrior crits for 3-4k with his autoattack, I crit for 300-400 with mine. He can stack up to 12 bleeds trivially easy, I can do 15. His tick for 92 damage in a power build, mine tick for 104 in a condition damage build. I wasn’t exactly feeling the love.
I started playing my alts some more. I made a warrior, engineer, ranger and elementalist as well as a guardian up to level 11, but ended up axing that one.
Things. Are. So. Easy. Sure, the elementalist dies to a sneeze, but that’s pretty much the only vulnerability of the class, and when combining earth and water, it’s pretty much nullified. The engineer can stack up conditions like a pro, and when they don’t work or when it’s time to do some burst damage, he can easily switch to grenades or bombs for some pretty sweet DPS. The ranger’s shortbow is trivial to spread conditions with when compared to the necro, and the class is equally resistant to conditions from the enemy. And the warrior? Everything is such a joke. He can kite exceptionally well with bow or rifle, but doesn’t need to, thanks to the highest health and best armor. His axe, sword and greatsword kill enemies faster than a necro can reach five stacks of bleed. Hell, he’s even better at regenerating health, spreading fear and causing bleed than ANY of the necro builds I came up with.
I… have no idea what I’m supposed to do. In dungeons, the only place I shine is the CoF farm runs, the little room when we’re supposed to run around in circles and evade the dozens of elite enemies that spawn; I last eleven seconds more than other players, on average. In a support spec, elementalists, rangers, guardians and engineers are all just flat out better, and all these classes outdo my DPS and control in that same build.
I was hoping that a patch would come out and fix me. Today, I heard from a friend that a massive balance patch, the FIRST, was out, and that it fixed ALL of the classes! YAY! FINALLY! I went to see what was changed. Traits switched around? Better minions? Skill and trait bugs fixed? Maybe even a use for my Axe and Dagger?
I came. I saw. I puked a little into my mouth.
My main is an engineer with over 11 hours of play time. I also have four alts, a necro, a ranger, an elementalist and a warrior.
Because morons have flooded the market for the cost of production, and you can’t go much higher. I even saw some people sell the same type of staff for 2.7g or even lower.
It is absolutely UNACCEPTABLE that the BLTC takes a 15% cut from all your sales. Selling an exotic staff that I crafted for 3 gold gives me 2 gold 55 silver. That’s ridiculous. No other MMO that I know of takes that much of a cut from trade transactions.
Wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be the other way around? As an incentive to actually sell stuff, and not just use the BLTC as second storage?
Why does the BLTC take the listing fee twice?
Example: I placed a staff for 18 silver. The 90 copper listing fee was taken from my wallet immediately. When I sold the staff, I only had 17 silver 10 copper to take, not 18 silver.
Why? And why doesn’t it say anywhere that it does this?