Guild Wars 2

It can be dodged… which is fairly frustrating because there isn’t anything to dodge, I’ve also seen it just not work for some reason lately which doesn’t seem to be a ‘block’. The kitten thing just doesn’t do anything at all and I’ve no idea why.

Unfortunately, its the only thing that we have to kill guardians and DD elementalists, otherwise they just don’t care about necro’s pissant damage and conditions at all. (small tip- also use focus buff-stripping off them AFTER a Corrupt Boon, wait for them to start reapplying and rip them off while applying constant pressure on them from the sceptre/staff)

playandchill.3908:

Dude.

Thats a lot of badge. How many kills do you have ? You make me wanna reroll necro. But im afraid A.net nerf AOE effects in WvW before i am 80 ^^

Bit under 31,000 at the moment, slightly over 1000hrs in wvw.
Some people do dungeons, some people do quests, world exploration, legendary weapons and others do spvp.
I do people.
(Strangely though- there’s a few people out there MUCH higher than me, I still have a full time job to manage as well!)

Don’t roll a necro, they’re a class that requires 100% attention, research and playing all the time to the absolute fullest to get them even just ‘on par’. Put it this way, I have 3 slot skills, one elite and a stat/skill allocation which have been pretty much the same for the last 1000hrs on it… the rest is broken, bugged, doesn’t work and complete rubbish because Anet just wont fix them.
Guess that sort of works in a way, if I commit, I will have to kill every single person before they kill me as there are no ‘way-outs’ and running away for a necro, unlike fairly much every other class has.

If they nerf me, well, I’ll just have to throw my hat into the warrior/thief arena which never gets nerfed and continue purging the unclean from the borderlands.

Lot of this stuff is immensely hard to test in game under any semblance of controlled circumstances, just working out the damage/tick/duration/cyclic attack time for every a single weapon to work out the overall damage done is immensely difficult.

Would really appreciate an Anet developer input for some hard answers to Ayusaki’s questions.

TheDevilWithinU.7092:

I do laugh when people call [Choo] a “zerg guild” considering the fact how organized we are as a guild. Considering we do take on groups double our size and larger sometimes with ease. We’ve learned a lot from playing against BG for so many weeks and we’ve become a lot stronger as you have seen. It’s really cool to see how powerful our guild is now than before, and how much of a presence we have on the battlefield.

Its been interesting to see from the BG side, the evolution of Choo and some other guilds on both servers since our first encounters as they began raising their game to being a serious threat to life and limb.
Took a few savage beatings, lot of bag donations to do it, but they’re definitely on the right track!

Walking out of tier 2 has also seen us apply higher levels of discipline to our wvw actions and a heck of a lot of experimentation to get our game up as well, its not to the ‘pro’ level I used to run in my DAOC 8man vs Zerg groups, but its getting there. Provided we keep yelling at the more attention bereft members and training, it’ll also eventually sink in. But we’ve got a few combat ‘metas’ down this afternoon to unleash on T1.

Dunno how long we’ll be there or how well we’ll do, but a lot of the guilds on this server have undergone a lot of changes since we where last there.

8679 badges (spent 5-600) 1.5mil Karma (spent @1 mil) and I’m the innocuous little toon who’s actually killing you while Riven is distracting them by waving a sword around and being brave…
Course if they do bring in new currency for WvW’er’s the rage quit from halfway around the world should be audible in his bedroom without voip.

Probably down, most we had out today was 16 of KnT.

papascoobs.7239:

My favorite part of last night was when Choo’s zerg and KnT’s zerg passed rite through each other outside WC, didnt look like anything rendered for anyone for a good 30 sec.The TS chat was priceless.

A clause somewhere in the contract:
Game experience may change during online play… by not rendering moving objects, friendly characters, enemy characters, siege, portals, terrain and bitey mobs.

Hopefully the next patch will alleviate this by removing graphics altogether and we’ll just go back to a MUD interface.
“You are likely to be eaten by a Choo”

I like how EBG is such a river of blood and repair bills, that no one ever talks about it or posts any videos.

Did a bit of testing yesterday:

Standard 1811 C/Dam = 133 tick
BIP 2161 C/Dam = 151 tick
Food + Crystal = 146 tick
BIP + Food+Crystal = 163 tick

A standard opening salvo (not including staff 3 & 4) would be:
BIP: 2x Bleeds running for 15sec at 163tick (2445) and 16x Bleeds at 146tick (2336)
Staff 2: 3x Bleeds running for 10sec at 163 tick (2445)
6second mark*- 2nd Staff 2: 3x bleeds running for 4 sec at 163tick (652) and 6sec at 146tick (876)
Terror = 1 × 1640 tick

So those first 10seconds
1630 + 2445 + 652 + 1640 = 6367 damage

A second terror tick would be nice, but its a lot of compromise to squeeze in at the moment.

• 4 .75sec cycle time with 0.75 sec cast + slow old man reflexes

Gluttony.2017:

complaining about complainers isnt exactly better.
Also, if they nerf our aoe im expecting a buff in condition damage cos they said they want to bring cond. damage in line with the others.

This might be a make-or-break for many. If they nerf our AoE, which is IMO one of the best points of the Necro (well… ok sometimes I feel like a bipedal arrow cart) then this class will be in some very severe trouble without something to offset it.

About 4am Sydney time (1hr ago)… and I’m off to bed. All keeps and towers in EBG upgraded to T3, hopefully most will stay that way or KnT will be cranky

Yeah it would be nice if ‘Lifeforce’ was more than just an enhanced downed state you can use while still having hit points.

If I was a game designer, I would have given it 3 uses along the lines of-
Burn life force for:
F1: Extra DPS
F2: Extra Health
F3: Extra Boon/Condition Duration

That way it would fall into the playstyle synergy instead of being a a component of your career, rather than being an additional playstyle completely different to what you normally do as a necro.

But, its another idea Im sure Anet dont care about.

I assume that my server-mate has been interrupted by the enemy doing something useful like running supply/siege or on the way back to reinforce a battlefront. He might be that one guy they need to hold their combat group together or has the last 10 supply needed to get something important done.

‘Course, if I’m wrong and if you’re profoundly stupid enough to be punching each other on some main thoroughfare or near a supply camp instead of away from everyone- I do not care.

Rennoko.5731:

I disagree with this premise and it seems to be such a popular trend on the forums.

I used to run a build that maximized condition damage, and took whatever duration I could find as extra. Then I realized that the barbed precision bleed ticks twice at 100% duration on bleed, and procs all the time (normal crit rate around 50%, gives a proc rate of 1 in 3 hits)

I logged about 400hrs in wvw as a condition/hybrid using the pizza food and around the last 350hrs in wvw as a pure condition/prec/toughness build using Master Tuning Crystals & Bowl of Truffle Risotto.
It seems to be more practical in combat situations where I get about 5 bleeds at 160, run around a bit as the enemy gets insanely cranky at me/have to chase them, apply another 5 bleeds as soon as the timers come up or are cleared by the enemy or incapacitate another group with conditions.

To some extent I also leverage a lot off running organised guild groups so I’ll also have a 2nd necro (rarely) or ranged C/Dam spec class (more commonly) and a guardian (or 2!) to pump up more conditions and Might stacks, which is a big factor in our damage output now.
In hindsight, a lot of the changes since the game opened in terms of Terror, Might from BiP and actual ‘equipment’ types have allowed for higher C/Dam builds than when I first rolled out into wvw.
At some point I might try out the hybrid again, but this is working for me now and Im happier with the overall performance.

Best advice I can give you from my own wvw experience is that Duration is a near-useless ability in WvW, you’re far better off investing in two other things:
1. Faster cyclic downtime for skills/utilities to overwhelm enemy removals
2. More damage per tick for conditions so when they do stick, they really hurt

You do have one big advantage though… there is a large majority of people in WvW who don’t seem to carry any condition removal, are using some glass cannon spec ‘for big numbers’, still think their spec from spvp/pve is applicable or are up-levelled noobs looking for karma and xp. So, you’ll always cause some causalities

Fairly much nil expectations, they have an inherently stupid class design principle for necros of “attrition means stand there and get punched in the face and punted around while doing crap damage because you’re durable”
Which putting it very simply, is just not able to withstand the immense damage output of most other classes hybrid/glass DPS specs for any appreciable time and is fundamentally flawed to shoehorn an entire career into being a bag of hit points.
(DD-spec Ele’s do that job much better than my Necro every could hope for + have a ‘way out’ if things get too hot!)

I do WvW and that’s about all I do so there is a slightly biased perspective, but there’s about 1 other full-time WvW necro I see regularly, couple of part time alts/irregulars and the usual pve-carebears that crawl out from out of their dungeons long enough to get their monthly-achievement component done.
So, I really do worry that the class isn’t played at all.

Topix.6974:

spartanx.1364:

Trebbing bay from bluevale with out even taking blue vale. BG has some balls.

Was a great tactic.

Not nearly as brilliant* asymmetric a tactic as the hour long, 7 players and 3-flame rams defence of Blue Vale entrance :p

*we get slightly silly after midnight

1. Anet commercially comes to terms with the fact instanced spvp is a complete crock that barely anyone cares about unless its to test specs and wvw is a major driving force of:
- End-game player interest
- Server population health
- Bleeding out players if they don’t address it as a priority.
It needs to have more man-hours allocated to its development as a result.

2. Stop free transfers. At some point servers have to stabilise their populations, learn to live with each other, have some pride in where they play for and it will sort out the very large transient ‘I join to win’ populations that float around borking the weekly scores.

3. Gear & drops. The drop rate for useful items is appallingly bad (some more blueprint drops at least!) its very hard to collect, making BoH’s very hard to come by. The Invader gear (power-vitality-toughness) is all there is for badges? Seriously not everyone has a spec that way and they’re forced into pve hell to do dungeons for equipment. WvW needs its own skins for gear, Invader looks horrible, considering how hard it is to get the currency, you should not look like some gronk that spent time grinding a scripted dungeon- you should look like a hero that defends their server by killing thousands of the enemy players, taking and holding territory and is unique to anything else in the game.

Hitting the road for xmas break, have fun not being hit by me and may Santan the Dark Lord of Consumerism bring you lots of loot both in-game and out.

Way I figure its still early days in terms of the game that’s only been out for 4months and in hindsight, a lot of the MMO type of games take some time to fill out all their areas. That doesn’t necessarily make me satisfied of course as a full time WvW player to have no recognition titles, usable equipment (for my condition spec) to buy with badges or the fact the PvE monkeys are universally both wealthier and now, also better equipped.
So 6 months probably seems about right to fill out, however, due to a number of factors I think it should have been done earlier.

WvW is important because it also affects server health- the better your server does:
The better the game bonuses
Ability to attract better players and guilds
Keep better players and guilds

But mostly, this is Guild “Wars”, I came here for an open warfare experience, I didn’t come here for “PvE Wars”, “Dungeon Raid Wars” or “Group Wars” on some postage-stamp sized spvp match of half a dozen a side. All other games do that kind of stuff and its universally boring for me, I’m here for the week long, big fights, long term tactical planning/manoeuvring and logistics required for my server to be winning a War.

So please Anet, give us, the hardcore 1%‘s that fight it out every day on the battlefield some recognition that will never be achieved by someone running a dungeon 20 times, grinding components, crafting silly legendaries etc.
That we are are ’Realm Defenders’, the crazy guys and girls with a 25-1 player killer ratio, the supply train destroyers, castle ransacker’s, contributors to the server’s honour with hundreds of hours of blood and warfare under our belts.

Think most of the big wvw guilds sank a lot of hours and boots connecting to rectums/doors/walls/faces this week, the score shows it.
Today was a lazy day though, farmed me some easy badges defending keeps, did a little 5-man ganking, rounded up the child labourers for gathering so we can make a lot more superior siege (which I know you love because you keep standing under it) and ended up in a long meeting talking about ‘stuff’ for tomorrow.

They last longer… they’re still worthless!

+1, make it go away

I agree with what they say as to what a necro is (but not in principle!) except for:
“able to combine condition damage with raw damage”

But maybe that comes down to the definition of ‘Raw Damage’, whacking away with a sceptre for 300-400 a smack + bleed is not very high damage at all. Compared to the ‘raw damage’ that something like a condition-spec thief or warrior pumps out, which is quite a lot of ‘raw damage’ and conditions on top.

Our big problem in wvw I’m finding is that the burst-dps and hybridised specs of other careers do what they do with ease and are easily rewarded with a result of killing someone (or worse, me!) in next to no time at all. Not equipping the necro with the ‘outs’ and ‘damage absorption’ options of say a bunker-elementalist or even a decently specced warrior/guardian is just saying ’you’ve got a massive Achilles heel, but we gave you a lot of hit points to make up for it!’
Reality is, hit points aren’t making up for any of it. The career is mediocre at best, with a pitiful amount of ‘self buffs’, barely any ‘group-friendly buffs’ and of course, if anyone ignores you for long enough and lets you dump stuff on them, of course they will die…

Don’t even start on deathshroud, it is a completely junk, downed state

I quite enjoyed my Ranger when I played one through beta, mostly in wvw with a little bit of pve. Mostly ran around with sword-warhorn & shortbow or longbow-greatsword with a few variations on the trait/slot skills.
About my only complaints with it was that it was a bit ‘vanilla’ if I was putting it side by side with other archer/pet type classes in other games and not really bought anything new to the table. I did enjoy exploring to find new pets though.

Necro… I’ve started to find the shine wearing off in that I’m more or less stuck using the same stuff* and if you thought ranger pets where ‘fairly daft’ you’ll be horrified at just how terrible necro pets can be as a liability!

*I’m basically a “force-multiplier/zerg killer”- very high-condition damage spec and fairly much stuck using the same spec, same weapons at 80 (Sceptre-Dagger + Staff), as I was at level 30. Single-target takedown ability is very bad, but I’m rarely presented with a ‘single target’ so to speak.

manveruppd.7601:

The only other option might be to make them disposable (ie they disappear between fights, like a Mesmer’s clones and illusions). But this would mean a radical redesign of the whole class, as not only the minions would need to be remade from the ground up, but we’d also need more minion-summoning skills (possibly some weapon skills would also summon a minion). But, frankly, the main point of a Mesmer’s illusions is that they also provide confusion and misdirection, mainly in pvp, and force an opponent to look carefully before spotting the real one. A necro wouldn’t get that additional functionality, and while I guess they could make necro minions more powerful than mesmer illusions to compensate for that, it would basically just make the class mesmers with a gothy skin, and I think it deserves more than that.

To expand on my point for this as an advocate of a ‘fire & forget’ pet missile that goes and chews on whatever it is aimed at, we’ve got to remember that if you’re loading one up into a utility slot- that is a fairly important consideration when its replacing something else like a stun break, movement increase, utility ability or DPS adjustment.
It should be fairly powerful.

The majority of mesmer pets form as part of a weapon attack-chain and form part of that careers overall defence ability, a few like Decoy and Mirror Images are a utility skill that are optional and roughly where you’d be looking for in terms of equivalent impact. (I played one for a while and its mostly terrible to level them up conventionally, there is a very steep learning curve!)

A necromancer ‘disposable pet’ on a utility slot might form a similar function like a swarm of small annoying spirits that blind, nibble and cripple the foe until destroyed (or a timer runs out), maybe a pet that floats around and intercepts hits like ablative armour… all the way up to bitey things that just latch onto some poor unfortunate they’re aimed at, leaking a poisonous mist and doing comparatively high damage.

I’m not an advocate of pets forming part of weapon-attack lines though.

As I replied in another post here, a couple of nights ago we where really rolling in it and made out pretty well, (enough to cover the cost of siege and buy a bit more!) last night none of us got anything of note. (aka: ‘Situation Normal’)

I have a mental image of an Anet intern getting smacked across the back of the head yesterday afternoon and someone yelling at them “NEVER, turn that button on again!”

1. Yes, they fixed it, they removed them entirely
2. …of course they did, its called Ascended
3. No, the point is still just gratuitous slaughter and the honour of the server, which suits me fine for the most part
4. Big things like garrisons and castles take zergs, most everything else can be ninja’d in some form or another with about 5-10 ‘not completely stupid’ people if you have to pvdoor something.
5. People will still build rams in places for whatever reason.
6. Culling is still terrible, possibly worse.

The other alternative universe solution might be…

: Hello NCSoft, this is Arenanet
- oh god its those guys… hide the livestock and liquor
- Yes, this is NCSoft, what can I do for you?
: We would like to speak to Team Aion*
- What about?
: We have a ‘pet problem’ and would like to borrow the guy that made spirit masters pets not entirely horrible and mostly work.
- Many seek the guru of pet AI, but first you must answer these 3 riddles…

*Assuming NCSoft isn’t like EA Games and doesn’t eat their young developers after each release.

MiasmicMist.1420:

@KnT nice defense of lowlands keep after we got to lords room other night, I commend you guys on your quick response! (shout out to the smaller guilds I saw in EB as well from BG defending)

…and you only saw 1/3rd of the story as a very large force of IOJ had already taken down the front door as BG and SOR where finishing stabbing each other and romping their way down to the inner.
The carnage continues, IOJ are sent home as well, giving the SOR mesmer sitting up on the vista, picking his bum decides to port in all (I don’t think he missed any, there was a lot!) his friends and the carnage continues again, for a third time!

Quite a lot of credit to Urge though, they did call in reinforcements off other maps in the nick of time.

Not a lot of time this week to play, have to get about 3 projects to finish at work, then I go on holidays for a month.

In my opinion the community has already given as much data, documented testing, feedback that is well above and beyond what is needed to make reasonable changes to the career for it to be unique, enjoyable and competitive.

If they can’t understand at this point… well, there’s really not much more you can do.

Think to some extent with all the special events* happening a lot of manpower gets tied up in those things instead of career adjustments, either that or the career fix-it team is comparatively small and just chewing through a backlog of things to do for everyone.

*Completely wasted on me, don’t bother with any of them and spend 95% of my time in wvw… cept that one time I ate a lot of candy corn and ran around vomiting on people for 30min for a monthly task completion.

I have seen* zealous crusades of 40 men rolling out to reclaim the holy home lands… all led of a cliff to their screaming deaths by a distracted commander.

*It wasn’t me, the guilty parties involved shall remain nameless

I tend to fire up my warrior if I really need to get some single-target takedown action happening
It does it so elegantly with all the tools for the job with easy to get equipment, that it just makes everything else seem like completely excessive faffing around! Have mucked around a little with axe on the necro, but compared to axe on my warrior, it may as well be the difference between night and day.

lettucemode.3789:

If you put 15 points into Soul Reaping, you will automatically gain Spectral Armor for free, including the stun break. I’m pretty sure that’s the only traited one we get.

Plus, the lowered Spectral timer is at 10pts into that line, I find it fairly worthy enough to keep it there as it drops the cycle time down to about 48sec on Spec-Walk (not been able to confirm if it affects the cyclic time of Spec-Armour at 15pts though).

Which if nothing else gives you +33% speed 90% of the time, 100% if you switch in a warhorn for Locusts. That in a way does give you something of ‘prevention’ instead of cure for maintaining a kiting position.

Been hit by quite a few ‘big’ (30+ people) bombs over the last couple of nights fighting and none of them have been what I would describe as being any degree of success. All because it was done in a way to be obvious, or measures where taken to make sure people where aware enough to respond and the good old fashioned ‘gank the mesmer’ on the way in.

….mmm bags.

At some point I think there may be enough mangled mesmers on some servers to form their own “Portaler’s Union” for better pay, OH&S conditions, co-worker harassment and repair bills.

Gryph.8237:

Honest feedback (with my opinion), this class is a patchwork, poorly designed class. It is my opinion that the devs could not decide on the design and over-comprimised to add both their desires/designs and ended up weakening the class entirely. It should not be called necromancer, but maybe corruption mage, or bleed/blood mage. Has nothing to do with necromancy, and is boring.

Correct.
The design principles that they seemed to want, reading at development notes here on the forum, was that the class was a ‘lock-down’ specialist which was hard to escape from, hard to kill, but not necessarily the fastest killer.
That’s fine as a concept.
Except that it doesn’t actually work in principle!
Also, if it was actually implemented that way, that’s all it would be and no provision for the alternative play-style options that ALL other careers get. In our case it would be Minion Masters and Single-target/High Damage

If you want to be tough to kill, lock people down be hard to escape from and kill relatively slowly, I’ve got 4 mates I play regularly with that combination… and they’re all Guardians!

My Necro pro/cons?
I’m a highly speed, light armour class that practices being cautiously positioned on the battlefield, condition-specialist AOE and CC in my WvW guild.
I don’t do well at single target damage
I don’t soak up a lot of damage myself
I have very limited escape capability
I do have a very good personal heal
I do have great area denial
I have some damage-offset in Deathshroud
I do have decent amounts of personal +% speed

That is what I bring to the table as a ranged-standoff class, played fairly much exactly the same as a Staff-Elementalist would, instead of being an ‘up in their face damage soak’ that they seem have thought we where apparently going to be. Statistically, THIS WORKS (I have an 18-1 kill/death ratio because of it) and Anet deluded in thinking that we are currently anything else in its current form.

Hybridization is fine for a starting necro, it essentially makes up for any deficits that starters have when making mistakes or lacking gear-stats they dont have.
Of those:

Power is not a ‘useless’ gear stat in terms of ‘Actual DPS’ (as opposed to conditions over time) with any necro weapon on any spec, it just becomes less desirable if you push further into a pure condition-spec.

Vitality, for the obvious reason that those with the most = last man standing and in WvW, the last man standing wins. It is a perfectly acceptable survivability stat if you can’t get a lot of toughness- we all have problems getting toughness on accessories, so in a sense most of us are ‘making do’ in some form or another until Anet gets its crap together.

Armour
When I was leveling up through wvw, I basically had Karma & no Cash, so I made do with Invader, Trade Post (when they eventually fixed it) and other Heart-stuff from the few bits of PvE I reluctantly stumbled into. To some extent, from pre-launch to hitting 80 I probably had an easier run of it, because we where all bloody terrible

The Orr 42k Karma exotic armours are very good for what they are. Quite a lot will give you Tou-Prec-Con/Dam. Head, Gloves, Legs & Shoulders where all easy to get. Body & Shoes, not so easy… in fact, kitten hard would be a mild understatement.
There are also some dungeon armours which have the same stats, personally I would rather drill a hole in my skull than ‘grind’ a dungeon because PvE is dirty and populated by the lowest denominator in MMO’s… the ‘Mob Fondler’.
Killbron’s also has the goods on the trade post, but it is a premium armour in terms of cost, so I bought a couple I couldn’t get quickly elsewhere, there for hard cash.

What to stick in the armour slots?
Up to you. If you want to ‘Crit’ more often, aim for those runes that will increase the precision.
Want to hurt more, the Con/Dam ones.
On a personal level, I found hurting people is more effective than critical-hitting them and possibly proc’ing a bleed, so I use Undead Runes for the synergy of also making my prodigious toughness add to my Con/Dam.
I have found ones that extend the ‘time’ of conditions to essentially be “mostly worthless” as anyone with a brain will clear the ones you put on them ASAP and anyone who isn’t, is already a dead idiot anyway

Weapons
As I mentioned earlier, Power and Vit are not necessarily worthless ‘ad-hoc’ replacements, they’re just less desirable on armour for a con/dam spec.
On weapons, they are much the same, most Necro weapons I’ve been happy with are Toughness (for my rune synergy) Precision (to make it hurt often) and Condition Damage (to just make it hurt more)
How much of what/where of each is up to you and simply what you can lay your hands on. If you have to ‘make do’ with some Power, it’ll be just fine as well because the initial ‘belting’ will hurt more than if it didn’t have power on it.

What to stick in the weapon?
There’s really 4 choices in my opinion and not in any real order:
+10 Power every time you kill someone +25 stacks = a lot of hurt!
Rating for Necro 5/10 (Expensive and not that great, better for warrior-types)
+10 Precision every time you kill someone +25 stacks = crit-a-lot!
Rating for a Necro 8/10 (Cheap, and effective)
+10 Con/Dam every time you kill someone +25 stacks = +25Damage tick on a bleed
Rating for a Necro 8/10 (Mid-price and very effective)
Earth Sigil 60%chance to proc a 5sec bleed every time you crit = more bleeding!
Rating for a Necro 7/10 (Very cheap and does what it says on the can)

Other options, the lightning strikes, fireballs, +5% to Crit and life-steals are fun to drag out if you want and they’re not entirely worthless. Remember if you can’t stomach the pain of the +10 sigils, the +7 ones do ok as a substitute and at about 2% of the price!

Food
Risottos + Tuning Crystals = dead and dying bodies everywhere
Using both will make people scream, run around and bleed like crazy until they fall down, or stick a tampon in it and go bother else.

Habib Loew.6239:

Extra load time varies depending on how beefy the client machine is (those with more memory, faster CPUs, more CPU cores, and faster drives experience shorter load times). One of our engine programmers recently completed an optimization pass on the character loading process and so we should be seeing improvements to that part of the issue very soon.

For those of us that do a lot of WvW, (and often nothing else except stand around in Lions Arch queues!) is there a rough baseline machine spec we could look at using which will assist in getting us a better culling rate?

We have terrible pay, rubbish loot, high overheads and people who ‘grind mobs’ have better gear… but think of the alternative conversations we would be having!

For example:
- Well I did COF path 1 in 24minutes!
- Noob! We did it in 22minutes!

- Har, I got so many points in spvp, we killed those 5 guys over and over
- kitteno look at them scrubs!

- I did fractals all weekend until I passed out from starvation, but I got 1000 butt-nuggets for my pink ring!
- Oh wow, show us your ring in /say!

This is the horrible fate that we face, if you leave wvw.
The intolerable mediocrity of your server being full of mob fondlers whacking away at staged encounters for shiny’s and putting up with pseudo-elitists hiding in the safety net of controlled combat without any repercussions or risk.

Do your bit today!
Slaughter the enemy, crush all they hold dear and break their will to fight
(Then we’ll do the grub, tree spirit and jump puzzle!)

Honestly dunno where this is going in terms of sustainability-character development over the next few months. Last Saturday I put in a “big day out” of about 10hrs of play (also known as ‘work’ and I worked my butt off!) which statistically ended up looking something like this:

Mobs Killed = no idea (a lot!)
People Killed = 978
Bags picked up = roughly 80-90%
Badges = 150+ (Useless currency*)
Yellow gear drops = 2 (yes, that’s ‘two’ in 10hrs!)
Karma = About 125-150k (useless currency*)
Gold at the end of the day = +4gp (after all salvage & TP Sales of mats)
Gold spent = around -4gp (spent siege + upgrades, food-buffs and repairs)
Total gold income = about 8g all up, maybe 10 factoring in some later sales of mats

So about all I come away from wvw is a sense of satisfaction murdering people, keeping the realm free of dirty invaders and probably feeding some latent anti-social disorder… :o The chase, the fight and execution is “My End Game” because, real live players- they’re surprisingly hard to kill and don’t follow a script.
sPvP is a silly joke of rubbish class synergies at worst and a gentlemanly way of duels at best, it is a long way away from being an ‘esport’, you are kidding yourself Anet if you think its even remotely close.

But anyway, at some point it won’t be sustainable for me to wvw for a long time because its just really not economically viable to do so.
I’ll end up in LA, asking for a group (and not getting one*) to do some stupid, repeatable dungeon I’ve never done before, getting bored out of my skull, for another ‘currency’ type to clog up my bank.

*Condition Necro, basically nearly all the Karma & badge gear is useless to me, I’m not wanted in any groups for pve dungeons “because we’re terrible”

blazesquall.6798:

I’m sure it’ll be awhile. Honestly, they’ve pretty much said they’re working on everything. I’m betting there’ll be a new currency for the ascended rings in WvW.

I have an icky feeling that will be the case as well as its an altogether common MMO thing to introduce “another currency” every time they add something new and god only knows we’ve got enough in GW2 already!
8 or so dungeon specific ones
Karma
Badges
Gems
…actual ‘Gold’

(Enough Anet, I’ve nearly got half a bank vault of this junk which is next to useless!)
The more elegant solution would be to have a currency convertor, so if Bob the Pvemonkey wants to swap me some of his magic dungeon balls for some of my badges or Karma, he can.

Hammer/CC spec warriors are about the only thing I will exterminate with extreme prejudice in wvw when on my necro, as our access to ‘stability when it works… sometimes’ is quite limited.
Kill-shot specialists will also take a huge, steaming kitten on you if you don’t see it coming.

I think ‘fire and forget’ minion missiles are probably a better work around (with some adjusted timers), target what you want chewed on and the critters run off and bite it until they or it, is dead. Rather than doing what they do most of the time-
A: stand around picking their bum
B: agro’ing something halfway across the zone

The other thing if we’re looking at an overhaul (which IMO is the better option than trying to ‘fix’ them- which has been tried and failed completely miserably since Beta), is that we get a couple of ‘spiritual advisers’ so to speak, which are just mob/npc transparencies which give buffs to people within a certain radius and would give us a certain ‘group appeal’ that Necro’s currently don’t have.

Reason being-
Mesmer pets aren’t great, but they do work ‘most of the time’ for their intended purpose and are proven code.
Ranger spirits aren’t great either, but also do the above and are proven code, just make them different buffs.

Out of all the things that I think are ignored in wvw making it ‘less appealing’ sometimes, repair bills are pretty low on that list.

I actually figured out last night that if I combined all my 1000’s (of otherwise useless) badge of honors and loose gold I could make 31 Omega golems… but I will probably spend it on dye or something.

As for the ‘incident that wont be spoken of again’, lodge a ticket, there’s no much more we can do and hope Anet responds slightly faster than tectonic drift that we’re used to for bug fixes. Heck I’ve thrown 2 at SOR and 1 at IOJ members in the last 2 weeks for “being places in towers they couldn’t have been”. Including one last night, is this a big deal? No, I killed them, then reported it with a screenshot.

Likewise, asking people to police people outside of their own guild- if we see it, it gets reported… you see, for the slow and dim out there, our ability to do more than report it and advise their guild leader they’ve got rubbish members, is pretty much just limited to that until they invent a way of physically cutting off their fingers and toes over the internet.

CharliePrince.2071:

there is no solution Thresher, Blackgate of all servers should know considering the only way you guys revived your server was getting a MASS TRANSFER of guilds

that’s the entire point and crux of it. it’s not like fresh players rose up and revived a server. i’ve been thinking about this long and hard and you just do not get fresh players

I have an insight into that, having been on Blackgate since the pre-release days and spent 90% of my time in WvW, the server has usually had one or more people, (even before it was launched!) waving the flag as part of a campaign to have ‘players’ come here that want to be active in WvW. If they bring a guild, that’s great, but otherwise you’ll have a “home” here and the server’s wvw community by and large will support you if you choose to run into battle with them.
Lot of people call them ‘pugs’ but its not necessarily complimentary term, ‘Militia’ is actually probably a much better description and there are a large amount on the server that as individuals and a collective group, pull a lot of weight for the following reasons:
- Server Pride
- They never left
- They work with their server mates

People will always come and go, be distracted by the moronic filthiness that is PvE to grind for gear for a time (boy, did we feel the shortage too!). But scratch past the shininess of the more noticeable guilds, all the BS of haters and chest thumping that goes on; there is a large core of people which have kept the place going through the worst of times.
Those people deserve a lot of credit for their dedication, fighting, waving the flag for recruiting and not just the new arrivals.

On a holistic level, I’ve seen it run the gamut of ups and downs from being 1st tier, to 3rd and back up, down and eventually where we are now. Ultimately, those “downs” cleared out a lot of the wannabes, fairies and try-babies, made the core of the server tougher, better to where it is now.
Because like many, at some point I made a decision to have some guts and stick it out, grabbing your junk and running for perceived security of a “better” server at the first sign of a bad times… doesn’t actually fix the ‘problem’!
I don’t need a “better” server, because this is MY server…

If I can offer some support in regards to that, it is important to encourage an attitude in your own guild, then to others to stick it out through the tough times. Pragmatism with the server hopping is something of a mixed blessing- sometimes you get a few gems, other times you get a bag of brick’s around your neck that seem to want to drown you!

But, as long as there is a ‘core’ of original people on the server willing to commit, it does make a difference, just don’t expect it to be easy, there will be tears and you will cop a flogging every now and then which makes anyone go ’ah jez… wtf was that!"

On a personal level.
Talent gets you a little way in, but I know tonnes of talented nobodies.
Ability will get you some peer credibility, but often it doesn’t shine past the moment
Persistence… counts for everything.
Being the guy(s) that never, ever, give up is what gets the job done at the end of the week. Encourage it in yourself, your guild and your server.

I tend to run my necro as something of a force multiplier, its not a particularly good 1v1 career or better at something specific compared to many other careers (in fact a lot of it is quite busted and needs fixing). However in combination with other careers it enhances them in terms of area denial, crowd control, debuff removal and blowing up a whole lot of people.
I seem to kill a lot of people :o

About the 3 most interesting I’ve got is Deathwish the staff, Emberglow the sceptre and Malefacterym the dagger. The dagger in particular is fairly good for a condition necro, the sceptre not so much so I transmuted my Mystic one into it and just use the skin. Its quite big, about the size of most of the smaller staves.

IMO- yes, the Divinity runes are a pretty good way of maximizing your overall character by about +20% if you had all 6 in at 80 (they would actually be much higher % if equipped at lower levels) and being that it would also mean +60 Condition Damage, its applicable to the majority of necros specs.

Quite a lot of us however tend to aim for a Primary and 2 x Tertiary stats to focus our characters which is much higher than 20%, but at the cost of other things. Up to you to weigh up if its worth it.
Something I’ve been interested in doing is experimenting with these, but the sheer $$$ involved has scared me off looking so far, Last I looked a few weeks ago they where the wrong side of 4G each on the trading post.

Cheers, got the boots for 2.2g… better than the 16g they where a few weeks ago!

Norn is not so bad, superpower-kitty form is a ‘get out’ which as a career we don’t have otherwise, 5sec stealth and a massive charge which will nearly take you out of clip range. I have used that as a blockade runner to get into a keep a couple of times which I wouldn’t have been able to do in plague form. The wolf-form also does condition damage on its attacks with a decent enough bleed, but its not something I really tote out often over plague form.
Aside from that, the cooldown is not really desirable on them as its quite long.