Guild Wars 2

Well I hate to tell you this but that kind of power build is even more spamming.

oZii.2864:

Tim laid out the numbers but I’m sure people will ignore his post and keep saying dire out dps’s soldiers etc etc.

I do not take credit for this, this is a part of Blood Red Arachnid’s post. It seems I accidently hid the header. A mistake I will rectify.

Well this a test of dire vs soldier:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Personally I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, and I go hybrid.

Anyway, not a lot of people have done math on the issue. What most people get is the tooltip, and that is misleading to a large degree. The tooltip assumes 2600 armor, and since the minimum is 1836, this means it can be up to 41.6% higher.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to make an arbitrary comparison between a guardian’s auto attack with his sword, and a Necromancer’s auto attack with their scepter. This is assuming a few things: Full PVT / MVT gear, exotic level gear, 300 in the relevant damage stat, and an appropriate rune/sigil. Off-hand weapon will not be considered. So, in full PVT/MVT we get the following bonuses:

Guardian:

Vitality: 698
Toughness: 698
Power: 1003 from gear + 165 from rune + 300 from stats = 1,468 Power
Runes of the Ogre bonus: 4% damage increase
Sigil of Force bonus: 5% damage increase

Total effective power: (916 + 1468) x 1.04 × 1.05 = 2603 power

Necromancer:
Vitality: 698
Toughness: 748
Malice: 1003 (from gear) + 300 (from stats) + 183 (from runes) + 83 (run undead bonus) = 1569
Total Malice with Sigil of Bursting: 1663

At 1663 condition damage, bleed does about 126 per tick, and poison does about 250 per tick. This means that the necromancer’s scepter auto chain will do 4 (126) x 2 + 4 (250) = 2008 damage over the course of 7 seconds (3 seconds to initialize the damage, 4 for the poison to tick). If you want to get technical, the motions to inflict all the damage is done in 3 seconds, so we’ll just go with that. Note that the auto attack also has a direct damage component (118 + 118 + 168), so the real total damage comes to 2,421 in 3(+4) seconds, factoring in crit chance and crit damage.

At 2603 power, the sword auto attack will do 764 × 2 +1,432 damage, or 2,960 damage in 2.5 seconds. Now, this isn’t assuming any crits, but if we factor in a 4% crit chance along with a 1.53 crit damage, we will get a further 2% increase, or about 3023 damage in 2.5 seconds.

This tooltip damage is also assuming 2600 armor. That is actually more than the necro has ATM (2584), but assuming we were fighting something like a GC mesmer, who would only have 1836 armor, then we would do 41.6% more damage, up to 4281 damage in 2.5 seconds. But, we’ll just go with the tooltip for now.

Ultimately, the guardian is doing more damage, doing it faster, doing it in power, and doing it while in heavily defensive gear. A lot of people constantly point at zerker gear, saying it is the only way to run a damage build. It really isn’t. I’ve been running a PVT guardian build in sPVP for a long time, and it does hit things quite kitten its own. One of my favorite things to do is just go around auto attacking people with the greatsword, since the combination of power + bulk means I’ll win the auto attack war. I’ve even played around with Valkyrie, which I recommend to many people, as it hits really kitten crits, and still has plenty of vitality for defense.

Those “builds” above are merely skeletons. The more modifiers you throw at it, the more things change up. But if you do throw modifiers on, you have to remember to do it to both classes: if you include trait abilities, you do it for both. If you include additional stats, you do it for both. If you include consumables, you do it for both.

Edit: header was not visible

well I have some news for you:

good news is that condition damage requires three stats for full damage namely condition damage , condition duration and precision.

Another good news is that there exist a rune called rune of melandru which cuts down condition duration on you by 25%. There also exists a rune generousity and purity which transfer/remoce a condition. With the new sigil changes they can now be taken together. Another thing is that they in the future will not require a critical hit, so they will proc more often.

The bad news is that condition builds are probably are going to receive a buff due to rune changes. Now a condition build has to mix and match for full condition duration but now it will be likely that they can take a full set while maintaining the full duration. This assumption is based on the rune of balthazar changes.

jportell.2197:

Arcing arrow when blasted in a fire field gives me 6 stacks of might not 3… something no other blast finisher does

It’s a big that probably will be fixed , a similar bug occured with putrid mark.

I’ve been thinking and I think the placement of the trait is good because parasitic contagion doesn’t scale wih healing power only condition damage or duration. Also the unkillable necromancer with only 100hps/person?

People who are complaining that defensive traits does not fit in offensive trait lines. It is not as uncommon as you think. The easiest example is mug for the thief another example is focus mastery of the guardian, the new grandmaster of the elementalist is also a defensive one. The list goes longer.

Muchcacho has point also 5% percent is not that big if you think about it it’s only 50 hp/1000 damage.

Auzerous.1384:

Tactics: Phalanx Strength – When you grant yourself might, grant it to nearby allies as well. 6s of might is granted each time this trait triggers. (It works with blast finishers)

I can see potential. If a warrior builds 30 into tactics, he is either trying to run healing shouts or banners (support). If you take this trait, you lose the regeneration banner/healing shout options. I see great potential with Battle Standard and I think this trait is made for it. This trait basically gives an offensive support banner style instead. Little use beyond that, unless you tried 20 in arms for gs crit = might. I think that’d just be a weird build lol.

why do you think it will be weird? I think a build like this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vIAQFARjMd03ZhH2eQHSA48AKmaK9IMyAA-zAyAYLAKDQyrIasVuioxqWw0vCRa4U7NwAA-e

with ten points in either strength or discipline depending on the damage output would be good with the trait.

I can see the cries of op already, but that aside it is an interesting mechanic. It fits the necro theme perfectly and is a good damage migitation ability that is not the bland vigor on crit. The endurance part that is. The adrenaline part is just stupid and should be removed.

Rennoko.5731:

Speak for yourself, a skittle is more than enough when I have been looking at an empty table for 4 months. I can easily find builds and combinations to keep me busy for a few months assuming nothing more than what we know about the new elites. They all have their own niche interest to me, though admittedly the SR one is going to take some serious stretching to find a place for.

Try healing in a zerg in wvwvw take unyealiding blast for piercing and you’re ready to go.

flow.6043:

I can’t believe that so many people give this skill such high praise.

Healing with 8+ conditions is lucky at best.
And even then, this heals you for what… 10-12k? That is really low, considering that:
1. your hp pool is about twice as high
2. it’s on a 25 sec cd
3. and you don’t have any other significant sources of healing (unless you are also a siphoning MM).

1~2. This is a standard for most skills take a look at shelter less then 50% on a thirty second cooldown. Healing surge at most around 10K on 30 second cooldown. Elemental glyph around 5K on a 25 second cooldown. elixer H around 5.5K on 25 second cooldown. Most healing skills swim around 50% on 25 seconds.
3. Dagger #2 1800 health on a 12 second cooldown I would call significant. You yourself said vampiric master. The new spite grand master can be considered as a significant healing.

flow.6043:

Even if you’re able to heal 10k every 25sec (which like I said, is lucky), you’ll have to take less than 10k damage in that amount of time to not gradually lose more and more health. If you’re up against any half decent opponent you’ll take a lot more damage than that, and the only thing you can do about it is win before your time runs out.

Are you saying that we are entitledd to outhealing our enemies damag with consume consitions alone?

Another thing that you have too calculate in the heal is the damage you would have taken if the conditions stil ticked.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The lack of stunbreakers in death shroud is not really much of an issue, since you’re using it to eat the damage while stunned while leaving your own health intact. You already didn’t want to spend time using the death shroud skills, so being locked out of those is irrelevant. Plus, there’s Doom as a pseudo-stunbreak (you don’t break out, but your opponent can’t do anything to you either).

The only reason this is true is because the only reason death shroud is used by conditionmancers is ‘damage sponge’. If this were to change it would be very much possible that condition users will just leave death shroud the moment they are stunned/feared/… just to save their life force. Doom is a solution but is not everything like with pet players or stability, … .

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Likewise, condition builds actually want to have conditions on them. It gives them more ammo. As such, they don’t really care so much about condition removals in death shroud.

Perhaps but again doesn’t start that from the assumption they can use these conditions efficiently meaning they want to stay little time in death shroud?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Even Power builds don’t care so much about conditions in death shroud as it means a bigger heal when they pop out.

I wouls be surprised if they don’t. I mean what if they get weakness or cripple or immobilze? They would need to leave death shroud or be ineffective. Even the damaging ones would hurl them faster out of death shroud which would mean lower dps.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Yup. The healing will stop. Yet another reason why condition builds spend as little time as possible in death shroud, so 3 major reasons why after this patch.

Only 3? I came up with 7:
-no healing (both from itsef and allies)
-no condition removal
-no stunbreakers
-life force diminishes on its own
-no life force on death
-no utility skills
-lower dps

7 reasons why no to enter death shroud and most are not even condition spec specific. Something has to be done about this, I think healing is the most important to tackle since it affects our allies as well.

Frightlight.3796:

You know what they could do is just make ferocity precision/crit damage because you need both anyway why not? makes it fair since condi classes can stack dire gear and have full damage output without sacrificing survival. If anet did this we could use power/ferocity/toughness or vitality gear and still get our dps output without have to sacrifice a survival stat.

So barbed precision doesn t exist nor shapshooter nor sigil of earth nor sigil of torment,… . I think this little text will enlighten you for thos who think dire is so OP:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Personally I don’t put all my eggs in one basket, and I go hybrid.

Anyway, not a lot of people have done math on the issue. What most people get is the tooltip, and that is misleading to a large degree. The tooltip assumes 2600 armor, and since the minimum is 1836, this means it can be up to 41.6% higher.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to make an arbitrary comparison between a guardian’s auto attack with his sword, and a Necromancer’s auto attack with their scepter. This is assuming a few things: Full PVT / MVT gear, exotic level gear, 300 in the relevant damage stat, and an appropriate rune/sigil. Off-hand weapon will not be considered. So, in full PVT/MVT we get the following bonuses:

Guardian:

Vitality: 698
Toughness: 698
Power: 1003 from gear + 165 from rune + 300 from stats = 1,468 Power
Runes of the Ogre bonus: 4% damage increase
Sigil of Force bonus: 5% damage increase

Total effective power: (916 + 1468) x 1.04 × 1.05 = 2603 power

Necromancer:
Vitality: 698
Toughness: 748
Malice: 1003 (from gear) + 300 (from stats) + 183 (from runes) + 83 (run undead bonus) = 1569
Total Malice with Sigil of Bursting: 1663

At 1663 condition damage, bleed does about 126 per tick, and poison does about 250 per tick. This means that the necromancer’s scepter auto chain will do 4 (126) x 2 + 4 (250) = 2008 damage over the course of 7 seconds (3 seconds to initialize the damage, 4 for the poison to tick). If you want to get technical, the motions to inflict all the damage is done in 3 seconds, so we’ll just go with that. Note that the auto attack also has a direct damage component (118 + 118 + 168), so the real total damage comes to 2,421 in 3(+4) seconds, factoring in crit chance and crit damage.

At 2603 power, the sword auto attack will do 764 × 2 +1,432 damage, or 2,960 damage in 2.5 seconds. Now, this isn’t assuming any crits, but if we factor in a 4% crit chance along with a 1.53 crit damage, we will get a further 2% increase, or about 3023 damage in 2.5 seconds.

This tooltip damage is also assuming 2600 armor. That is actually more than the necro has ATM (2584), but assuming we were fighting something like a GC mesmer, who would only have 1836 armor, then we would do 41.6% more damage, up to 4281 damage in 2.5 seconds. But, we’ll just go with the tooltip for now.

Ultimately, the guardian is doing more damage, doing it faster, doing it in power, and doing it while in heavily defensive gear. A lot of people constantly point at zerker gear, saying it is the only way to run a damage build. It really isn’t. I’ve been running a PVT guardian build in sPVP for a long time, and it does hit things quite kitten its own. One of my favorite things to do is just go around auto attacking people with the greatsword, since the combination of power + bulk means I’ll win the auto attack war. I’ve even played around with Valkyrie, which I recommend to many people, as it hits really kitten crits, and still has plenty of vitality for defense.

Those “builds” above are merely skeletons. The more modifiers you throw at it, the more things change up. But if you do throw modifiers on, you have to remember to do it to both classes: if you include trait abilities, you do it for both. If you include additional stats, you do it for both. If you include consumables, you do it for both.

Terrahero.9358:

So i dont have a big problem with these traits because essentially they are a more interesting version of “convert x% of stat A to stat B”.

I must admit I never looked at them like that and indeed it is an interesting vision we could use for other stat types.

MonMalthias.4763:

True, Engineer as a whole is filled with these lazily designed passive defenses. But I do think that this is a topic for another thread. We haven’t even touched upon crit-proc condition application traits yet, and how they contribute towards mindless autoattack spam.

Are we really going to talk about a 2~4 second bleed with a chance of 66% on critical hits?

Healing and death shroud is a problem that needs to be addressed since it causes several issues:
- we will never fit in a group with a healer since we can lose that healing if we stay in death shroud (which is promoted)
- Several traits/skills are ineffective due death shroud examples would be parasitic bond, vampiric, … .
- Regeneration is useless fo the necromancer since we could lose some due death shroud
- necromancer are also one of the few (if not only) with a class mechanic that hinders other skills.
-necromancer also have two incompatible trait lines.

I believe personally that letting all heals through death shroud would have no problems, it’s like when other classes use their defensive mechanisms and still can heal.
If turns out to be a bit much we could always let a part of the heal through.
An alternative would be is converting healing into life force when in death shroud.

The cast time is a bit long but the skill is ridicously strong so a good trade off.

Vox Hollow.2736:

How do you figure that?
I had active proc-based play on DoT classes all the time in WoW. Active Play was never naturally contrary to the concept of damage over time.

Conditions in gw2 isn’t just “damage over time” conditions is about having a secure and relitively stable amount of damage with as trade offs being dps and set up time. DoTdoes not equal conditions, pulsing skills like wells are also damage over time (in my opinion as least)but are completely different from conditions. I may not know how the Dot in wow works (gw2 is my first mmo) but I’m pretty sure how conditions work in gw2.

The problem with making conditions more active especially on long cooldowns lies in the way condition removal work :

Let’s say you managed to get one of your powerfull power attacks off you can immediately work with making your next powerfull move hit since the damage is done the only thing the opponent can do is healing but that is no relative to the damage done to you. In conditions this won’t work let’s say you managed to get your active and powerfull skill off and you immediately managed to place your next attack and then the opponent cleanses them , you just lost two strong attacks because the first attack was still ticking. With power builds you lose around one strong attack per migitation skill with condition skills you lose more due damage over time aspect. You could wait untill your first skill is done but that doesn’t work. To counter this problem conditions must be spread over small time intervalls so less damage is lost when cleansed. The relatively long cooldown on active skills make it less suited for such tasks. That is why conditions need more passive skills.

ps: for me a proc means an effect that repeatly activates on recieving/taking a (critical) hit. What is your definition?

Vox Hollow.2736:

Ah, I think I understand your concern. You’d just be sure all major ways of building had some form of representation in each of these categories.

For example; We don’t have any condition-build-related Procs in this game as far as I know. (At least, not without relying on precision, which I agree, isn’t a good situation). So you’d just add a few. Like; ‘5% chance on Tick to gain a ghostly appearance and add Lifestealing to your next 3 Damaging Conditions. 20 second cooldown.’

Or something along those lines.

Not really the problem is you’re trying to put a playstyle in system which promotes the opposite of said playtsyle. Condition damage is for the most part passive, this is done so that the condition user has a relative stable amount of damage all the time. By forcing situational/trigger traits, condition damage cannot maintain the stability it once has so why would you play condition damage if it has no advantages over power damage.

Another thing you risk lies in your sigil when procs are moved to sigils alone it means all class has equal access to them and must be balanced around the class the proc works the strongest. So 7 other classes will have a subpar proc and will never take them thus never invest in precision because that’s why condition builds take precision to make procs proc more often.

Ps: what class do you play? because there are a decent amount condition based procs.

I think that somehow that instead of new traits they wanted new skills/weapons. Also their definitions of active and passive is also very strange.

if you look at rune of the monk then you can see that the 6th slot is not filled with boon duration so it is safe to assume that there exists one with the 6th slots so the max boon duration from sigils will probably be 30%.

The point is that with your changes you would reconstruct the concept of condition damage. Right now condition damage is a weak, consant stream of damage. Conditional traits combined with the forced Triggers would remove the consatnt part of the trait. If condition damage isn’t constant then it is useless because the conditions will be removed after when you reached the peak of your damage. Also by moving all the procs to sigils would mean that either:
-condition builds are pidgeon holed in taking certain sigils
or
-condition builds have no use precision
Both changes are unfavorable in gw2.

Vox Hollow.2736:

I think you just have to make sure you’ve got a healthy balance of character building proactively shaping your gameplay across the whole of combat, and also giving you events within combat to reactively respond to. Esp; by segregating categories along character building slots.

Like;
Procs (Valiance, Sigil of Air) come from Sigils. Triggers (When Swap, When use Banner) come from Major Traits. Conditionals (If have full adrenaline, if Flanking) and Native Properties (Piercing, Bouncing) come from Minor Traits and Runes.

So that way it’s just not possible for you to overload your plate with too many reactive things to pay attention to, or have so many passive things combat isn’t dynamic. But all of your character building options still shape your combat experience in some way.

I may be wrong but this seems to be from a power perspective where active combat is a given due to the high burst skills. The other aspect of the damage conditions will not work in this system. This is because condition damage is far more passive in damage then power damage. This is to make sure that conditions becomes a steady stream of damage if conditions were more active then it would be useless to take said actives because of the nature of condition removal.

I’m not sure about this suggestion. Not everything should be done in the act of execution, it will overload the players with information they have to remember/process when they fight. In other words they will have to make too much decisions in too little time.

Also these traits does change gameplay a person wielding axe mastery will be less likely to switch to another weapon.

The internal cooldown will be still there. I think it’s 90 seconds.

Seriously a trait in a build that can give your allies potentially 25 stacks of might permanently and you are complaining?!

Kotone.6597:

Nice catch..Tim! Guess i miss the sigil of fire is still on crit
However I am not sure the word “defensive” they are using in the post, because sigil of Purity they are using there is kind of more offensive sigil imo but i may be wrong tho..

purity removes a condition I’m pretty sure it is defensive. Sigil of earth is 100% offensive so is sigil of tormentso we don’t have to wory about rabid gear become useles with the new sigils. The nerf to dhuumfire will make it less important but still not useless.

Kotone.6597:

I still think a soft cap of condi will solve the issue…like the lower condi wont be able to overwrite the higher ones….so we won’t suffer lose 3K dmg per trick due to dual sword warrior and his 500 per trick

This will not solve the core issue 5 condition users doing less then 5 times the damage of one condition user.

flow.6043:

Rennoko.5731:

DM GM: It is weak. Not much else to say. Additionally it should allow 50% of all sources of healing through, end of story.

Make that 100%, and there shouldn’t be a trait for it.
Healing should go through Shroud, period.

Rennoko.5731:

Spite GM: It is okay. Under the right circumstances it will be a reasonable sustain component. However as others have mentioned it is just like siphoning skills, in the since that optimally it will be good to impressive, and the other 95% of the time it will do an ignoreable amount of healing.

The major reason why this trait won’t be super hawt: see above.
But if you could actually heal in DS it wouldn’t be bad at all, actually it would be the first proper damage mitigation that scales with opponents.
Let’s assume 1 tick of bleeding does 150 damage. Mark of Blood on one target in WvW: 3 stacks would heal you for 22,5 hp per second. 5 targets: 112,5 hp. And that is from a single skill. You’ll actually do a lot more aoe condition damage than that. With a proper Epidemic maybe 5-10k aoe condi damage? That’s 250-500 hp/s right there.
But oh look! Major damage incoming, better go into Shroud to absorb it… and not heal at all -_-

You’re 100% right. Death shroud should allow healing (not sure of healing skill) , without it we can never truly balance traits like vampiric, parasitic bond, … .

Mystogan.4157:

Honestly i think ppl are jst mad cause terrormancer isnt good pve

The people are mad because 5 condition users to the damage do not 5 time the damage of 1 condition user. Power users don’t have that restriction (in fact they due more damage due to vulnerability stacking).

I can find it it only changes that some on proc will be made more reliable(higher % when the conditions are met) and that some defensive “on crits” will be “on hit”. Also on the photo of sigil of fire stands “50% on critical”.

Talonblaze.3175:

The only GM trait that I actually thought was useful out of the bunch was that Might sharing, but its sadly tacked onto that Tactics tree.

And here I thought it would be awesome with greatsword.

no, we still have barbed precision which makes up around 2~4 stacks of bleeding also where did you find this news?

Elvahaduken.3609:

and what if you want to heal someone but they’re out of range because the target is in front of you and they’re behind the target? move through/around until you get lined up to get the 800 heal off? lol wow, a guardian can do 1 dodge roll and get the same result with minimal healing power.

unyealding blast allows piercinq so as long as there are less then 5 enemies it will pass through but if you have hit five enemies then you have placed 10 stacks of vulnerabilty and that is support as well.

I think this can do some serious stuf in zergs. Add unyealding blast and it gets better.

armored shroud: can be good but I doubt it.
soul comprehension: sucks it’s just 2% on kill if you are not in death shroud which is they are trying to promote.

Parastic contagion: this is one I will love, it is just what I wanted, healing while doing condition damage Sad it doesn’t scale with healing power since we have death into life.
path of corruption is a bit weak but can be the thing that rips the stability of the enemy.
Unholy sanctuary: weak but if combined with high lf generation it can become usefull.
Unholy martir: This is a awesome support skill, the life force regenration makes it perfect. This trait justifies the place of sanctuary.
Renewing Blast: This can be some of the strongest support in zergs but only there.

All in all I’m ver happy with the new traits. I’m very excited with the changes, makes want me to gather some new armor sets.

Muchacho.2390:

As necro you should not really have a problem with conditions. And i am aware how vitality and ds work together. The thing however is the more healing abilities you have the better toughness becomes, while for vitality it is not the case. So what i mean it that this trait ,like all siphon traits we have, works better with toughness then with vitality.

Tell me how do you remove condition while in death shroud? because when you take this trait you want to be a lot in death shroud and there we have next to none condition removal.

Muchacho.2390:

Why the hell do you need vitality? Yes ds (and the lifeforce generating skills) scales with vitality but i would rather stack toughness instead of vitality if i go for healing power and dont forget toughness also effects ds.

1. conditions ignore tougness and death shroud is lacking in condition removal.
2. The advantage toughness has in a normal setting is because healing power doesn’t scale (directly) which LF generation does.
3.Every stat in toughness allows you equally long in death shroud as vitality against power builds.

Dalanor.5387:

I assume they remade the minors already and at least the GM minor helps someway to make synergy with this trait to heal with Regen too or enable allied heals to us in DS.

It was not about minor/major traits it was about stat optimalisation. Right now to have the most optimal stats to wield this trait you need healing and death shroud( thus healing power/vitality and death shroud). So that is 90 trait points, also the best armor for this trait is magi/shaman which is completely useless in pve and even not avaidable in pvp.

Also neccesairy stats healing power/vitality and in a boon duration/toughness trait line?

I actually feel a bit insulted with this anouncement.
They say like it is special getting healing while you are using your defensive mechanisms. Every other class gets it without problems while necromancers can only use it when necromancers have to invest 30 (then 6) trait points and our limit is regeneration while loosing all our other heals (even from other people).

The fact that this trait is in death magic does not help my opinion either.

Shinjo.6092:

I wonder why people think it’s ok for other classes to use auto attack against block/blind/aegis to get it removed vs thieves, who stealth attack BECOMES their auto attack, using it to remove them.

If what you propose goes through, every single class except thieves will have a free way of dealing with block/blind/aegis using their auto attack, whereas thieves will be punished because their auto attack is taken away in stealth. In fact, since auto attacks are usually a lot faster than backstab, I can argue that we are already being penalized in this regard. Is this balance?

You can’t just call backstab/surprise shot/… an auto attack since if we did that we would have to nerf backstab/surprise shot/… to the lvl of an auto attack which is ridicously low for the effort to create stealth.

zapv.8051:

To remove the passive effect, make it something like.
Passive: gain health when using a burst skill something like 2500 health per burst skill.
Active: gain 800hps for 10 seconds
cooldown 25 seconds

If i remember correctly a warrior can get off one burst skill every 8 seconds. That makes it 325 hps if used well. Then the active heals 8000 health. This is still a lot of healing overall. In say 26 seconds the warrior could get 10500 health which is a lot and still more than healing surge.

As a little change make it hit with a burst skill and up the healing a bit to 2750~3000. It adds a bit of counterplay to the skill.

you want to have 900 hp per critical hit? permantly?? with cleave this would be insane let not even speak about rifle piercing, greatsword 100 blades. And to add protection as well?

Before we start these are my personal views on the necromancer and are possible not complete or accurate.

1) It can be argued that the only way a necromancer can be usefull in a team PvE is by going full dps and we are lacking in it a bit. It’s not that we don’t have nice features like lot’s of debuff (weakness, cripple, vulnerability, blind and chill), boon stripping , condition damage and aoe but the most important fights are single boss fights so aoe falls. The bosses have either no boons or boons that refresh so quick it isn’t even funny anymore so boon stripping useless. Debuffs most bosses bareley move in group content and some can teleport, so cripple and chill gone. blind? reduced to 10% chance of hitting. Vulnerability is 50% reduced in duration. Weakness is 50% reduced in duration and most enemies have one hit kills so out of the question. Condition damage might work but most of the time in a group we suffer from teammates which place their own conditions and override your damage.

That doesn’t mean the necromancer is completely useless solo I believe wecan do very well but in group their are better choices.

2) race has barely any effect on skills since they are most of the time UP. Asura is a good choice though for it’s confusion but radition field is over shadowed by corrossive poison cloud. I prefer human though since it the avatar of melandr 5 skill is quite power full in a necro’s hand.

3-5 is depending on your build so I will take the three mayor build type:

powermancer: the power mancer is not a playstyle I play much but this is what I belive are the basics. weapons axe and dagger with a off hand of choice( most take either focus or warhorn but dagger is a valid option as well). Your gear should be either berserker or valkyrie. Here you try be as much as possible in death shroud at a rather close range. The most important trait lines are spite and soulreaping.

conditionmancer: weapons scepter/dagger and staff. The best gear choice gear is probably rabid or dire. Here you will be in the backrow spamming your condition skills. The most important trait lines are spite and curses. The most important traits are hemophilia, master of corruption, lingering curse. You can swap one of the last 2 with terror though. In spite the most important trait is dhuumfire. Your skill set will most likely exist of epidemic and blood is power.

minionmancer: the minionmancer is a build where you take at lot of minion skills. It is a rather free playstyle with lot of options (you can justify any weapon set or nearly any armor set). The basic of the build lies in death and blood magic with most important traits: flesh of the master and vampiric master.

Carighan.6758:

I think conditions – and boons – are simply much too common. I’d propose an overall change to both:

1. Less common. Much less common.
2. Much more powerful.

If I get crippled, it should be, well, crippling. Not something I circumvent with a teleport, a charge, simple swiftness or a cleanse.
If I get poisoned, my healing should falter.
If I bleed, I should be in immediate danger of dying.

However, if I work around the condition, I should have some assurance that it won’t immediately get reapplied.

Imagine for a moment if Bleed – a stacking condition – did the damage it currently deals at 25 stacks, per stack. However in turn, ~95% of applications are removed, especially all crit-procs (crit-proc or procced conditions are removed, period). Specific medium/long CD abilities would apply 1-3 stacks of bleeding for 4-6 seconds.

Oh, boon/condition duration/reduction food is ofc nerfed to ~5% then, and the traitline reduced to 15% total.

But in turn, everything is much much stronger. Swiftness should be a very brief but very noticeable burst of speed, Protection should be -50% or -66% damage, Might should be something like +5% or +10% damage per stack, etc etc. Fury should guarantee crits.

Boons:
It sounds like a great idea but it would make support type builds nearly impossible to execute let alone in a unorganized group. The timing required would hard to achieve.

Conditions:
Cleansing ruins this idea since cleansing works after the condition is applied, so if you finally manage to place your single stack of bleed you’ve lost since it was cleansed afterwards. Also the more stacks you can place at the same time the more you gear towards a power/burst type of damage.

amiavamp.9785:

but no other profession has a customizable profession mechanic bar yet.

What about ranger?

can’t be predicted? I take it that the mark symbol is invisible to the eye. It is also shown that they are different(except for chillblains and reapers mark) but just hard to differentiate.

It’s also not that they are without counters. You can easy counter them like don’t walk into them or dodge through them (I even think that a minion/pet can trigger them, but I’m not sure about teleports like blink). So I don’t think that it is an unfair advantage. If they decide to walk into a mark while they don’t know what type of mark it is then it is their problem.

I must admit that this chapter was a good read. But I wonder if this chapter is applicable to gw2 since this is a constantly changing game. The chapter described bugs (and the game in general) as something unchangeable and should just be integrated in your community.

If it does apply we should ask ourselves:
“How do we want to see the gameply of ‘the play to win’ gamers evolve?”,“How can we guide them to this goal?” and last but not least “How will this affect the scrubs?”
It sounds a bit academic but I think it is in the best interest that we answer these questions.

I do not aggree with this, since if they decide to walk into a mark then they have to be prepared for the consequences. If they take the gamble hoping it was the blood mark but got the putrid mark then they guessed wrong. They chose to take that risk, it’s their problem from that moment.

Another thing that needs to be considered is that marks are visible unlike traps of rangers/thief.