Guild Wars 2

Firebird.8324:

Crinn.7864:

Necro’s don’t hold up to focus fire anywhere near well enough to function as a bunker.

Soldier necro does, which is basically the Mercenary’s necro of tomorrow.

The loss in defensive stats hits necro twice as hard since shroud scales with vitality and toughness so I wouldn’t consider soldier equal to mercenary.

I’m not sure necromancers will run mercenary in the next balance patch. Necromancers are looking toward corupt boon and might take curses for the cooldown reduction on corrupt boon and consume conditions. If they do take curses mercenary will lose alot of its appeal since it has no precision. Menders might make a good necro amulet for a hybrid damage support role. It is a bit theory crating but I see potential in it.

Chill has become more common with HoT, the corruption of resistance did not help either. However HoT intruduced an extra set of counters against chill. Another thing HoT did was create an enormous meta shift away from condition removal to take up their shiny elite specs. It is not that chill has no counters, most people just refuse to take them.

runeblade.7514:

Tim.6450:

runeblade.7514:

Rym.1469:

runeblade.7514:

flow.6043:

Good idea, makes sense.
Although, pve necros probably wouldn’t be happy to lose the stat bonus. And icds ruin traits, but other than that it’s a solid suggestion.

I suggest moving the stat bonus to Parasitic Contagion.

It will give Pure condi necro more damage + healing. Making it more synergistic.

First off, PC has to heal through Shroud to be any synergistic, but that’s other topic.

Your suggestion would weaken PvE Necro. Condition stat increase has to be located on either Master of Corruption or replace one of two useless adept traits (Chilling Darkness/ Jumping puzzle trait).

How is moving the stat bonus of Lingering curse to parasitic contagion weakening PvE necro?

Because you split extra condition duration on scepter skills from the condition damage stat bonus in 2 traits you can’t take together.

Why would that happen? I didn’t say anywhere in my post to split condition duration from condition damage.

Did you dream it up?

runeblade.7514:

Put the Boon corrupt inside Lingering Curse instead of making it innate. Then give the condi stat boost to Parasitic contagion.

Lingering curses boost the duration of scepter skills, the stat bonus is moved to parasitic contagion a trait in the same tier as lingering curses. So you split the duration from the stat boost. Unless you mean moving the scepter skill duration increases to parasitic contagion as well. Which means we have 2 scepter traits which makes less sense.

runeblade.7514:

Rym.1469:

runeblade.7514:

flow.6043:

Good idea, makes sense.
Although, pve necros probably wouldn’t be happy to lose the stat bonus. And icds ruin traits, but other than that it’s a solid suggestion.

I suggest moving the stat bonus to Parasitic Contagion.

It will give Pure condi necro more damage + healing. Making it more synergistic.

First off, PC has to heal through Shroud to be any synergistic, but that’s other topic.

Your suggestion would weaken PvE Necro. Condition stat increase has to be located on either Master of Corruption or replace one of two useless adept traits (Chilling Darkness/ Jumping puzzle trait).

How is moving the stat bonus of Lingering curse to parasitic contagion weakening PvE necro?

Because you split extra condition duration on scepter skills from the condition damage stat bonus in 2 traits you can’t take together.

Seyiwaji.4082:

You overestimate, this boon corrupion on the 3rd hit.
Some classes have remove boon on auto attack. It didn’t change the world.

It’s not the removal of the boon I consider OP, it is what kind of conditions are being applied and how strong they are. If the skill acted more like "nothing can save you "(remove and apply a specific condition) it would be fine. Now we are using the boon conversion table which includes slow and fear. What isn’t strong lasts incredibly long.

runeblade.7514:

flow.6043:

Good idea, makes sense.
Although, pve necros probably wouldn’t be happy to lose the stat bonus. And icds ruin traits, but other than that it’s a solid suggestion.

I suggest moving the stat bonus to Parasitic Contagion.

It will give Pure condi necro more damage + healing. Making it more synergistic.

Condition pve necros also need the duration boost for scepter. They don’t really need the healing.

Bhawb.7408:

Tissitra.4153:

So if you trait corruptions, then every time you use corrupt boon you apply at most 3 conditions to your target (IF you hit AND they have this many boons) , while you ALWAYS apply 2 conditions to yourself…

I’d love to know this magical world you’re playing in where enemies don’t have 3 boons literally every single second of every game.

I see them in my fights from time, they are not that noticable (most of them are necro’s) but you have thise moments were the foe has less then 3 boons.

Tissitra.4153:

Realistically, how often do you land the full autoattack chain on scepter in actual combat? This almost exclusively happens if your opponent is already overloaded with condis and/or is running away. I predict that this change will not have a big impact.

It is actually quite easy, scepter uto attack is not that noticable nor slow. By the way what has overloaded with condis to do with it, it’s still a ver powerfull condi on an auto attack.

Tissitra.4153:

So if you trait corruptions, then every time you use corrupt boon you apply at most 3 conditions to your target (IF you hit AND they have this many boons) , while you ALWAYS apply 2 conditions to yourself…

Yep, fantastic is it not.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

Necromantic Corruption
Shrouded Removal
Sigil of Generosity come to mind as things that could handle self-conditions on a 10 sec cd. Not saying any of these are meta but to say “not a single transfer skill” is incorrect. I guess shrouded removal is just negation, not transfer, though.

Fair enough on Necromantic Corruption. The rest on the other hand is only 1 condi removed against the 2 of corrupt boon. I suppose a traited shrouded removal can work with perfect shroud timing but then you get some serious sacrifices for the corrupt boon.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Tim.6450:

That’s so stupid, now the auto attack that can deal
up to 8.5 seconds of blind or
up to 17,25 seconds of weakness or
3 stacks of vulnerability for up to 17,25 seconds or
up to 5,25 seconds of SLOW or
up to 17,25 seconds of poison or
up to 5,25 seconds of chilled or
3 stacks of consusion for up to 5,25 seconds or
up to 1,75 seconds of FEAR or
up to 17,25 seconds of crippled or
3 stacks of bleed for up to 17,25 seconds
in a realistic pvp setup on top of it’s base effects
That’s broken.

This is just ridiculously overpowered for an auto attack.

To be honest it is traited auto attack with a common necro rune but in that table I forgot the chill and bleed duration boosts. My point still stands though.

Rym.1469:

Fair point. There’s Lingering Curse, but:

1. Boon corrupt may not be affected by it

Skills description is in my favor still some of those things are still scary even without 50% extra duration (33% fear + perma slow)

2. LC isn’t that great for PvP.

This change could be the trigger.

Euh guys, 47% poison uptime untraited? 70% traited? Not a single transfer skill that can even hope to keep up? The only thing that can keep up against an untraited corrupt boon is a 3 hit traited suffer. Traited forget it. 3663 damage per use traited from self harm for 3 converted conditions? Can’t heal up the damage with siphons because of poison.

That’s so stupid, now the auto attack that can deal
up to 8.5 seconds of blind or
up to 17,25 seconds of weakness or
3 stacks of vulnerability for up to 17,25 seconds or
up to 5,25 seconds of SLOW or
up to 17,25 seconds of poison or
up to 6 seconds of chilled or
3 stacks of consusion for up to 5,25 seconds or
up to 1,75 seconds of FEAR or
up to 17,25 seconds of crippled or
3 stacks of bleed for up to 20,25 seconds
in a realistic pvp setup on top of it’s base effects
That’s broken.

EDIT forgot chill and bleed duration boost

-1 for a new boon, the game already has too many boons.
-1 for Torch being a power/condi/support weapon: make up your mind
+3 for support shroud, the idea is quite solid
-1 for weak shroud effect on a incredible slow shroud
-2 for having a chance healing skill
-1 for being a undecisive about being ranged or not
-1 for utility on downing of allies
-1 for sacrificing both life force and health
-1 for incredible long condi immunities
-1 for super specific condi immunities
+2 for utility 4
-1 for superspeed
+2 for master 2
result -4.
That was basically my thoughts about the shaman from a gameplay point of view. The biggest problem is that you have to commit to a few things and work with them. Reaper worked with melee damage and chill and gave the tools make it to work and to enhance said style. The core necromancer can fill in the gaps. I suggest ranged support and (health xor life force) sacrifices. Also the name shaman sounds a bit unfitting since shamans are people who can access spirits which I miss.

Oh my the filth of this build, I don’t want to meet that anytime soon in any format. I would love to find out how a zerker would deal with this. Also why don’t you run reapers protection?

Where do you find minions useful?
PvE,wvw and pvp
Where do you find minions not useful?
none
Would you use a full set of minions without minion traits
never
would you use one minion with minion traits
Yes, but only because the trait is minor
would you use one minion without minion traits
absolutely
which gear sets would you use minions with?
all

P.S. Flesh wurm skews the results ;-)

Wintermute.5408:

To not create another fashion topic – can anybody advice dress-like outfit for female necro, that doesn’t make her look like stripper? :P

Well, with the vague description with what you want I created two dress-like setups, they need a bit polishing in terms of dyes though.

My personal set up for a nazgul look (i asume the necro is male) would be:
reaper’s hood
acolyte shoulders
arah chest
seer gloves
arah pants
glorious boots

There is one flaw: the shoulder and chestplate clip, so inspect it very well.

Tadsoul.6951:

We have traits that benefit us for staying in shroud and traits that benefit us for flashing shroud.
shroud flashing builds or play style doesnt really work so i suggest a trait to make them work
Shrouded attunement
while your shroud is recharging 50% of incoming damage is redirect towards your lifeforce.

I wonder if a necromancer with this trait will ever be able to enter death shroud? I would prefer a flashing trait that gives us some defense back like :
shrouded resistance: when entering shroud your life force bar can’t decrease for 2 seconds, increase the cooldown off exit shroud skills by 2 seconds.

SlayerSixx.5763:

Every moba I’ve seen doesn’t allow people of different rank to play ranked with each other because it’d defeat the purpose of ranked. How on earth would this be a bad suggestion?

Because rank has currently no meaning. I’m a rank higher then my friend and I’m pretty sure we’re on a similar skill level and I might be talking positively about myself.

I don’t think the trait system is the big problem for a lack of balance. I think that the small amount of balance patches is what kills balance. Anet does a very small amount of balance patches but the balance patches are quite influential. This means that a lot of variables have changed and inbalance is more likely to occur. If the they started with smaller but more frequent patches they will slowly move closer to a balanced state or at least close to. It comes at big disadvantage though, reworks are less likely to occur and may result in conceptually flawed concepts to remain flawed forever.

I never have queue problems (as a diamond) , +-3 minutes solo or group in most cases never more then 5 minutes, regardless on what time of the day I play. Very good times.

I think reaper resbot is an option. The problem with the cleric build is that transfusion is almost mandatory but then you can’t take vampiric rituals. Perhaps is full damage the best option for this one, I wouldn’t run well of blood in that kind of build, but I would still run ritual of life.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Consider this: if Deathly Chill were moved outside of Reaper, would “condition Reaper” exist at all? I don’t think so. Dhuumfire alone does not give enough reason to take an entire trait line.

I would think it will depending on which traitline it would drop, if it where to drop in spite or soul reaping, it would be taken especially soul reaping since you can take deathly chill + blighter’s boon). Spite would be a bit inconveniant with the loss of signets of sufferering, but not completely. Blood magic ,death magic and curses are a too much damage loss too work.

I think the better question is: If Deathly Chill were moved outside of Reaper would it make people stop running Reaper? I don’t think so, Deathly chill synergises too much with the reaper shroud and trait line: bitter chill (if spite) + executioner scythe, frost aura, shrivers of dread+ staff+deathly chill, chill + chilling victory, soul spiral,….

Another thing to mention is that people do not run Reaper because of deathly chill, they run reaper because of the Reaper Shroud. Stability, better mobility and faster attacks make reaper a lot more fun too play. It also synergises better with core necromancer traits then Death Shroud. Moving deathly chill will not change this.

What may improve the usage of death shroud in condi and power builds is a better schroud to suit the needs of the necromancer. But more importantly it has to be fun to use in death shroud. The pingpongmancer, the long cooldowns and slow attack speed and low synergy will not make people run Death Shroud no matter what traits are moved. It’s simply more fun to play reaper. You can nerf Reaper but I don’t think it will make people run Death Shroud. They will make people run away from necromancer in total. Reaper did pull players to the necromancer profession , they even leveled necro’s just for that elite spec.

I think that deathly chill is a bit too thematic and influential too move outside a elite spec. With every specialisation you will have to consider deathly chill as a staple. I also don’t consider this as a pure condition trait, it is more like a trait for hybrid builds.

Making the power/condi division between DS and RS is not preferable, it would make them both a bit stale. Also consider that Reaper is the first specialisation of many. I want death shroud to be more mid range while giving options to both power/condi/melee/ranged builds. With that in mind I suggest the following changes.

Life blast : lower cast and aftercast but same power dps. Inflicts 2~3 second bleed on hit.

Dark Path: Seperate the claw and teleport. The claw inflicts 1~3 stack of 4~5 seconds poison and 3~4 seconds chill. You then can telport to the target instantly and inflict 1~2 second of chill, this option stays 3~5 seconds on the target. Cooldown is reduced to 10 seconds. So if you don’t teleport, you get the claw back after 10 seconds since the cast, otherwhise you get the claw back 10 seconds after the teleport.

Doom: longer fear duration and/or lower cooldown.

Life transfer: Now gives a stack of stability of 2~3 seconds per pulse. Cooldown lowered to 30~35 seconds. Maybe add an extra 1% of lifeforce on hit.

Tainted shackles: Cooldown lowered to 30~35 seconds.

Aktium.9506:

Because I can see condi burst spiralling out of control if there’s just buffs and no nerfs. I’d rather not have another dhuumfire where they nerf everything except the problem until they do nerf the problem while never reverting the other changes they made because of the problem in the first place leaving us worse off than we began.

Burst out of control??? Have you seen other classes’ condi burst? Terror and deathly chill proc together at 1708 / second for 1 second a fear/chill combo, 2 seconds if 100% fear duration. Oh no the horror … . Also like I said before this burst comes at a price either a lower sustained damage or sustain.

I had this idea and I’m not sure how to judge it. Let’s make fear of death like this: Fear lasts 100% longer. When corrupting/removing a boon prioritize resistance and stability (in that order).

If this trait is not strong enough, I would add when you corrupt or remove resistance or stability corrupt one extra boon, 5second icd.

Why do you need to nerf deathly chill for it though? The avarage carrion reaper doesn’t even run curses. So to have terror/deathly chill, you have to drop spite or soul reaping. In other words, you either sacrifice a lot of might which drastically lowers damage across the build or sacrifice burning on reaper shroud #1 and almost all defense. It’s just a trade-off from sustained damage or sustain for burst which is fair.

Ps: At base dethly chills only deals 615, the rest comes from spite.

With the introduction of resistance fear has become a lot more lackluster. So it is time to buff it. The introduction of extra boons made the occurence of corrupting stability less likely, on top of that if your foe has both stability and resistance the chance of getting a succesful fear becomes a lot smaller. That can be solved by buffing corruptions of boons. I also think that most fears are too short for their cooldown, probably made so out of fear of boosted durations. So a duration buff on some/most would be fine.

@Arcades Saboth: try fear the red guardian of the first raid boss.

I like it’s simplicity. It is quite enjoyable too move through (no forced stupid jumps or walking on ledges) and it has a not obnoxious secondary mechanic. It’s not my favorite though that’s nifelheim.

Dadnir.5038:

I find vampiric ritual already way to selfish… If anything the necromancer need less selfish traits.

Transfusion is 100% altruistic. Vampiric rituals is semi-altruistic : 3 our of 5 offer full support (blood,power and darkness), the other 2 have some elements of support as well (vul and boon curruption) but are now used as burst tools and vampiric rituals does offer aoe protection . In short blood magic got one altruistic trait and one semi-altruitic one so having a full selfish one could be a nice supplement to the line.

I would prefer if unholy was replaced with unholy sanctuary. Synergy with life from death and Last Rites would be very much appreciated. It also helps that blood magic has better life force regen potential (either soul marks + MoE or warhorn+Banshee’s Wail). It also gives blood magic a selfish grandmaster.

I think foot in the grave is fine in what it does. However I also think it does not have the support for the playstyle in which it would shine: a style wherein a player stays in shroud as little as possible (I don’t say flash because you can never ignore the utility or damage absorbtion of the shroud). So either we need some traits to support that style or we need an elite spec around a shorter shroud duration.

I’m not sure if marauder is better over berserker. I think that we can do a better damage/survability trade by using runes of durability instead of switching to marauder.

You are talking about revenant or thief right? The thief suffers from extremely long cooldowns and revenants is a bit conditional. The necromancer on top has a niche where it can scale with the amount of foes without much problems. It is a bit undertuned in my opinion especially the scaling but conceptually the necro siphons are good. On top of that we have the unique ability in signet of vampirism.

I’m not sure if it is prisoner’s dillema because B could just play normally and leech off the people who are throwing increasing his chances at victory.

Exos.3472:

Rym.1469:

Core Necromancer has much easier time vs. Condition Revenants (since you can take Curses instead of Reaper and bring second passive guaranteed plague sig + more boon corruption) and I think that would be it.

With the current mechanics on boon corruption (nerfed) and rev mallyx’s resistance uptime I doubt it would be any more usefull.

I’m not sure about that because a curse necromancer removes 6 extra boons every 24 seconds. The extra pressure removal from the signet is fantastic as well.

Boon corruption is random since specialisation patch but it was a buff compared to the past because the corruption order was so stupid. Right now boon removal/corruption is in a low position because it is inherently much much weaker then condition removal.

A reason is that you have to hit a foe with a skill to remove/corrupt boons unlike most condition removal skills. Necro signet traited goes through most defense and that is considered OP (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Signet-of-Vampirism-ignores-LOS).

Signet reaper is strong but it is not strong from it’s boon corruption capabilities. It tips the scale from mediocre to strong but it is not that important. I run a soldier reaper with 2 traited signets and I’m doing fine.

+1
/15charrreq

Tadsoul.6951:

I think the strength of Tim’s verison of putrid defense would need testing to really determine if its overpowered.
you could make it more potent and less often like 10s cd aoe 4s poison 5s

Side note what if they gave death magic a whole poison theme to it.
putrid defense
take less damage from poisoned foes and increase poison duration
deadly strength
Gain power based on your toughness. summon a poison cloud on your next target after you gain lifeforce
vile miasma
increases the healing penalty of your poison, stun foe around you when you use a stun break

since this would have a new grand master i would replace unholy sanctuary

Of course all my ideas need testing, I’m not perfect.

For a poison related death magic seems a bit to specialised since we are not the masters of poison.We do have it but not that much. It could be an idea for an elite spec though.

skullfaerie.7203:

Yup, wasted an entire day yesterday only to end up where I started- zero pips. Guess I need to finally l2p now.

l2p will only help you temporary, since matchmaking will try to give you a 50% win/loss rate. So whill you can improve the mmr system will then match you with more skilled players making your effort almost useless. Better is to find a point where you can’t drop, form a loser league group and lose a couple of 20 matches and then smurf your way to the next save point. Rinse and repeat.

While I understand the sentiment, I don’t think this is the way to go. You are boosting what exists to make it attractive. The problem is that it tries being a defensive trait line while heavily promoting offense. In itself that isn’t a problem but we have already similar things spread over the profession while death magic offers nothing special. As long this maintains the trait line will invalidate another or vice versa. This is what I would change this. The focus will be on defense through migitation.

Minors:
- remove soul comprehension
- replace it with “fall of the mighty: gain 1,5~2% damage reduction for every boon on the foe when struck” OR “death’s embrace: when in death shroud hits have 30% less crit chance”.
Adept major:
-Putrid defense: take 7~10% less damage from foes with poison, when hit drop a patch of toxic ooze on the ground (radius 120~180, inflicts 1s of poison per second, duration 2~4s, icd 1s)

Master major:
- Reapers protection: gain 10~15% life force when inflicted with a cc (5s ICD).

Grandmaster major:
- Move unholy sanctuary to blood magic ( by removing unholy martyr)
- Replace it with: shrouded resistance: when entering shroud your life force bar can’t decrease for 2 seconds, increase the cooldown off exit shroud skills by 2 seconds.

Best tries where by spectral mastey when running wall/armor. Eventually I decided against it, VP was just slightly better in that case.

It ignores a lot more (blinds for sure, blocks I’m pretty confident), I’m not sure it should stay, on the other hand it is a 1,25 cast time heal skill with an obbligated follow up. It needs to be strong in some way(s) which it isn’t at the moment. Besides Bhawb brings up agood point about buffs.

I’m pretty sure it is intended. The +% stat modifiers use base stats otherwhise we could have infinte health and power warriors.

If you do it please film it. I would join myself but I woud l have to beat the vale guardian first.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Don’t Reapers do better condition damage than Engineers against moving targets? Not just because of Torment, but also because they don’t rely on pulsing fields for any of their damage?

That’s irrelevant, phase 1,2 and 4 can be done with the boss completely immobile (even the pull to the mushroom is done outside the timer), phase 3 can be done with little movement. Phase 5 is the only one with forced movement and I’m not sure about that one. Even if the engi gets green duty it’s still more valuabe due to it’s knockback.

The only reason I think condi necro is taken is becauser there aren’t enough condi engi’s.

Well condi reaper is generally accepted as a decent second choice after engi.