Scourge has some of the best vigor uptime though. It’s not even tied to a trait or anything, you just use one of the three abilities you have that bleed yourself and then hit F2.
Barrier still hasn’t been tested yet in Raids, or the new Raid. Saying it’s not wanted is speaking too soon.
I was hopeful before, but worried about anymore ‘necro too stronk, must nerf again’ from anet.
Seriously though, it also depends on how barrier works in raid scenarios. Would an 80% damage hit from failed vg green deal 80% of hp+barrier (bad design) or 80% hp, thereby removing the barrier and making the hit less problematic?
Pretty sure none of those mechanics are percentage based, since I survive kitten as a necro that instant downs other classes with less health all the time
The problem with the idea of legendary weapons is that a) none of them fit necro class theme and b) a weapon only has one use. Necro scepter will always be a condi only weapon, dagger will always only be power, etc, staff will always only be for wvw/pvp builds which are currently all condi and are going to stay that way with scourge. Even if the new scepter comes out and it’s a cool zombie themed legendary scepter, what stats are you going to put on it, not viper?
Power reaper is already fine for everything except raids, and in raids having dps that relies on deathly chill is going to suck just as badly as the current viper gs meta. We won’t know until we see the post-beta balance changes.
Base necromancer has no many design issues, it has literally no builds that do anything good in any context, they’ve completely abandoned it and are instead putting bandages on it in the form of the elite spec system.
If they wanted to make base necromancer worthwhile they could do something like increase life blast damage by 800% and then have it be a power damage spec based around building and spending life force with these huge bursty single target damage chunks, but they can’t even fix power reaper, they’re not going to fix power necro.
On raid dummy the numbers for power reaper might be low, but I feel like it might do decently in actual raids because I see a lot of meta classes pulling sub-14k dps over an actual fight, or 16-18k dps when it’s a meta dragonhunter playing their class properly. Considering all power reaper has to do is autoattack with dagger and drop wells and sometimes use shroud and then press 2 a lot for packets of 30k damage over about 2 seconds I’d imagine the numbers at the end of the fight might be pretty decent, it seems like it’d be much easier for reaper to hit closer to their raid dummy benchmark.
Has anyone actually tested the valk reaper build in a no-requirements pug group with arc dps running?
But why would your character’s F5 pulse inflict dhuumfire? Dhuumfire specifically is inflicted via F1.
The sand shade’s F5 is probably doing dhuumfire because it pulse triggers F1, which seems odd, but believable.
Because at a fundamental level, everything your sand shades do is also supposed to be also done by the scourge themselves. A key part of the class is that you have access to barrier/clense/fear/pulsing damage from your f2-f5 without needing to place shades at all.
Having used this in open world for the first time, I feel like our new f1 needs to be an instant cast at least in pve. Placing shades just feels weirdly slow, it seems like there’s also a large amount of “aftercast” delay. This spec would play much better if you could dump shades in much the same way you dump wells or staff marks, and you need to dump shades a lot because as I discovered in the stress test, a lot of our traits only affect the shades attacks, not our own. What I mean by this is for example dhuumfire will pulse on every hit of a sand shade’s f5, but the f5 that pulses out from our actual character does not inflict dhuumfire.
If you don’t already have ascended viper gear I wouldn’t stress about getting it unless you want to dump a ton of time and resources into a meta that may change in 22 days
Vipers gear may still be the best for scourge, but if the expansions comes out and there’s a new 3-stat armor that has condi damage and expertise, or a 4 stat that has some crap like condition damage expertise healing power and vitality, those would pretty much immediately replace viper as the scourge meta.
I didn’t follow this advice myself because I wanted to get back into raiding asap, but if you’re not stressed about that then there’s no reason to jump the shark now. You can probably keep running whatever you were running 3 years ago and do fine.
I think warhorn will almost always be better than offhand dagger for Scourge. The increased life force gain is far more valuable.
Without Offhand Dagger, then Corruptions won’t work. Also Warhorn is more used in PvP and Power builds.
Mainhand Dagger will also generate Life Force WAY faster than the pitiful Warhorn ability that has a 30 second CD.
Yeah but any time you’re attacking with mainhand dagger is time you’re not applying scepter conditions which will make you do less damage
The cooldowns on warhorn and torch skills are longer then weapon swap times, so you can run scepter with offhand torch and offhand warhorn in second set and lose nothing while having the extra life force gain
You can also convert the conditions that are given you by corruptions at any time, it’s slightly less damage on the enemy but more boons for you.
Nothing you have described is a rework, just a buff. It’s already the most unique, interesting, and powerful pvp weapon in the game so I doubt that will happen. It already works great with power/condi hybrid gear, what is what viper gear is, and that’s the current meta though nobody uses staff in pve because the only thing that matters in pve is dps output.
The scourge is OP because most GW2 players are too stupid to think “maybe I shouldn’t try to melee the guy whos primary class mechanic is pulsing area denial”
Are you unaware that you can just have a single offhand in your second weapon set and pressing swap weapons will swap your offhand, giving you full benefits of any on-weapon-swap things, while keeping your mainhand?
You don’t need anything other then scepter. If you want to run geomancy or something then just put geomancy runes in your offhand dagger and torch and they will function perfectly.
Sorry, but when I reached “Because of this change it killed any possibility that a minion build could be viable in the future. Not to mention that Minion skills themselves were lacking in power to make them a real viable option in most if not all situations.” I stopped reading. This is such BS…
I run minion build and its fantastic! Some traits/skills might use tweaks, but your statement is just laughable…
Oh you’ve figured out how to do at least 30k dps with minions on 4k health raid dummy? Because that’s the only PvE metric that has any relevance at all. Survivability is worthless because even a glass ele can survive all content that exists in the game. World content is worthless because any class can do that fine. The only PvE part of the game where a thing being good matters is in raids.
I think you’re overlooking that while the punishment skills won’t be amazing, they will probably be better then the godkitten minions that are currently our best skills for most fights, and will be our main way of proccing Demonic Lore since the only other way we have to apply torment is on a 10 second cooldown.
1: How Much Damage does the Necromancer Actually Do?
I will preface this by noting once again that this entire discussion is predicated on Deathly Chill being nerfed into the ground to make way for a new Necromancer Condi Spec. Given this, I will be mainly examining the damage output of Power Reaper. Now, the most recent benchmarks I could find with corroborating evidence that actually list Power Reaper set the build’s DPS with realistic buffs at 23,385. We should all agree that this is low, but there is a question of how low it is. Once that is figured out, we can be more equipped to arrive at workable balance changes. So some context. Examining qT’s benchmarks prior to today’s patch:
As it stands, Power Reaper is not listed on these benchmarks, due to its DPS being lower than that of all meta DPS specs of all other classes, including for example Jalis Revenant, Hammer Guardian, and of all things Condi Mesmer. It is 0.5% higher than Power Phalanx Strength Berserker. The only meta builds with lower DPS are Power PS Zerker and pure support Chronomancer.
If you were to increase the damage of all necromancer skills by 50%, Power Reaper DPS against large hitboxes would be less than all meta Tempest builds and comparable to Dragonhunter. Against small hitboxes, Power Reaper would be only the third highest DPS, following Condi Daredevil and Condi Engineer. So an across-the-board 50% damage buff to all necromancer skills would not make power reaper the highest DPS class in any context
If you were to increase the damage of all necromancer skills by 33%, Power Reaper DPS would be lower than all of the following classes: Condi Daredevil, Power Daredevil, Condi Engineer, Condi Tempest, Condi Ranger, and Condi Berserker. DPS would also be in-line with Power Engineer.
If you were to increase the damage of all necromancer skills by 25%, Power Reaper DPS would be under 30k, less than all of the above in addition to: All meta Tempest builds, Condi Revenant, Power Engineer, D/D Thief, and Sc/T/GS Dragonhunter, narrowly edging out Condi PS Zerker.
Has anyone actually managed to pug kill keep construct as a necro? I just need this one kill to complete envoy armor 1 achievement but every group I have joined either a) can’t kill it after hours of attempts, or b) tells me to switch to another class or get kicked. It’s weird it’s like I am actively being locked out of content because of my class choice COLIN PLS
You have no idea what people are eventually going to settle on. Keep with your shaman gear for launch, it can’t hurt, but people really need time to figure out what the class is best at. You got healing power gear, but the scourge doesn’t really have any healing. It can with blood magic, but will transfusion be available frequently enough for that to be worth it? Probably not, but we won’t know until we see it in action.
We’ll have to see what happens when they destroy the condi food in a few days. If they remove condition duration from food and then just leave necro like it is now then it might just be time to uninstall again because sure as hell ain’t going to be getting any legendary insights for the foreseeable future.
Scourge being good in raids will really depend on whether or not the class is able to put out competitive DPS at the same time as providing these mediocre buffs.
If you need to use a cheesy strat to account for a majority of your damage, then there’s a larger overarching problem here that needs to be addressed.
This problem has needed to be addressed since 2013. The problem is that necromancer is a completely broken unusable trash class that the developers ignore.
I’m getting the impression you don’t raid, which makes you not qualified to comment on pve balance.
The power damage from viper is significant. When you look at the bleeds each scepter auto inflicts, and then look at your crit damage from the power portion of scepter auto, you’ll notice it’s almost equal. Around 1300 bleed and 1000-2000 power damage per crit.
Anet’s current approach to necro in pvp right now is nerf reapers just a little bit and then to make every other class as dominant as reaper was in its prime where it was an unstoppable killing machine, only in this process they forget that other classes have kittenloads of hard mitigation, CC, and movement skills which the reaper does not, WHICH IS WHAT THE REAPER WAS BALANCED AROUND. So now warriors and guardians and rangers and revenants are better, faster, more dominant reapers and also they nerfed our already kittenty soft mitigation by 17%.
High level fractals aren’t new things though, it’s literally the same kitten, there is no differently
Maybe people who don’t want to throw away money should plan for the future and play the right build from the start. I understand this forum is filled with people who play random made up builds that barely work for anything other then leveling content, but if you’re putting together an ascended set and not minmaxing with what is demonstrably, measurably, mathematically the most effective build, then that is your own fault.
What’s the point of paying extra gold to skip right to t4 fractals when the main thing you get from t4 fractals is more gold
Fractals is not the place to try new builds. You take established builds that work into fractals. Also it’s not that expensive to get new trinkets and stat swap mystic forge your armor and weapons, like 15 gold total for a really expensive inscription set.
The best minion build you can get for PvE is the viper horrors build. Jagged Horrors are minions with decaying health that come from two places, a grandmaster death magic trait, and your 4th skill in lich form.
Viper horror is great, but for solo PvE and map exploration (what the OP is looking for) it lacks speed unless you run with the speed signet on your bar, or switch one of your trait lines to Blood Magic. Power MM reaper is much easier and cheaper to run in solo open world PvE. But if you want to do high level fractals or raiding, that’s a different story.
Yeah, so you just switch either CPC or epi for locust sig depending on the mobs in the area, that’s no reason to switch to an inferior stat set that will set you back if you later decide to try raiding
The best minion build you can get for PvE is the viper horrors build. Jagged Horrors are minions with decaying health that come from two places, a grandmaster death magic trait, and your 4th skill in lich form.
1) Every build you just listed was PvE. Necromancer was never optimal and barely viable for PvE due to its lackluster damage output in comparison to every other class. You can’t pull the “what are you smoking” card when Necro builds in PvE practically didn’t even exist in PvE prior to HoT.
2) You spent 4 paragraphs trying to prove me wrong, but 2/3 builds you listed were “This build that could have been used for Necro that didn’t use staff WAS TRASH LMAO XD” so I fail to grasp your point.
3) You kinda cherry-picked the best part of Staff Ele in PvE for comparison purposes, since the Ele build was almost literally LavaFontMeteorIceBow.exe
PvE is the only mode that matters though, especially with the clown shoes bullkitten we’ve seen come out of the spvp balance department recently.
I don’t see how that 2) is in any way invalid, necro had one pve build and two poorly designed disgraces and none of them used staff.
Staff having a use in spvp is beside the point, especially since you only use it to dump marks on an objective/player and then switch away to other weapons to actually attack with, which reinforces what I was saying that the staff autoattack is complete trash and is the main part of the weapon that really needs a solid redesign since it conflicts with the rest of the weapon.
