Guild Wars 2

gluttony isn’t multiplicative, you can test it by performing multiple casts of life force generating abilities, and there is no difference, although if it was it would be such a small difference it would be a joke in practice. Having a pure 5% increase though seems OP, especially for an adept trait though, so I have no clue what it should/supposed to be.

Well that’s great, now the reliable way of testing might not even apply outside of PvP.

Yes. Their art team and 3D design guys have been pressed into service ‘working on something better or fixing bugs.’

Read the bug thread, its sticky’d on the top of the necro sub forum. It’s a known, and extremely annoying bug where it simply copies conditions instead of transferring them. I wouldn’t use it until it eventually gets fixed.

digi, the point of locust swarm is that it’s extremely difficult for them to get out of melee range once you’re there. If they’re a ranged class then you have dark path regardless of build, with its useful chill, or spectral grasp. And then depending on your other weapons there is a good chance you’ll have a chill there, with either the staff or focus, and both the axe and dagger main hand can slow/stop them from moving within 600.
There should seriously be no real issue with closing in on an enemy, and while chill would be great, chill is literally better then cripple in every way, so while I would be happy to replace every cripple we have with chill, I’m not going to hold my breath.

While cripple has 2nd priority in condition removal/conversion, necro’s lack any movement abilities for escape except the wurm, which is unreliable, and pretty much a waste of a utility. While it’s certainly not impossible for necro’s to disengage in PvP, I would say it has it tougher then every other class by far, as our best method is running with locust, dropping marks (most notable chilblains to slow, putrid to transfer any slowing conditions, and reaper’s to turn them around for a moment), while other classes can blink, stealth, ride lightning, and all that fun stuff.

While I agree that DS could be much better, I try and do the best with what we’ve got.
Dark path is an amazing skill, although it would be nice if it was faster; while doom is an invaluable interrupt if nothing else. Life transfer is solid multi-target damage with good range, but yeah, LB needs to fire faster.
Also you say you’re leaving behind your skills when you go into DS, but if you go into DS while your other significant skills are on CD, that’s extra damage you can inflict on your opponent, while taking no ‘true’ health loss, while letting the CD of other skills tick over.

If you want to play melee, use the warhorn with the dagger. Seriously, with banshee wail, you can perm cripple on top of its extra damage and swiftness.

Sadly if you want to do this for PvP, get used to not using dagger 2. Ever. Other then that though, it is actually very good, but it’s extremely unforgiving, in that if you miss time some of your key CD’s, you’ll die fast. Also as with all necro’s, its pretty much impossible to disengage from a fight that’s going against us.

Well of sufferer and well of corruption are your friends here, after you immobilize your target, you can dagger 1 them in the back and drop wells, doing extremely good damage, and ruining the boons of classes like warriors and guardians. Also when thieves or mesmers try to stealth, your locust swarm and wells will keep killing them; I’ve killed plenty this way.

Last thing I would suggest is to max out the curses trait line, for withering precision. Because you do so many attacks, so fast (dagger auto is our faster attack, and the wells + locust swarm tick every second), you’ll have no problem keeping weakness on your target basically all the time, which reduces incoming damage a lot, and makes it harder to avoid yours. Also the 66% chance to bleed adds a bit of extra damage as well, and it goes without saying, that target the weak is of great effect.

As hilariously great this would be, this would be in a word, overpowered. I would immediately go dagger/horn and axe/focus, heavily invest in crit and soul reaping (and that gain life force on crit+ persistance traits), and proceed to have effectively infinite quickness with the dagger’s auto attack life gain, in addition to the occasional chunk more from axe 2 and focus 4. Doesn’t matter how poor our damage more or may not be, but this would make us awfully powerful. (would be fun to see this for a day, just for fun though)

Spectral has to be used when they’re running pretty much directly away (or I guess towards) you, it’s the longest pull in the game, with a nice chill, I use well of suffering and spectral grasp and walk when on my own, and pretty much in WvW in general.

WvW is pretty easy, I run around with around 70% crit chance (84 if you have all the orbs), and 113% crit damage, so I crit over 3k with the final strike on dagger 1. I use Dagger/horn and either staff or axe focus if I’m certain its only 1 target. The only people I can’t reliably beat are competent mesmers, very bulky warriors, and stealth abusing thieves that use shortbow (since I can’t see them even when they destealth, but if they try melee me, then I can kill them with wells and locust swarm very fast.)

The warhorn + spectral walk is a must in WvW, gives you more or less perm swiftness, and perm cripple with horn 5 alone. Once you’ve made them waste their dodges, or if they don’t bother at all, immobilize, drop wells, 1111, no matter how much damage they do to you, with DS, they can’t kill you faster then you can kill them. (except for the bulky warriors, they’re quite tricky unless you can make them waste some of their CD’s, which isn’t too hard.

Invulnerable means you’re not getting hit, working as intended, unfortunate as that might be. (otherwise you could bait people into your spawn in WvW, and just let them generate might before healing and going to town)

1) stability: It would be nice if the stability trait gave 5 seconds, but then it would be possible to trait/skill into having almost perm stability, but an unmodifiable 5 seconds would be nice. Giving perhaps spectral armor some stability could work, as atm it’s CD is to long to be useful. Having a stability utility that also provides protection and life force would be nice.

2) Yeah, not much to add, it’s a fairly significant issue.

3) If they removed the reduction of power on the DS auto attack based on lifeforce it would be fine, As it’s essentially some free time to do extra damage/effects. Alternatively making the auto fire faster works too.

4) At the moment once a necro commits to a fight, they’re in it to the end, it’definitely an issue, but i’m not sure what suitable skill/utility would fix it. perhaps they could make death shroud more like other transforms (so you can see your boons/conditions etc), and give it a 5th skill as an escape of some sort. Dunno.

You say we only have one stun break. Last I checked we have three, spectral walk, spectral armor and the signet.

The signet has long standing bugs, and now needs to be targeted, which is an issue, and spectral armor’s CD is far to long in my opinion, But as a dagger necro I almost always have spectral walk on me.

5) I don’t think it’s quite as bad as you make it to be, but it is notable compared to other classes.

I have tried this before, and I can perform the stomp as I go into death shroud no problem, But I found that even though I would perform the animation, nothing would come of it. After seeing this I tried again with the same results, any ideas?

That was a very long sentence.

I’m pretty satisfied with Dagger 1 as is, although stealing endurance would be nice. The other dagger attacks aren’t cleaving (ele doesn’t count as it’s a magic attack), so I wouldn’t expect that to come in.

Life siphon certainly needs to have a much faster channel/remove channel altogether, as outside PvE it’s just not effective.

Dark pact would honestly be too strong if it had a gap closer as well, as the thief has that exact ability, but the difference is that their immobilize is only 1 second, ours is 3. The other two options could be nice though. Actually making dark pact steal endurance would be rather useful, but obviously not if dagger 1 stole endurance also, a you would basically be able to leave them dodgeless… as fun as that would be.

The mark of blood isn’t actually a blast finisher, it’s just that you create a blast finisher along with the mark of blood, hence I can dodge roll off a cliff with mark of evasion and the fall one, and create a poison field + area weakness even if the mark isn’t triggered.

Because It’s separate from the mark, I don’t think it’s a bug because they would have had to actively decide to add in an additional blast finish effect.

I’m curious as to why you think the warhorn is useless, the 2 second daze gives you a lot of breathing room, and lets you maintain offensive momentum.

The number 5 when traited gives 13 seconds of swiftness, and each second ticks 2 seconds of cripple (without investment in condition duration), which makes it extremely difficult for them to pull distance; and of course it generates life force, and can proc all the on crit traits, which helps maintain permanent weakness.

I’m not saying its better then dagger or focus, but with dagger mainhand it’s very useful, atleast.

Edit: And to the people talking about bull’s rush + stability, you can either corrupt boon him if you activates stability before the bull’s rush, turning stability into fear, or if he does it after simply use your stun break to get out of it, and he’s wasted all his utilities.
If you don’t have a stun break for precisely this reason, then there’s your problem. Hell, our few stun breaks are actually not that bad.

A dragonbrand player by the username of galaxia.7421, a ranger, deliberately waited where we had destroyed the inner wall of a keep. once we captured the keep, the wall went back up around him, giving him an area where it was pretty much impossible to hurt him, yet he could pop out at any time to attack us, or even kill the npcs nearby. He could have waypointed out or simply walked out (he walked half way out multiple times to attack and send out his pet), but chose to remain inside for an hour(and counting).

If you’re actually going through with this, then good on you, I’m hoping to get the legendary hammer one day, sadly I’ve all but ran out of money trying to forge the precursor.

Pretty much. It’s also the best way to shutdown dagger storm thieves, breaks their stability, cancels their elite and leaves them running out of control…

fun fact, the trait which reduces horn cool down and boosts duration also boosts the cripple duration. That is, the locust effect last longer (13 seconds?), but the amount that each cripple tick last for also increases, even if the tooltip doesn’t show it.. Testing on golems showed that there was a full 13 seconds of cripple left when the locusts vanished, and that’s without condition duration boosts.

Locust swarm is very, very good for dagger/warhorn, as well as any situation where you need to keep on top of someone, and I often use the warhorn trait over ground targeted wells purely because it can keep them slowed for so long.

The staff fear I believe should stay at one second, it’s a long range, AOE fear, and is useful as is.
Doom however (our death shroud fear) I feel would be better at 2 seconds, as it’s a single target fear that does nothing else.

Anything more then 2 seconds however, would be potentially over powered, as you would easily be able to turn a 3 second fear into a 5 second one, even more in WvW because of food buffs, and that’s more ridiculous then the thief’s AOE fear.

You have a curious impression of FUN, I have yet to see us beat a door to death with our swords with a server outnumbering zerg, and I wonder if you even know who our commander is.

A lot of FUN stopped playing WvW or playing altogether due to all the common reasons, we’re still around though. Some guilds did jump ship though, some I think for the better.

While I think having crit damage with precision would be nice, it would shoehorn crit/precision combo for all the classes, as crit damage only directly works with precision, a little ironic considering my last post but whatever.

Why do you say that death shroud necessitates power? Life force if anything would be more linked to toughness, as that’s the only one that is useful regardless of how you use your life force.

Precision dagger builds take great advantage of the life force/crit damage, as it essentially heals more, and of course does more damage. The issue I have here however is with curses and its precision/condition damage.
Scepter/trident are the only weapons that inflict damaging conditions with their auto attack, while axe does no damage condition, dagger only does a bleed with its 5th skill, and neither focus or war horn inflict damaging conditions.
As said earlier, the dagger can do a fair bit of bleed damage due to the minor trait and its high attack speed, so I don’t think the condition damage is wasted so to speak, but I can say that any other attribute would be more useful to me then condition damage.

The necromancer’s dagger auto attack chain is honestly quite decent as is when used correctly, so I don’t really think cleave is needed, hell, how do you hit three people with a stabbing attack with a dagger?

Extra range I don’t think is needed either, if you have your other abilities setup properly, but it would really benefit from any extra range it can get, as it is a little unforgiving when up against tougher melee classes due to being out classed in raw damage potential.

The main issue I have with the dagger is its life steal ability, in PvE it works fine, but in any PvP situation its rather long channel time is a serious issue, because if you compare the health you gain and the damage you inflict compared to the damage and life force gain of the auto attack of the auto attack (also keeping in mind the other playing is going to be trying to kill as well), it’s usually much more practical for me to simply auto attack, except against inexperienced melee players… where it doesn’t matter anyway. If life siphon either worked twice as fast, or wasn’t a channel (ie: you could do other actions while it does its thing) it would be far more useful, in my opinion. If anyone thinks that would be to strong, then I could more then live with having a longer cool down.

@Shredicus.8706 Dark pact would be to powerful if it teleported you to your target like the thief’s Infiltrator’s Strike, which has the same range and damage, but only immobilizes for 1 second. being able to teleport to them and stab them in the back for 3 seconds, as fun as it sounds is to much. As is you can easily close the gap with those 2 extra seconds of immobilize, casting some other ability as you do so, or simply punish them if used while already on them.
Having dark path with more range/faster would be nice though, but having spectral grasp move faster and simply work more reliably I think would be more significant.

all short range ‘teleport’ skills, like blink, necrotic travel, shadowstep(or whaever the thief short bow thing is called) behave the same way currently, that is you cannot cross gap or go up cliffs with them.

shintai have you even tested this? It doesn’t matter which weapon they are on, they will proc regardless.

The same crit sigils do stack as far as I can tell, it’s just basic probability, so lets say a sigil has a 30% proc chance, if you have two of them, it’s a 51% chance. 30% chance for the first to proc, leaving a remaining 70%, 30% of which is 21%. 30 + 21 = 51% chance.

fifteen character bump.

Sigils that activate on crit share a cool down, that is: if you proc with sigil A, sigil B will not activate until the cool down of sigil A has expired. This is all well and good, except for the case of crit sigils that do not have a cool down, namely the sigl of strength and frailty.

These sigils will not activate if another crit sigil is on cool down, despite the fact that they do not have cool downs of their own. So there are a few questions I have to ask here

1: Are these two sigils supposed to be effected by the cool down of other sigils?

2: Do these sigils in fact have cool downs of their own, but not stated in the description, such as the sigil of earth, and if so, what is the cool down? (this would render question 1 moot, as they would not be different from the other crit sigils, and it would merely be a description problem.)

3: Are sigils even supposed to use a shared cool down? I don’t see any real reason for them to do so, but if it’s a design choice it would be good to actually know from a dev. (if it is in fact unintended, then this would also make question 1 moot.)

On a related note, while testing this bug, I found that if you have two steady weapons, both with crit sigils, the off hand sigil will never activate, but if the primary weapon sigil is not a crit sigil (say a sigil of force) it will activate as normal. I’m not sure if this is intended or not.

It only induces the CD if interrupted at a fairly precise point in the channel (assuming at the very end, I can’t really test it on my own) but this can happen with any channeling ability, and I assumed it was intended.

While trying to find the answer myself using steady weapons in Spvp I discovered something curious.

usually, a crit sigil can activate from a crit with either weapon. (a sigil of rage on the off hand can active when your main hand crits), but while testing on the target golems, the sigil on the off hand (sigil of strength at the time, 30% chance on crit, with a 60% crit chance) would never active while auto attacking. to make sure the main hand sigil wasn’t interfering, I used a main hand with a sigil of force (passive bonus, doesn’t active on crit), and found that the off hand sigil would work as normal.

This is curious as when it wasn’t working the main hand sigil was a frailty, while the off hand was a sigil of strength. Both sigils are identical except one gives might, the other vulnerability, and neither have cool downs. When used independently, regardless of which weapon they’re on, they would active as expected, and i would get a few stacks up pretty much constantly. When I used both for a good 20 minutes, I not once got the off hand sigil to activate, even when only using the attacks of the off hand weapon.

Tl;DR Off hand crit sigils do not activate in Spvp, or at the very least not with steady weapons, intended or not?

Edit: After testing with regular weapons, this seems to only happen with steady weapons, although the question of is it intended remains the same.

Edit: This isn’t really in the right sub forum anymore as it’s more of a question to the dev’s then other players now. If any dev’s could respond with a ‘working as intended’ or ’it’s a bug’, it would be greatly appreciated!

I know that sigils that active on crit share a cool down (if you trigger your sigil of rage, your sigil of earth won’t be able to active for that 45 seconds and vice versa), but if you have a sigil with a cool down on one weapon (lets say the sigil of rage), and a sigil without a cool down, which still activates on crit, (such as the sigil of strength) will it be unable to activate while the sigil of rage is on cool down, or will it be able to operate independently?

Alternatively do all sigils without cool downs in their description have hidden ones like the sigil of earth?

Edit: After testing with non steady weapons (see below), the cool down of one crit sigil will indeed prevent a crit sigil without its own cool down from activating. Is this intentional, or is it merely because they simply have a hidden cool down like the sigil of earth?

GOM borderland garrison is (or was yesterday at the very least) also bugged. It’s happening a lot, nothing much we can do but wait for a fix in the distant future.

The problem with orbs is most notable when trying to retake an orb. The combined bonus of three orbs as well as the guild bonuses are quite significant.

You mentioned reduced cost of siege with out manned Elite, did you mean supply cost or cost to buy? If you meant purchase cost that would have the issue of if people want to buy blueprints, they can just wait till they’re out manned, and just buy a whole pile; but then purchasing blueprints isn’t that great anyway.

In my opinion orb bonuses should be reward based, and out manned should be performance based. Orbs should reward the controlling team with better rewards for completing WvW objectives and/or more points for holding positions as you’ve mentioned. Out manned I don’t have a big issue with, but if it was equivalent of the current minor orb buff, I feel that would be something more practical, but not overpowering.

The first time I saw Phelum was during the week match against eredon, and the first thing I see him doing is standing at spawn and bad mouthing ‘scrub’ guilds, claiming that they were taking up valuable slots on the borderland (even though there was no queue at the time), and he singled out FUN multiple time for no reason that I have been able to discover since.

He repeatedly called us a disgrace, a waste of space and bads, most of the time while doing absolutely nothing at spawn. Dispite this we’ve always been willing to work with him and his guild, yet he continuously acts like a kitten to FUN, and altogether refuses to help.

With today’s attack on Askalion he was being clearly immature, trying to make us upset in map chat, claiming how he was “taking his guild members out of our zerg”, mockingly saying good luck with our reduced numbers. he later came over to the fight with his guild members, not to help, but to kick his own guild mates who were trying to help us, before telling us he was leaving with all his guild mates.

Pretty much every time I’ve seen him in WvW I’ve seen him insults “certain guilds” or just outright FUN, talking about how terrible we are, about how great his guild is, and how everyone should merge into it.

If he doesn’t want to help us, I honestly don’t care, but it’s a problem when he is publicly trying to weaken our WvW efforts, and publicly insulting us.