Guild Wars 2

I’ve had a fairly unchanged build since basically release, and while yes most of the time I would still be shroud stomping as usually, I’m just pointing out, that a good player can time CC to hit you in the 0.2s or whatever between stab dropping, and the stomp finishing, which can be mitigated doing this when needed, or even better, baiting people into using their CC, then going into DS before it hits.

NeXeD.3042:

Your opponent is running away from you kiting, you are at half health ds is on cool down staff is on cool down dagger 3 is on cooldown oh look dagger 2!

Yes, when literally everything else is unusuable, and they are not in melee range, the ONLY THING LEFT will be used. Doesn’t make it not awful, and have hilariously bad synergy with how the dagger otherwise operates.

with the upcoming change, you should be able to stomp, then activate DS AFTER to deliberately cover the entire last part of the stomp, or activate as you see incoming CC. This is the true benefit of the new change.

It’s bad because it is so weak, I am MORE survivable but not using it ever, relying on AA instead. This is from a practical standpoint, of a power build, what ever hilarious notion they have of this skill in theory does not matter in the current game.

One day, I hope, dagger two will not be literally useless. Ideally by completely removing what is there currently, and putting something useful in there. Like a small gap closer, or like, anything that isn’t an awful channeled ability that wastes valuable AA time.

I haven’t played for god knows how long, and while I would have liked to see a lot of other changes (like reducing spinal shiver’s cast time, because long cast tims are awful), these changes are over all very good FOR ME, or atleast, my power build in WvW, which I find quite amusing.

For example, the locust swarm change means I’ll have 24.75s of swiftness, on a 24s CD, which means I can swap out spec walk for spec armor, which was buffed along side last gasp. Axe is now slightly less awful, and glorious dagger autoattack hit two targets.
Letting us ‘officially’ shroudstomp is good for two reasons, firstly, it silences the babbies calling foul about it, and second, it lets us shroud stomp/res when we’re already in DS, which gives us a little more flexibility.

So yeah, plenty still needs to change, but I honestly can’t complain about what did change, for me personally, atleast.

Back before the weakness changes, I could stack perma weakness with my wvw build, sadly now it’s a useless trait, Path of corruption is extremely useful to any (non pve) build.

In terms of improved survivability, I cannot see any reason why you would want to use this trait, when there are much better survivability traits at much lower cost.

Last gasp is our best survivability trait, at 15 points, with an excellent range of traits to choose from for the 10 and 20 slots, for any build. Hell, I would argue that gluttony is more useful for survivability, then sanctuary, and it’s a near useless 5 point trait!

Perhaps having a gain health on on hit while in DS would be more useful, depending on the amount, but either way, this trait as is, is simply a waste of points.

Unless this trait allows all healing in DS (which from the wording, I doubt) then This isn’t a very exciting trait.
If it does allow all forms of healing however it could be quite interesting. That trait that causes life transfer to heal nearby friendlies for example, actually heals for a fair amount, so a handful of necro’s all healing each other + spec armor on would make for some hilarious burst healing.

Well if we’re necro’ing the thread…

Aegis on entering DS would be more useful then on leaving, sknce you can ‘f1 to block’ instead flash in flash out.

I’m not a fan of gaining protection when you get retaliation, since you’d basically have to use axe and spiteful spirit to get decent use out of it. Straight up protection on entering ds, or when hit by a crit are much less… restricting.

Blind on leaving DS would make dark pathing onto people much more amusing.

I have always fancied a necro mh sword, but honestly thin it should focus on power. In particular, look at the thief sword, it has a bit higher damage/scaling and has the nasty weakness + cripple on the last hit. Necro is a condi class, of course that doesn’t mean it needs to be condition damage. So if you scrap the bleeds/poison and add a little bit of LF gain + weakness and/or cripple, the auto would be pretty lovely. If nothing else, the auto does need LF gain to make it properly viable.

With the 2nd skill, they will never, ever, give us a ground targetted blink. Hell, they probbly wouldn’t give us a blink like the guardian sword, but that would atleast be more reasonable. Also 8 seconds seems a pretty short CD, especially considering most weapons have CD reduction traits, which would make it pretty powerful for me.

With the 3rd skill just to clarify, is it a ground targetted AOE or not? You have a range, but the description suggests otherwise. Also with the pulsing effect, is that damage and chill, or just the chill, with damage on cast? I do love the idea of an ice field and any extra chill is always appreciated for any build. This skill might be a tad strong, not sure.

Overall however, currently your idea is a bit to hybrid-ish for my tastes – I don’t think it’s very efficient. Also there is no LF gain on any of these skills, only from your trait suggestion.

I was going to make some long-winded post but man, where to start. Hm, guess I’ll start with the changes already proposed.

The changes to chill of death, weakening shroud and banshee’s wail are all good Although about weakening shroud, I agree with others; 2s base weakness is rather low, since you’re having a joke if you thing people are going to be trying to max condi duration, shorter DS CD, and spamming DS as often as they can. You simply can’t do this and still be effective, it’s an outright waste of DS, although if the DS CD was based on when you entered DS, not left it, it would be a different matter…

Reanimator is just beating a dead horse – if you’re removing it/merging it into something else later great, but decreasing the CD makes it just as useless in 90% of the game.

The change to reaper’s protection is also good – so many things in this game, atleast in my experience playing necro, is about how often you can do things, not how powerful they are, which is why adding a CD onto withering precision so utterly killed it – it’s far easier to cleanse and then forget about it, whereas before, under certain conditions (heh) you could apply enough hits (admitttedly with my 97% crit chance) from various things to much more reliably maintain weakness on someone. Short of scrapping withering precision entirely, I would suggest having no ICD/a very short ICD, with a reduced duration to make the trait useful.

The buffs to the GM minors in death/blood magic are good I suppose… but I’ll struggle to find people that actually invest high into those lines – for most aspects of the game, it’s just not really useful to go much into either of those lines.

Vital persistence is completely overshadowed by the other traits in the line. I cannot conceive a build where vital persistence is better then path of midnight, spectral mastery or unyielding blast, they’re just so much better in comparison. Soul reaping in general just has a lot of good traits.

There’s plenty more to talk about but I’m far too lazy to keep typing for long, so I’ll just cover a few things.

If you’re clearing out the death magic minors in the future, I think you should add aegis on entering DS either as an adept minor or major. Firstly this fits somewhat with the fact that this trait line boosts boon duration (although admittedly this aegis should only last 1 or 2 seconds) and to help cover the old functionality of DS being able to absorb a large hit. This would still be weaker then that, but would allow for skillful use and timing of DS to absorb nasty attacks in both PvP or PvE. Failing that (or with it, depending on where you were to put it) shrouded removal, while useful (playing with it solo roaming was surprisingly useful at times), doesn’t really cut it, compared to giving out protection, or hm, yeah the adept DM traits are pretty meh to me, but anyway I feel this trait would be quite suited to the adept minor spot – it’s not a powerful ability, but it’s the sort of thing that proves to be a minor (eh? eh?) improvement, regardless of build. Also not using dagger OH or staff severely neuters your ability to shed conditions.

But what ever traits you do put into DM eventually, just make sure they have utility value to more then just one sort of build, ideally supportive, defensive utility, it fits the line, after all.

Blah blah other stuff, when I can be bothered to type it blah blah etc.

Thanks.

Anubarak.3012:

Flissy.4093:

How has this gone unnoticed for over a year?

Maybe we should test if our healing skills heals our enemy’s too O.O
Healway guards would die out

Funny you mention that… The necro heal Well of Blood, used to heal EVERYTHING, friend or foe in the AOE, for months, even after it was extensively documented and reported.

Replace it with 2-3s aegis on entering DS, give us a trait that requires active, and thoughtful use to get the most out of it. Also brings a little bit of the functionality of DS before damage went through to hp.

Interesting changes coming up, but one thing (among many) I would like to see is the removal of the trait reanimator. I’m sure you’re aware that virtually no one actually like it, and it activating after you killing something makes it really just forgettable, outside of the rare HEROIC meat shield against a CC by the rat monkey.

I suggested this after the change to damage bleeding through Life force into HP, but I think replacing reanimator (or if not, putting it somewhere else) with a trait to give aegis on entering DS. This would give us back that ability to block a large hit with DS, but would require much more intelligent usage of DS to actually make it count; it would be an active trait that requires intelligent use, instead of passive ‘free rat monkey’ after kills.

Knote.2904:

Only difference is an interupt from another player at long distance, that’s really the only difference.

Only difference? that is a massive difference in both WvW and PvP, the mojority of the time.

Mesmer also has invuln stomp with distortion, which on a 60s CD is pretty decent.

Blind stomps are great 1v1, (especially blackpowder with it’s lolnoCD) but with multiple enemies around it’s still easy to get CC’d by another person, which against a co-ordinated group, is a tad likely.

Stability is as you said vulnerable to just being beaten down or boon corrupted, which is why a proper shroudstomp is so great. You’re protected from CC by stability (there’s like a 0.1s window where you can get CC’d before the stomp though), and LF makes it next to impossible to down you before pulling it off. On top of that, shroudstomping has a 10s CD, making it the overall best stomp in my opinion, combining reliability with frequency. Of course you have to use foot in the grave for it, which won’t sit well for how a lot of necro’s play (and generally unviable for tpvp), but when I use it in WvW it truly is delicious.

Andele this is why it’s always easiest to test hp related junk like this on other players, so you can actually know exactly what’s going on.

Even without fitg, shroudstomp is still very useful in a lot of situations, namely where your health is low enough that the downed target/his friends can outright down you before you pull the stomp off; having to burn through your LF on top of that makes a difference.

fishergrip.4082:

Pack stability, but then necro will remove it. Proceed to get chain feared.

Or just have more then five boons, or more then one source of stability or hell, invuln/evade work just as fine. Which ever way you choose, all you have to do is get around corrupt boon, I’d be far more worried about a thief stripping your stability then a necro.

Ara.4569:

I find Precision to be overrated for condition builds:

- Barbed Precision is laughable: roughly 33% to apply 1 bleed tick. Don’t even mention it.
- Dhuumfire just need a crit every 10 sec, and every 10 sec you can get Fury: with only 20 points in Curses, no extra precision, that’s already 34% crit rate.
- Earth sigil can be switched to Geomancy (3 bleeds of 7 sec base) or any other decent sigil.

I can see Dire becoming the new Rabid in terms of popularity.

Barbed precision has a base duration of 2 seconds now.

Ultimately I have two moves for damage, dagger 1 and well of suffering. Every single other skill is either to better let you use those two, or to use when you using those two isn’t appropriate.

This means DS 2,3 and 5. Spectral grasp, constant swiftness and extremely high cripple uptime via horn 5 and Swalk, dag 3, horn 4, axe 3, focus 5 and glorious golem charge. All these skills help you keep on people extremely well (and of course is with 3 reduced CD traits, it simply doesn’t work without them).

then axe 2, focus 4, DS 1 and 4 are ranged damage for when melee is not viable.

While other classes can chase better (just get super sanic warrior), but you’ll struggle to find something that can hold things better, but seriously, without the lower CD’s on everything you simply can’t manage, simply looking at certain other classes escape CD’s.

Condition duration food (both increase and decrease) is massively overpowered compared to other food type and thanks to koi cakes, are also dirt cheap.

Condi necro has much higher (practical) damage in wvw, almost all of it is AOE, and epidemic is without question one of the best skills in the game, mainly due to it’s tiny CD. Keep in mind epidemic’ing just a handful of bleeds/other conditions gets a lot of AOE damage for that CD, so when you epi a full rapid necro’s AOE rotation (something like 15-18 bleeds, burning, 3 stacks of torment and confusion, 20s+ weakness, cripple, chill and poison, everything, save for the confusion being AOE) it is a *tad strong.

That said I still prefer power for solo roaming, where a necro can be the best build in the game to prevent enemy disengagement, whereas condi notably struggles if the enemy seriously tries to disengage; most don’t.

Spectral walk + warhorn with banshee’s wail will (literally only just) get you perm swiftness. Having spectral mastery gives comfortable perma swiftness, whereas having both spectral mastery and banshee’s wail gives very easy to maintain perm swiftness.

If you use the flesh golem’s active ability (charge) if the golem is CC’d at the time, the skill will go on full CD, and the golem will not charge and will not gain stability.

I would assume the golem is supposed to stun break out, securing the charge when combined with the stability, otherwise atleast the skill needs to be on ‘short CD’ (what happens to all your skills when you yourself get CC’d, so you can’t waste it like that.

Spectral attunement is supposed to give 5% LF wehn you activate spectral skills, and increase their duration.
In a recent patch spectral grasp was changed to give 15% from it’s previous 10% LF on use. While it still increases the duration of the chill, it no longer grants extra LF (shuld be 20% now with the trait)
The trait last gasp activates the skills spectral armor at 50% HP, but unlike the actual utility skill, is completely uneffected by spectral attunement. It’s not effected by spectral mastery either.

(I have a few of these I’m going to post john, I was going to make one thread per issue, but if it’s easier for you I can make it in a single thread or something.)

If you leave death shroud by pressing your death shroud key again, the cool down on death shroud starts when you leave death shroud. If you are forced out of death shroud (degen/damage) then that cool down is based off when you entered death shroud.

Consistency means that either the cool down should always be based off when you enter, or always off when you leave.

When you are forced out of death shroud, (natural degen/taking damage) almost always your non weapon skills (6-0) are ‘locked out’. This isn’t the skills being darkened, this is literally there are no skills in those slots, FOR ONE FULL SECOND after getting booted out of death shroud.

This is an extremely problematic bug in PvP as well as PvE, and has been reported in the necro forum for months without response or acknowledgement.

What are the hell are they talking about with chill of death -it’s a trait that doesn’t have any range or radius tool tip. Anet, please.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Oh yeah, totally. You’d have to build really tanky, maybe go minions for the life siphoning and passive condi removal, maybe just load up on stunbreakers + Spectral Wall. The idea is, you’d be the tasty bait that’s remarkably hard to swallow, and then the thief backstabs them while they’re choking on you. Pop Plague and you’ll give your thief probably the full 20 seconds to kill them while you have them perma-blinded and poisoned.

It’d be harder to play than some of these other combinations, but not impossible. I kinda wish I knew more people in game to try it out though (to be clear, this is all theorycraft for me).

I WvW with a thief or 2 a lot, it’s not like it’s a bad ally, it’s just a fact you’re going to get primaried. Honestly it’s more useful to have other power necro’s… I have a couple of guild mates who I gave my build to, and we would just run as 2 or 3 completely identical builds… It’s quite hilarious how hard we CC the hell out of people, the main burst does 14k or so damage in about 2s, it was pretty hilarious when that was 2 or 3 times stronger, and it made stripping boons off targets like double/triple stability application warriors a tad easy.

Of course that is probably not the ideal duo, but it is hella fun.

Yeah I agree that D/D ele would be the nicest party ‘in general’, as they give you so many boons, can share delicious aura’s, and can give you some good healing when you need it. All while doing good damage and still being survivable.

The problem with thief is that you’re going to get focused since he’s cloaking a lot, of course having a friendly shadow refugee is great, but as a duo, I don’t think a thief is outstanding.

Guardians can give you delicious boons (21 seconds of stability, yes please), but they’re never going to focus the guard if it’s just the two of you.

Ranger’s can tank for you rather well, and spirits/healing spring is quite nice to have around in general.

I play with engineers a lot, elixer r is pretty neat, but they offer less direct benefits to you, but I find them general handy to have around.

And of course both rangers and engineers can poop out conditions for you to epi off. Oh, and rangers can use that neato horn skill before a fight then swap it out, as I personally appreciate the fury, if nothing else.

It just has good scaling. Like, extremely good scaling, with relation to your own team. Of course own it does nothing and is completely useless, but I still think 15s is too short, oh well.

I’m surprised they haven’t increased the CD on epidemic yet, it’s such a strong force multiplier with the right team, it’s pretty hilarious.

Also perplexity will be outright disgusting if they fix the whole fear being an interrupt thing. If only they would release a new rune set that would be worth using for me, rather then having used the same set since week 1.

Dagger 1 is great, dagger 3 is good but with a tad long cast, dagger 2 is a poor skill with no synergy with the other two skills. It’s a low powered ranged channel that give low amounts of hp, you literally benefit more from using the 1 skill due to the much higher damage inflicted and great LF generation. If you’re in a position where you don’t want to be in melee range, then that’s what your second weapon set/death shroud is for.

Dagger two should be a melee skill of some sort, I would of course love some heart seeker ranged leap (so gain less hp, but faster action, so it’s actually worth using, and could allow to close after the immob etc), but honestly so many things would just work better with the other two skills then what we have now.

Thief dagger doesn’t have cleave, no reason for us to have it either, if we want to be doing multi-target damage we’ve already got plenty of tools for that as is.

If he’s crying about not starting with adren at the start of a fight, then tell him to go stack adren.

Usually I’ll start at 100%, unless there are no mobs nearby, in which case anything over 50% is good enough.

>Apply one stack of bleeding for four seconds and crippled for four seconds, every second.

Although honestly if you’re going to complain about dodge traits, it’s the mesmer’s which is the strongest.

Every single time people bring this up I go into pvp and prove this again. What ever crazy stuff is going on or whatever effectively the LF pool was previously 60%, and is currently 100%.

Everyone makes all these complex tests that involve timing, or jumping off cliffs, when just taking a single, large hit from another player makes for the most accurate possible test, and is also extremely simple to do.

But yeah, no clue what’s going on, on the Anet side, and it’s pretty disappointing to get zero response back from them.

The two most notable situations where it hits the wrong thing for me is firstly rangers, where the pet will often be behind them when they’re moving around, but if they’re within range of the aoe chill it’s not to bad.
The second case, is my most hated skill, PHASE RETREAT. The projectile will try follow them when they phase retreat, but since the skill drops a clone, it almost always hits that instead. Heh.

Hey man, we’ve warhorn 4 (again I find no information on any ICD. Surely we can’t hit (up to, in unlikely circumstances) 5 people with a few stacks of 20s confusion.

Speaking of which, does that effect have an ICD, and if it does, how long. But if they actually work properly, these seems like rather strong runes for conditions builds.

Honestly it was better before the recent patch. Before you could keep within 1200 or so of your target, and it would still teleport you to them, even if they projectile flew a significantly longer distance. This make it good for actually chasing targets.

After the patch, they increased the projectile speed which was nice, but the change to prevent the projectile from going more then 1200 was a surprisingly significant nerf. It’s in a better state now if your target isn’t outright running away from you, (so in PvP it’s still mainly fine) but when chasing people down while in WvW it’s really killer to our ability to prevent people from disengaging. It’s not useless or anything, but it was an unfortunate change.

While I would certainly enjoy if it was an instant effect skill instead of a projectile, I doubt it would happen, I remember one dev citing the slow projectile speed as an intended, advantageous thing, to cast skills while the projectile was travelling. Of course I’d much rather be able to instantly teleport to them then start casting skills… But yeah.

It’s pointless to argue the ‘best’ stat to choose, because it all depends on the build, the game mode, the meta, blah blah blah – it all changes what you might need.

In general if I was forced to choose however, I would say vitality.

As everyone knows, a 10:1 health:armor ratio gives you the best EHP, but you have to remember that’s only against direct damage, on top of the fact that EHP might not be what’s ultimately needed.

Toughness reduces direct damage only, making it good for sustain against direct damage, as it makes all heals more meaningful. It does nothing to help against condition damage.

Vitality will make it take longer to kill you with both direct and condition damage but will give you no improved sustain against direct damage. having LF generation % based further improves condition damage sponging of vit investment.

Lastly, we have terrible sustain anyway, so building that way isn’t terribly competitive in the first place.

Also to talk about the current PvP meta, which is a heavy condi meta, looking at the normal burning/terror builds you can see why there is little reason for people to change the meta. We have a rabid amulet, that’s toughness. We (typically) have undead runes. More toughness. Some people still have investment in death magic, or atleast almost no terrormancers have investment in blood magic. So (sometimes) more toughness. That means we have zero defensive investment against condition damage (atleast stat wise), but a significant amount of resistance to direct damage. That is to say, beat condition builds… with more conditions.

Of course then you can argue that we have good access to condition removal so we don’t need to worry about conditions stat wise, or you might with your team have perm protection so not be so worried about direction damage. There’s a lot of factors, many of which are out of your control, so while you should still think carefully about which one to invest in (if you have the luxury of choice), but you should also remember that neither one is simply ‘better’, they are simply different.

It’s quite easy to test, as I’ve done myself.
with a thief guild mate, I had 20k hp, full LF. He cloaks, I enter DS, he BS’s me, I leave immediately. He does 5.4k or something, and I am left with 74% LF. There is no natural degen involved in this test (and even if there was one tick, that would mean we would have an even higher LF pool), so it seems pretty simple and straight forward.

Wait what? Our pool is 60% with proper damage? Multiple people have tested it to be 100-120%, and many more tested it as 60% pre-patch (when did the double damage bug occur?).

Are we all just completely inept/insane or is something else going on?

If you have two spectral skills, always go for spectral mastery, however I wouldn’t suggest using locust signet along with spectral walk. (Well, I would never suggest using locust signet except for running around if you’re not in the perma swiftness master race)

Basically I would advise you to remember that your goal is to kill (emphasis on kill, not down) the enemy before they do the same to you.
1)Obviously you need damage (and more importantly, how to effectively apply that damage)
2) Positioning (if you can’t catch someone, doesn’t matter if they can’t kill you, because you sure as hell won’t kill them. Also keeping melee players out of melee range goes here)
3) Finishing the fight (you have to be able to finish people off one way or another, often with their allies trying to save them/kill you at the same time. Even if you don’t have stability learn to shroudstomp. Seriously, you will have so many fights where you down someone while on very low health against one or more people, and that LF buffer keeps you alive while you get the stomp off.

I don’t think whether it ‘fits’ necro really matters to be honest, if it’s that much of a deal for necro blocking a hit, just give it some dark edgy name and it will fit right in.

Before I would have said a warrior is one of the easier things for me to catch. Now, with the right build (one extremely annoying fellow in particular springs to mind) it’s the most mobile, difficult to catch class bar non, with so many movement skills, and so hard to pin down with all it’s anti condition hilarity.

Also while I haven’t tried myself in WvW, in PvP atleast, rabid warrior is actually rather good; rabid necro’s in particular it shreds with literally no worries. It is also rather amusing how many thieves and other nimble classes get WRECKED by impale even after running away, as even if they condi cleanse, they can’t remove the sword, so it keep stacking torment on them. While I’m not sure if it’s ready for high end tPvP yadda yadda, it’s certainly not weak anymore.