Guild Wars 2

In the worst case scenario jagged horrors can lead to more damage on you through epidemic (although they won’t take many conditions before dying…) or bouncing attacks like a certain ranger’s axe 1 skill, which will hit you twice if you have a pet out.

Also very rarely, but it does happen, I’ll have a minion randomly attack a mob that tries (unsuccessfully) to attack me, putting me in combat.

So that’s why I suggest aegis on entering DS, it’s a more practical but arguably not too strong defensive tool, which at the very least would be interesting for anet to try internally.

Heuh. Like I said yesterday, I honestly think power is more practical for solo roaming, outside of a duel I could have ran from you and it would be extremely hard for you to catch me.
In that match up though you certainly have the advantage in actual fighting though, I can’t cope with that much condition kitten .

That’s why putting an ICD on stuff like withering precision and spec armor/walk is a bad idea, – without an ICD you have an equal chance to reduce incoming dps of every person you hit (withering precision). With the ICD but the new, more powerful effects, you can reduce the incoming damage of a single target, it doesn’t scale to multiple people at all; same with spectral armor and walk. They either need an ICD per enemy effected, or no ICD at all (of course their effects would have to reduced a tad to compensate.)
This is why defensive mitigation (protection, invuln evades etc) is much better (and more balanced), because it scales evenly regardless of how many people are attacking you. Offensive mitigation on the other hand will often either be balanced for 1v1 and poor for 1vX, or balanced for 1vX, and OP for 1v1

In deathshroud (and plague, since you brought it up) we cannot heal, we cannot condition cleanse and cannot stun break. If you leave DS to do any of these things, then there is a 10 second window where you can’t go back in.

Having a lot of buffering isn’t great defense, it’s a great buffer. There’s a difference.

Yeah, it was a while ago, some people mentioned in a few threads, I only noticed myself when my power build was occasionally stacking like 8 bleeds from that trait alone.

only minions classed as allies give Lf. That is golem, shadow fiend and bone fiend. Wurm active gives LF as well, but that’s part of the ability, not from it dying.

A S/D thief when properly played is the most robust build in the game bar none. It’s not because it has super high damage, or it’s super tanky, it’s because it has the ability to disengage at any point during a fight, and to do so repeatedly. This means a S/D thief can go into pretty much any situation (save for running head first into a proper zerg) with impunity. This isn’t an issue of skill of the opponent, or their build, it’s literally just the overwhelmingly strong disengage ability of a S/D thief, or to get to the root of the problem, the cheap to use, no CD ability infiltrator’s strike, which I can confidently say is the best skill in the game.

Of course if it’s not properly played it will find itself without a shadow return/step to use and die like a kitten, but having a S/D thief myself, and playing with others that also run it, I can say it’s disgustingly easy to not die, while being able to shadowstep in, C&D > sword 1 for daze >sword 3 to steal boons >sword 1 auto chain. Then if I feel I need to run for whatever reason I can shadow return up to 1200 inches (usually while cloaked), shadow step another 1200 units (and that’s already stun broken + 4 condi’s removed) before casually walking away.

That’s not to say a S/D thief will kill you and there’s nothing you can do about it, just that they can run away and not die, and there is nothing you can do about it, short of waiting for them to make a mistake.

trident 5 is also a blast finisher.

That’s with poop socking minions trait, but i don’t see your point; I’m just saying that we have skills that quite clearly should be finishers, and for consistency should be, but aren’t.

My original argument wasn’t looking at the balance of having more finishers (otherwise I would cry about 5>2 on d/p thieves and the like), just consistency.

you can still get 11 fields and like 7 finishers on one build you know.

This is really just a consistency thing you know, most skills in the game where it makes sense to be a finisher, they are. All I expect is consistency, just like spectrals having an ICD like auras and all that jazz.

ele has like 12 fields and 16 or something finishers. Just saying.

A fair few skills that should be finishers just aren’t, for whatever reason.
Dark path, spectral grasp, and focus 4 are all literal projectiles, yet aren’t finishers.
Lich 1 should also be a small projectile finisher for consistency.
If swoop/bull’s charge etc are leaps, then surely the golem charge should be as well.
If axe 3 isn’t a blast then I don’t know what is.

Sadly my wvw has zero finishers, would be nice if they did fix these up, as they currently are inconsistent with so many other skills in the game.

Jesus Christ look at what you’re saying Somoe
>Just because one class gets a mechanic that doesn’t mean all classes need it.

Then Drarnor says
>Just one class? Try every class. And they all get at least 3 such skills. Necros get none.

we’re the only one with a CC that does damage, no one else should have it PURELY because we do. No one is arguing that.

what we’re saying is that all 7 other class have methods to negate ALL damage for short periods of time, necromancers do not. This in no way contradicts what you say, seriously, what are you arguing about.

Most people have no problem with saying we do massive amount of damage (mainly because of the current codi meta, where we can throw back conditions, aoe our own, then epidemic everywhere), but the people here are arguing that our defences have serious flaws in certain PvE content, and under focused fire in PvP.

Edit: Also in a semi related note, anti condi meta warrior builds are hilarious against necromancers, I’ll be sad if I don’t see a few in the tourny.

Currently the projectile simply vanishes after travelling exactly 1200 inches. Previously, it would keep chasing a target as long as you stayed within 1200 inches of them(would vanish eventually I think, but could travel much further), making it much better for chasing people as they ran.

So even with the faster projectile speed, it’s not so great for catching people as before, but oh well.

You do realise most of this thread was from before people discovered that our LF went from 60% to 100/120% right?

The change to dark path is quite telling when chasing people. Although the projectile speed buff is nice, before this patch you could dark path someone in range, and it would keep homing, and travel further then 1200, as long as you stayed in range to the target. Now the projectile just vanishes after going 1200 inches. Oh well.

Nemesis.8593:

The patch is not what you think… they were either sneaky on purpose with it, or someone really knows how to “write” these patch notes.

Remember i was upset as well ?… well… i played it, i adapted new builds, i played those, realized there was far more to this patch then meets the eye.

The fix/change to LF amount/damage taken (what ever the hell actually happened) was a very big buff across the board, I don’t understand how Anet fail to properly list the changes they make, what is the point in patch notes if they don’t make note of the changes!

The bug fix to LF amount/damage taken (how DID they not notice/fix this for so long, considering we had so many threads about it?) generally buffed our survivabiliy a fair amount, firstly because of we can now have a larger buffer, but mainly because it means that all our LF generating abilities effectively generate a lot more LF.

The change to spectral armor combined with the above fix makes it rather good 1v1, but has ended up much worse then the pre patch version against multiple foes because of the new ICD. Spectral walk is now worse off in either case, don’t know why they nerfed it so.

The change to the spectral buffs however have only served to further highlight a serious issue with our ‘attrition’ claim – we cannot deal with focus fire.

While we can tank in a 1v1 situation well enough now, as troll pointed out, we have a lot of offensive mitigation, which for the most part is single target. It is also much easier for for an enemy to block/cleanse offensive mit off of themselves then it is to pull defensive mit off the necro.
The second point is of course that we have rather poor defensive mit (outside of dealing with conditions, where our condi builds can throw them off/eat them rather well).

We need far more defensive mitigation to genuinely claim attrition, as it work against all incoming damage where as offensive mit only reduces certain sources of damage. The old spectral buffs would (roughly) scale with the amount of things attacking you – i.e: the more people attack you, the more LF you get. The new spectral buffs have a ceiling, making them poor for multiple targets. If (for example) the ICD of spectral buffs was on the attacking side (i.e: 3 people attacking you, spectral armor can proc once per second for each of them), it would have a more balanced scaling benefit without worrying about people that attack 20 times per second getting jipped. Of course you might have to change the LF gain or what ever but yeah.

Then there are other obvious points that strike me.
Focus 4 gives regen when it hits friendlies, which doesn’t even work in DS and has a flat benefit, regardless of how much damage you’re taking. Why not a couple of seconds of protection? It actually works in DS and works just as well against multiple enemies as a single one.
Aegis on entering DS as a trait somewhere would create a non ‘exploit’ way of sponging key attacks with good timing.
Let healing effect us in DS – if I’m sitting in DS because two people are trying to kll me, it seems pretty poor design that my friendly neighborhood ele can’t heal me like he would to any other class in the game, and leads to a more dull, independent playstlye – which makes no sense in a team game.

Anet needs to get over their aversion to letting us use boons – you can’t have every other class play around using boons, and then make the necromancer designed around not having them, not when it clearly doesn’t work. We would either end up as we are now (vulnerable to focused fire, decently defensive 1v1), or we would be great defensively 1v1, good under focused fire, and then teams would build around pooping out a million boons for us to make us OP as hell in both situation.

Tenderly.7019:

chefdiablo.6791:

it is not enough to make people ignore what was once a very effective faux blocking ability that I have practiced using for so long.

Just quoting the conclusion since it’s true, any playstyle change is always hard but that goes along with anything that changes in the game, it’s an MMO and should be expected.

My point is that it’s not a big of a change as many are claiming it to be. In an ideal world, a big hit like an eviscerate should never hit regardless, and if it does during the last 10% of lifeforce remaining, it’s not as big of a deal, that 10% was essentially 20% before the changes.

I’m not saying the faux blocking of the last 10% of lifeforce isn’t a nerf, it just isn’t that big of a deal.

I’m personally very baffled by Necro players who before I thought were very objective and thought-provoking to be complaining about something as trivial as this change.

The amount of buffs received by Necro in the last two patches far outweighs any nerf by an immeasurable amount. And this last patch was an overall huge buff in my opinion.

For me atleast it’s been rather notable in wvw, where I’ve often sponged 9k evis’s and all that jazz while on only a few thousand hp, and 10-30% LF. Already I’ve had a few times where I’ve instinctively tried to do the same thing only to be somewhat surprised as it takes me down anyway. Will take a little bit for the muscle memory to get used to the changes, if nothing else.

That’s… a pretty neat ideal actually, could let you dump it dead center of a point in pvp or something also.

Also I’ve said it a few times but I wish our warhorn was a little like the other warhorns in the game in that they give aoe buffs – I feel a little sad when a warrior gives everyone swiftness with his, while ours is completely selfish.

why do you guys try test it by completely breaking through your LF pool?

Testing with me on a necro with almost exactly 20k hp, and a friend on a thief, I would go into DS and he would BS me and I would immediately leave DS, meaning at most I’ll have a 4% margin of error if degen does tick once. From the damage of the single back stab, it looks as though LF pool is 100% of your HP pool now (5k something BS left me with 74% LF). When we tested with 30 in SR though, it seemed a little off – but i dunno, only tested that for a minute.

JonathanSharp.7094:

People keep asking for mobility on the Necro, and again, by design, this is something we’re going to keep to a minimum. We will continue to make sure they get more attrition tools (Deathshroud is a main point here), the ability to manipulate boons/conditions, and the ability to control opponents.

There’s a difference between minimum movement skills and none at all. The closest we have is dark path and the wurm teleport.

Dark path is good for catching/holding people, but isn’t terribly good as a movement skill since it needs to be targeted.
The wurm has to be pre-positioned, limiting it’s usefulness, but can still be useful in the right situations.
Also I guess we have the somewhat nerfed spectral walk, but that’s even more niche as a movement skill.

Now we don’t need blink or swoop or something, but even just a heartseeker range movement skill (replacing dagger 2, for example…) can make a big difference for positioning. If you’re absolutely set on not giving us any movement however, then we have to be able to withstand focused attacks. That means a way to temporarily negate the damage of multiple people (which is why I found the change to Sarmor and the outright nerf to Swalk rather vexing) and a way to avoid being horrifically cc chained.

All the damage in the world isn’t useful if any co-ordinated team can blap you without any way to counter them. Also someone suggested aegis on entering DS instead of the jagged horror trait, which would be neato.

From some initial testing, it seems that your LF pool now matches your HP pool. Would welcome a little more testing though, I’m a tad tired, but it’s pretty neat if it’s true.

greater marks are still 240. Heuh.

The patch has come… it’s time.

lettucemode.3789:

That makes sense, but it also depends on how much damage those hits are doing. If you’re running Rabid or Soldier amulet, it’s likely that even 3 or 4 hits in a second won’t deplete all that life force before you get it back. Most of the direct damage sources in the game are less than 1k damage per hit (think mesmer clones, thief dagger autos, flamethrower, guardian hammer hits).

Unless your opponent chooses to use their 2-3 attack burst combo on your death shroud bar, which is silly, I think it will be comparable if not better. We’ll have to see it in practice though, I concede that it could go either way.

How much damage they’re doing per hit isn’t directly relevent, the fact is, the old system is much more effective against multiple hits, which is very common, whereas the new system is only more effective in situation where you’re getting hit rather slowly. The most obvious case in point s a 1vX situation compared to a 1v1 situation: the 1v1 might give comparable or even favorable results for the new system, but in 1vX, the old system wins hands down every time.

Also why did they reduce the amount given by spectral walk on top of the ICD…

Cogbyrn.7283:

So if block damage via DSing at an opportune time is deemed a good and interesting Necro mechanic, why not just give Necros a short-lived Aegis on using DS?

Well we have stabily fury and retal on DS… so aegis on DS (say… instead of the jagged horror) would be pretty neat.

lettucemode.3789:

I for one don’t understand how death shroud was nerfed. At most, the change means that you will take full damage from one attack if that attack puts your DS over the edge. The way Nemesis and others are talking – getting beat on by multiple players at once – it really won’t matter that much due to the large number of attacks. Being able to “block” a single thief backstab when you’re out of dodges and low on LF and DS is off cooldown is an incredibly specific situation anyway.

Not to mention that a good number of our life force generating abilities were buffed, especially Spectral Armor. Has anyone else played around with a DS-bunker build since the last patch? It’s hilarious, you can stay in DS for a full 30 seconds now, while people are attacking you…

If your argument is that necros can’t escape like other classes, then yes, you’re right. But if you’re saying that DS will be worse off after this patch I really don’t see it.

But in the majority of situations it’s a nerf to spectral skills. Spectral walk is nerfed in every situation, so won’t even bother there, but even with spectral armor going up to 8% lf per hit, because of the ICD, it’s only more effective if you’re getting hit less then 2.6 times per second. Now i don’t know about you, but I see an awful lot of fights were I’m getting hit more often then that.

Tenderly.7019:

From a high-tier tPvP standpoint, none of these changes really do anything to affect how powerful a condition Necromancer still is.

Terror nerf was needed and it’s was very minor.

30/30/10 Wells
Took a hit as unblockable marks in PvP are extremely good and now these players will have to choose between Ground-targetable Wells or Unblockable Marks.

I personally welcome every single change, they’re great. Base mark range increase is what Necro’s have been asking for since ever.

Fixing the bug where we take more damage in deathshroud is amazing, I always had suspicion that I was taking more damage from certain attacks randomly but could never re-create it.

Any nerf this patch was is so ridiculously minor IMO

In practice that’s more a choice between weakening shroud and ground targeted wells, but yeah.

LastDay.3524:

How is this a nerf?
Seems like a huge buff to me.

As far as I know Death Shroud took double damage from attacks.
At least it was double damage from Agony if I remember right.
Since Agony always deals the same amount of damage to a certain percentage of Health people noticed that “oh hey it’s dealing double to DS?!”

If I’m right this fix DOUBLES the amount of damage Death Shroud can take.
It’s a pretty crazy change if I’m right.

In addition the change to Marks means that you no longer need to get Greater Marks trait in every build with a Staff.
Minion Masters can now run Minion Cooldown Reduction, Flesh of the Master and Death Nova all at once if they want to.

It’s a pretty useless change if it was directed at Terror builds, though…
Many Tournament team Necros already used 30/20/20/0/0 to get Staff cooldown reduction and Greater Marks.

The only real nerf I see here is the Terror damage reduction, which I was predicting would happen.

As for Spectral Armor… we’ll have to see.
It’ll be less effective vs multi-hit attacks but much more useful when getting hit by slow attacks.

…oh and of course losing cliff jumping is a nerf, too, but you can still do that with Spectral Walk anyway.
I always carried Spectral Walk in WvW to begin with.

uhhh…. what? double damage? Go into pvp right now, get someone with a steady weapon to shoot you. The damage is exactly the same both in and out of DS. Either their is some sort of rounding error going on, or it only happens under certain conditions.

wiki is community written more or less, it will be touched. And touched inappropriately.

http://i.imgur.com/CXx3HdXh.jpg

It was a bit cold up at the top of the durmand priory, so down we went. Took over 25 seconds to hit the ground, and made some pretty spirals to boot.

The thing is the build that people cry about is ultimately an amazing pub stomping build where you’re much less likely to get focused fired, much less likely to see co-ordinated cleanses and stability, chain CC etc, leaving you free do to huge amounts of AOE hilarity. In TPvP, and serious team will be able to extremely easily punish your lack of mobility/stability/damage mit/stun breaks. Not to say it’s completely useless, but the competitive meta is a tad different from spvp.

Which brings me to the point of why are they making us worse at taking that focused fire. Everything else in this patch is reasonable enough, but this changes hits us rather hard in every format of the game.

Rok.5260:

“Spectral Armor: Incoming hits now grant 8% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Spectral Walk: Incoming hits now grant 2% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown. This spectral skill now grants life force while Spectral Armor is active."

This better give me like 50% life force 4fs

It’s a pity then, that in most situations you’ll be burst down in a few second with 20+ hits on you, but hey.

Rennoko.5731:

Because they did it to mesmer armor buffs, and they will do it to any and all on-hit or on-when-you-get-hit skills. This is part of their balance effort to prevent things from being grossly overpowered when you factor in lots of little hits from lots of sources.

Whey they are balancing that? I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe they are adding a PVE boss that hits for 100 damage 10 times per second.

The problem of going down the path of nerfing these aura type effects because they proc so often, (outside of the obvious fact that spectrals provided some much needed defense against focused fire) is that you can (by the same logic) say that the guardian wall, or necro wall should have an ICD on effecting people, after all, you can effect whole zergs worth of people with them.

Might add – with the guardian symbol changes, it specifically mentioned that the trait to make them larger, makes them 240 (I do believe that doesn’t make them 240 now, correct me if I’m wrong), where as nothing similar is mentioned for necros, so I understand that as the size of the traited mark shall remain the same. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong.

Also jesus christ, just have to say it again, why did they completely WRECK the spectral buffs? I would rather lose my spectral buffs in DS again then have an ICD on them.

Also what the kittenENS, they said we take extra damage in DS? It can’t be something that always happens, as this used to be a theory, but I tested it in pvp with steady weapons to show that we took the same amount of damage in DS as out of it, so either it’s a new bug, or happens under certain conditions. How did they ever make DS so bug ridden?

Edit: unlisted patch notes.

Dark path moves much faster (50%?)
The life force pool seems to fully match (or according to some people’s tests, exceed ) your hp pool now. (not sure if this was the ‘take more damage from direct damage’ bug they mentioned) This change is extremely significant as it gives a massive buff to all forms of LF generation, so I don’t know why it wasn’t listed/not properly explained.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/july-23-content-release-notes/

for those too lazy to click:

Necromancer:

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.

Fixed a bug that caused the necromancer to take increased damage from direct attacks while in death shroud.

Necromancer—Dark Path: Fixed an issue that caused this skill to strike enemies further than 1200 distance away.

Shadow Fiend—Haunt: When this attack hits an enemy, it will grant the necromancer 10% of their life force.

Ghastly Claws: The total life force granted from this skill has been increased from 10% to 12%.

Spectral Armor: Incoming hits now grant 8% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Spectral Walk: Incoming hits now grant 2% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown. This spectral skill now grants life force while Spectral Armor is active.

Spectral Grasp: This skill now grants 15% life force (up from 10%).

Mark of Blood: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Chillblains: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Putrid Mark: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Reaper’s Mark: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.

• Greater Marks: This trait has been moved to the Master tier.*

Spiteful Vigor: This trait has been moved to the Adept tier.

Terror: Reduced the damage by 17%. Fixed a bug so this trait now checks for the torment condition as well.

So it seems spectral buffs have been nerfed hard in large fights (where our defensive problems are most significant) but against a slow hitting, single target (hammer warrior? NPC?) spectral armor is better. Spectral walk is worse either way, although stacking with spectral armor is useful (although it should have been in since release.

Also while it’s sad that they removed our GLORIOUS ability to face tank falls with DS, it’s quite hilarious to see that we really were taking more physical damage then we were supposed to in DS, but I wonder how much it is/does it always happen etc. Also wooo, naturally larger circles.

Over all I find this a rather… unexpected set of changes.
Discuss.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Crippling_Strike
thief has cripple + weakness on the same auto attack.

Doom does some direct damage. Look in the combat log, if doom isn’t hitting at then something odd is going on. Well, if it is hitting, but no fear, something is going on as well.

Don’t get pigeon holed into 30 spite for close to death just because ‘muh deeps’. Not to say don’t use it, but actually think about what role you’re playing (pve, yeah full dps, zerg or solo wvw both ask for very different things however) when choosing traits and always ask yourself if X trait is the most effect for your build and strategy.

In certain puddles/shallow water, it’s extremely hard to see at all, it’s rather amusing.

Tricare.2946:

War Mourner.5168:

hm neat, I’m on sos, might see you around.

You mean getting killed buy us right?

Hm, we’ll see, although funnily enough, the very first enemies I saw today in wub were a pair of you VR guys with a pub, but I was on my own and left you to it and didn’t see you again.

hm neat, I’m on sos, might see you around.

Yeah, koi cake is literally dirt cheap, no reason not to have bought a bunch of stacks to last you forever, since it has the same effect as pizza.

What server are you on? The servers you’re fighting seem to be the ones I usually fight against.

Wail of doom was always unblockable as I’ve said before, they just added it to the tooltip.

Also I don’t understand how people have trouble with keeping targets in your wells, we have so many options for holding people in them, if you actually choose to use them.

Eh, with foot in the grave necro gets very frequent access to stability stomps, and with or without stability, a shroudstomp means your opponents have to eat through your LF if they want to stop you the old fashion way – I’ve stomped plenty of people in team fights while under 1k HP thanks to shroud.

Give it a month, if people aren’t able to adapt after that then something may need to be done. Right now it’s mainly people not used to it.

Yes, bhawb, even when shroudstomping properly, even with 10 in death magic, there is still a very narrow window to interrupt it.

3s is not long enough to shroud stomp someone. You need about 3.5s of stab to be certain of the stomp (10 in death magic covers that nicely) but even the base 3sleaves only a very narrow window at the end where you can be interrupted.

has anyone maxed out boon duration for 6 seconds of stability every 7 seconds? Sure it will be pointless, but amusing none the less.

The closest thing to OP I’ve found is life blast underwater… It fires like twice as fast as on land for hilarious amounts of damage.

We’re stronger then we were before, big difference between that and OP – there are just loads of people running necro in WvW and PvP right now, people aren’t used to fighting them, so if people call you OP just laugh in their face.