It is like a facepalm, but to the kitten.
Minions offer no benefit for long cooldowns. Necro has very little base diversity in builds. Everything revolves around DS. Minions don’t even impact that playstyle. 90% of it is weapon skills. Utilities are inconsequential. That is the problem.
Necro without reliably functional Minions also places all those Minion Focused traits into the maybe useful if you want to kill lots of boxes and barrels folder. 50% more health sure is nice that my Minions get to finish their first animation before dieing. I’m a sucker for aesthetics. But everything else doesn’t benefit you in any meaningful way that I can rationalize.
Wells <=> Epidemic > CC/ccBreak/Speed > Signets > Everything else > Nothing at all > Minions
This is not an exaggeration.
Necro role in Dungeons is to do 3 times the work of any other class only to underwhelm.
Necro. But I have been playing Necro since March 1999 so I am Necro Bias, shaman bias as well but no shaman here…
Also I killed the first 50 Ur Dragons, have set thousands of midgets on fire and cannot afford the rest of those games because I wasted my money on GW2. =)
(edited by XiL.4318)
He’s not saying there’s no point in doing these things for gear and glory, just that it isn’t the only reason to do them.
I don’t do sPvP for glory at all, I just do it because I enjoy the challenge and the very occasional satisfaction of playing my class well enough to beat some noobs (because I’m not good enough to go toe to toe against good players). Any glory I happen to earn is just a bonus, but I just do it for the fun of it
You know what is not fun? Having to guess what Traits work and don’t as a new player. The real issues with Necro start with how nothing about playing Necro is intuitive. Almost half of the Traits don’t do what they say they are supposed to do. And Necro does not serve the function its bio pages says it fills.
And… AND.. everything a Necro can do, someone else does it better. So you work harder to learn how everything works only to discover you also need to work harder to successfully complete content, yet there is no reward for this added difficulty.
The appeal of Necro breaks down from every single perspective other than one of complacent denial.
IMO that was a pretty crappy description, the one Jon gave us in a post long ago was better.
This one basically just lists our skills and states the obvious. “Oh necro has high hp and death shroud, and um, a short fear to interupt, and some slows and stuff”.
I don’t care what Jon says. Jon did not sell me this game with his forum post. Anet sold me this game with Necro Trailers featuring minions and the description of Necro on the main page of the website.
I paid, I expect what I paid for. Not excuses.
I actually did the same thing, went on the actual GW2 website Profession descriptions and had a good laugh at how they were selling the Necro.
Currently minions all DO have some sort of effect, but none of them are powerful, and they aren’t sacrificed for them. I would actually rather the ability to sacrifice a minion for say 20s of fury or protection or something. Something actually powerful. We all also know that the Blood Fiend does NOT give a “large amount of health”. It has an ok heal that we never get to use because it dies in any and all AoE crossfire, and PvE aggro issues.
Wells are my preferred utilities still, but they are extremely weak. They don’t control an area at all. Maybe if you dropped Well of Suffering, Well of Darkness, and Well of Corruption all on a capture point in sPvP the enemy would avoid it for the whopping 5 seconds it lasts. To actually do what they’re describing Wells need to have a larger AoE, and double the duration. Because honestly, the payoff with the duration vs the cooldown is just stupid. 5s of aoe blindness that at most will make them miss every other autoattack for 5s, and at worst blind them once or not at all, for a 60 second is bullkitten
Yeah I don’t really get how the developers can get so far disconnected from reality. I want Necro to be fantastic in GW2. But it seems like Anet is purposely trying to drop deuce on it and just lie through their teeth about it.
Somewhere someone has to be accountable and take responsibility. This is technically illegal in the United States and most of the rest of the world.
Xil, you are right to a degree. No us as a single Necro aren’t going to change the tide of a battle. But some things ARE more useful in WvW than others. For example, daggers are damn near useless except for attacking objects, but wells and marks are good to drop from a wall and provide pretty decent defense.
Yes PvE outside dungeons is easy but I don’t have much experience in dungeons so I couldn’t comment on it. If you’ve played the other professions (if you have a Necro you most likely have) then you’ll know some of them DO have a hard time. It was hell levelling up my mesmer to 30, and my ele.
As a Necro I can gather up the biggest group of enemies possible and come out standing on a pile of corpses. On most other classes, if you pull 5+ enemies, you’re dead. This is all just personal experience though, so you may have had a different experience than me.
I play a bit of sPvP but am no expert, and the OP says he doesn’t do sPvP so I left that out.
Is the Necro the best class? Hell no. Is it better at any other class at anything? Aside from gathering up a bunch of mobs and not dying in PvE, another resounding nope. However he was asking if playing a Necro is worth it over a Ranger, and he also said he wasn’t enjoying the ranger. Personally, I prefer a Necro over the Ranger. I prefer the Necro over everything. We may be weak as hell across the board but there is a certain charm this class has
I think the idea of Necro is fun. But the GW2 Necro stops being fun when you realize how little you have to offer any given experience and how little reward you get from any given content.
Absolutely overland mobs die by the scores to Necro AoE. But Elementalist do it way better. So does Mesmer (if you trait for it). Pretty much every other class can put together a more powerful and more sustainable AoE build for PvE.
And the real issue is that there is no significant difference between a a geared and traited necro in overland PvE and one without gear and traits assigned. It is the same no matter what you do. If you focus builds and get good gear you can farm champions solo if you like fighting for 10 minutes per mob for no reward or clearing stupid long dungeons solo for blues…
Necro is just not a rewarding class in any true sense. Even in WvW Necro get boned by loot bags and spike damage that other class have in droves but Necro are not allowed to have. 30k + health doesn’t mean anything if any Ranger/Thief/Engi/RifleWarrior/Mesmer… can lock you down and tear through that health like its not even their since you have no stability or damage immunity to speak of.
Necro mechanics are fun and active. But fun and active doesn’t compensate for being useless in much of the content available to you because 40% of traits and skills either don’t work due to global issues or are plain broken.
On the main page of the website under “Professions” Necro is clearly defined.
We are not getting what was sold to us. There is no build.
Yeah nobody benefits from bringing a Necro without the interrupts. And to top that off the majority of content is broken OP already so without these interrupts…
Why does it seem like someone else designed this game then handed it over to a bunch of interns skilled at making coffee and not much else.
Bottom line this is what ArenaNet sold us as the Necro:
“Special Skills
Here are two sinister skills that are particular to necromancers:
Minions
Necromancers summon undead minions to attack foes and do their bidding. Whenever they wish, necromancers can sacrifice their minions for a powerful spell effect. For instance, necromancers can use the skill Summon Blood Fiend to create a minion that heals them while they attack, then use the skill Taste of Death to destroy the minion and receive a large amount of health.
Wells
These persistent, stationary spells allow necromancers to control the area around them. Well of Blood, for example, regenerates all allies within range."
Right now, Necro can’t do anything listed here. Minions don’t do your bidding or offer powerful spell effects, and you cannot control an area with Wells. You can annoy people in an area with Wells. You can buff or debuff with Wells… but you certainly cannot control an area and your Well Of Blood might as well damage your allies for as powerful as that pitiful healing is even at well over 1000 healing bonus.
Necro does not Necro. THAT IS A HUGE PROBLEM.
If McDonalds sold you a McRib that was made out of “Not-Food” they would get sued. And they did get sued a ton. Cause the McRibb was not really food. That is why it suddenly vanished off the menu even though it was hugely popular.
Why does Arena Net think it is ok to sell us Not-Necro? Shouldn’t the same rules apply? This truly is 100% false advertising. Yet somehow publishers have managed to subvert the false advertising laws with carefully crafted EULA and ToS agreements that aren’t actually legally binding but we all pretend they are based on more propaganda from publishers….
At any rate Necro is not Necro and Minions 100% need to be fixed because GW2 is selling the Necro quoted at the top of this post. Not the imaginary interpretation of it. They are literally selling this. It is a quote from the Professions section of the main website.
Ok I’ll give you some actual feedback, as it seems you’re getting nothing constructive.
I’ve seen you say you don’t play much PvP, do you do both PvE and WvW?
For PvE Necros are actually really good. You will have no problems in any area you go to except when fighting dredge and ice elementals. We don’t have much control in the form of CC for PvE, it pretty much comes down to using Flesh Golem for a knockdown, and dagger #3 for an immobilize. We do have a lot of ways to slow an enemy though between cripple and chill.
In WvW we can be pretty darn useful as well, but mostly in condition builds. The daggers are for power builds and only hit one target but hit hard, so it might be worth carrying one around just for smacking on doors or trebs. The staff is almost a must, and is very nice traited for shorter cooldowns and larger AoE. Using the sceptre (our condition weapon) and some utilities you can build up 10 stacks of bleed on an enemy and pop Epidemic to throw out quite a bit of aoe damage. Having such a short cooldown on Epidemic you can use it almost when ever you see an enemy with conditions on him, even if the conditions aren’t your own.
We have two options for swiftness: warhorn #5, and spectral walk. I don’t use warhorn outside PvP dagger builds, but I never leave home without Spectral Walk. Not only does it give you a ton of swiftness but when traited for shorter spectral cooldowns, and with a few points in Death Magic for boon duration, you can have almost zero swiftness downtime. On top of this all when you’re hit in spectral walk you generate Life Force for Death Shroud. And it also has the option within 8 seconds of teleporting you back to the spot where you activated it. All in all, its probably my favourite and IMO the most useful ability across all builds.
I hope this helps, and I hope you enjoy your Necro! I can’t play any other class
I’m just gonna tear this one apart in a single chunk, you can apply my comments to their relavent counterparts in your quote.
Nothing in WvW is any more useful than anything else. The meta in WvW is zerg + siege = win. You have very little impact as an individual of any class type in WvW. That’s just reality take it or leave it. So any argument about Necro being awesome in WvW is null based on this fact alone. What is awesome in WvW is AoEs and Ele and Mesmer and Engi and Thief …all get WAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more powerful AoE and they don’t have to use a trait to make those AoE ranged. Simple fact.
In PvE again, all content is silly mode outside high end dungeons. You can complete all with zero difficulty wearing no gear, and using no trait points. I know for a fact you can do this because I know a couple people who leveled to 80 without picking up a single piece of gear or assigning a single trait point. Watched them play on Twitch.TV so I know they weren’t just messing with me. And the Dungeons and Fractals that get hard are pretty much just zerged. So any live body works.
Again Necro has no strengths here that every other class doesn’t have, and in top tier PvE content you start to feel how constrained you are as a Necro to focus down into a Healing/toughness build so you aren’t spending the whole dungeon running back from spawn point while everyone else kills everything.
And PvP, for a time Necro has been “useful” in very specific ways to structured PvP and tournaments. Not beneficial, but useful. Not a detriment like Ranger has been until recently. Now Necro cannot function in PvP without being carried.
It seems all negative nancy until you step back and realize the reality of it is even worse than the forum QQ. And that in particular is shocking to me.
Popularity should never determine priority. That is just common sense. Class popularity determines its position in this kind of system and classes that are not popular tend to have the most problems. That is why they are not popular.
Fat Basstard said it best:
“I am fat because I eat, I eat because I am fat, it’s a vicious cycle.”
Necro is not popular because it is fat, Necro is fat because its traits and core mechanics are broken, without popular appeal Necro will never become a priority, it’s a vicious cycle.
should also be mentioned that the +condition duration values add multiplicatively. doesn’t need to be a flat, summed 50%. it adds contribution from spite, then fear trait, then runes. should put you over the 2 sec mark with just 10% from Nightmare runes and give you an additional fear from 6pc proc.
the design of the trait seems odd to me though. % dmg modifiers have never effected conditions on any class. Suddenly though we have one class able to bump a condition based dmg by a large % value. Why not just buff the base dmg to something respectable? There’s far too much build work going into making an interrupt do some dmg. Conditions ticking for 1k is a bit excessive as well and way out of line with the rest of condition dmg. I have a feeling this “exception to the rule” could be the top of a slippery balance slope.
A better question is why the hell don’t Necro have a Trait that boosts all Conditions with Damage Modifiers instead of the useless nonsense we get for End Line conditions… If any class should have intuitively had something… necro should have had a major damage mod for condition damage…
The ANet quote about the necro abilities is misleading as it has fallen for the “list all abilities” approach rather than what is possible in viable builds. While we can possibly achieve some of those abilities individually we can only ever have two or three available to any one viable build (indeed many are contained in our elites so only one per build there). This is largely because of the buggered trait line structures and
mandatory useless traits like reanimator.edit: Actually I am starting to think that the devs are only looking at the abilities list and not how we can actually use those abilities realistically. To me they are either “in denial” about the necro issues, relying on the list itself as some form of justification of “profession fineness”, or they just plain do not understand how the necro builds work in reality. Probably a combination of both.
Combination of both, compounded by denial, cheered on by bias, and tea bagged by stubborn fiscal conservatism.
I’ve got a ranger, necro and warrior. Also levelling thief and engi at present but they are not at 80 yet. It may be heresy around here, but I enjoy the necro the most out of the 3 80s. I use the warrior more often in dungeons but I’ve had fun with necro in WvW and PVE. Enjoyment of play is so subjective that you might as well just play the class for a while and judge for yourself.
Nobody thinks Necro isn’t fun. But in competitive PvP fun doesn’t win you glory or get you the cool gear. And no matter how much fun your class is to play, if you are constantly in Downed State or waiting to for the revive timer.
Direct Quote…
“Here are two sinister skills that are particular to necromancers:”
“MINIONS”
“Necromancers summon undead minions to attack foes and do their bidding. Whenever they wish, necromancers can sacrifice their minions for a powerful spell effect.”
From this we can extrapolate with certainty a few things. First Necro Minions are intended to be Sinister and Unique to necro… In other words, they are one of two specific traits that make Necro… A Necro.
So these Unique Minion,s that pair up to Define Necro with Wells, should
A) Do my bidding, and
B) offer me a powerful spell effect when I sacrifice them.
It just so happens that
A) My minions don’t do my bidding (or any other bidding) and…
B) When I sacrifice my Minions… quite often, nothing happens.
So I don’t know when you switched sides, but welcome aboard bruh. Wanna go lift?
By the way yer paper boat… is soggy now. Doesn’t even float. Not really a boat at this point. =P
(edited by XiL.4318)
Terror damage buff – for someone who was already using a terror build. Again outside of Spvp. That was the one and only noteable change. If you spvp I doubt anything in the patch notes changed your play style at all, at a tourney level
Ahh ok, yeah I don’t see Terror Damage as a Buff. Without specing for a Fear build with Fear runes you won’t see any more damage that any other time you slapped down Staff 5 with 10 stacks of might on you and 10 stacks of Vulnerability on your target.
Pre-patch the highest I ever saw was 1100 and some change. Now if you Trait specifically for it you can increase that small about of damage by less than 50%. The difference between 1000 and 1500 damage when you are dealing with 20k+ health pools means nothing. Even with Staff skill 20% reduction what kind of DPS can you expect from this buff to Terror? Like 12 DPS total and that is with a theoretically perfect and infinite rotation?
In PvE building for Terror will definately put you in a Downed State more often though, and I can see how being able to double fear on Downed State + 50% damage might help you in PvE, but you have to die to use it…
Maybe I don’t play enough PvE for it to make a difference but I do have a geared 80 Necro with plenty of acheezment points and it makes zero difference to me.
Not talking about Spvp, or really PVE for that matter. A terror build doesn’t do much in pve when most pulls are 3-5 mobs. It shines in wvw, where you can substitute a food buff for 40% duration, making hitting that duration very easy to do and not restrictive to your build.
Not saying its the TOP dps in wvw or anywhere else, because its not. Pre-patch it was nice for control with the longer fears, and some extra damage was just, as you mentioned icing on the cake. I like to roam around and fight skirmishes in the range of 2v3, 2v5, 3v6 etc… in those situations a, 4 second aoe fear that deals a good bit of damage is nice. Now that 4 second aoe fear deals more damage than before. Hence my approval of that buff. I still run max condition damage in wvw, and deal as much damage as I can without speccing hybrid power or rampagers.
But make no mistake, this was not a huge buff, or even a noticable buff in the long run. An extra 300 damage on a fear cast isn’t game breaking at all, and would be completely negligible in spvp. But it beats the hell out of the other “buffs” we go in the patch.
Lol, fair enough. Better than slamming yer kitten in the door is indeed better.
Tested and verified, the 50% downstate damage buff does not apply to the condition damage dealt by terror. The most you are going to get out of any fear self buffed in spvp is around 1200 with BIP up on you and some condition up on them.
But it does apply to DownSkill 1, which is what makes using Terror build even useful as a fun troll. And that is how people are doing so much damage with Necro down state. Fear, Life Drain, Fear, Life Drain, you dead. Its pretty simple.
But anyone building for downstate is a bonified troll.
I think the worry is that minons get buffed and they call necros fixed. Many of us dont use and dont want to be forced to use pets to be a complete class.
Not to take that option from anyone else…
The option is what should be there. Every build that Necro can focus on should have the Option to incorporate a viable minion. Like a minion trait for each trait line that gives you something based on the trait line. Something just as useful as a Signet or a Well trait for example. And the minions should perform their role 100% of the time.
That’s it. They don’t need a buff. They don’t need special attention beyond making them work and making them useful. That way no one is punished for choosing a play style.
You’d think after all these years these publishers would stop punishing unique playstyle with nonsensical mechanics, but they just keep on keepin on gathering those millions in front loader tractors without afraid of anything.
If you loved being completely useless in tournaments on your Ranger, now is a good time to swap to Necro. You will fall in love all over again.
Ranger are starting to become useful in the meta and Necro have just become a solid detriment that cannot compete without being carried.
It will be like you never stopping playing Ranger.
I just stick with my group when it comes to these professions it’s kind of hard to fight them solo as a con warrior. Sometimes I can beat them and sometimes I can’t, but sticking with a good team eases the frustration.
Too bad there is no mechanism for players to find teams to play with. Then this would great advice because it is true. Teamplay > Rambo every time.
Not being able to swap Utilities is going to drastically screw over pretty much every popular Necro build for tourny’s for sure. Being able to swap Elite and Swap for Movement speed were essential to keeping Necro competitively viable no matter what build you ran. Now Necro is completely screwed. You either build Attrition (which all other classes are better at and can shut you down), or you run mobility and give up all your powerful tools that make having mobility useful.
We can hurry up and die. That is Necro meta now. Hurry up and die.
But think of the poor Warriors. They are completely boned. They can’t swap condition removal and CC anymore so they are screwed no matter what they do. Conditions will get them no matter which they choose because without the CC they can’t kill anything and without the condition removal….they can’t live long enough to kill anything….
I feel like I live in that movie where a common kitten goes to the future and becomes the smartest person alive. It is like people just don’t think stuff through. They rely on random chance and feelings that shape popularity.
I can name more than a few popular things, and people, that ended up being detrimental. And we can throw away Hitler and Stalin just as a little gimme from me to you. That’s like playing a Heartseeker spam thief. I’d rather lose playing well than win by smashing my face on the keyboard while watching TV and eating a sammich.
(edited by XiL.4318)
Anet sets goals for each class.
Patch notes and reality are complete opposite of those goals and previous statements made about competitive ideals.
Response is shockingly negative… riiiight…. yeaaaaaaah. I’m gonna need you to come in on your day off. We’re a little short handed this week and we need to play a little “catch-up”. Thanks.
.. Heartseeker deals like 2k damage to squishies with full HP?
Tell that to the 9k, 5k, 6k Heartseeker chain thieves with Heartseeker on Auto attack that don’t even bother with backstab because it is faster to heartseeker spam without stealthing.
Or my combat log. You and it can have a discussion about how 2k does or does not equal 9643.
I had a PvP specific contacts list with well over a hundred players in it. All active. I never had to want for a team to play with. I also had a regular competitive team to practice with 4 to 5 nights a week.
Of that entire list, 6 players have logged in within the last two weeks. And none of them were in the mists.
I can’t even bring myself to log in anymore after what they did to Necro this patch. I just have no good reason to play. Even the Wintersday nonsense means nothing because all those people I was playing with are gone.
And the worst part is there is no mechanism in this game to match-make or socialize. Everything is frantic zerging in PvE and PvP for new players. There is no intuitive mechanism for mastery development. No intuitive mechanism to seek mentors in veteran players. The anonymous grouping features encourage the act of zerging the same things, but not of actual grouping and the development of play bonds.
Other people are just minions that you can’t control. And we all know how awesome the minions are.
This game is what happens when programmers design entertainment. Its amazing in the metrics but you can make anything look good in a bar graph. There is no social engineering because programmers are by and large not socially adept. No offense. But social butterflies don’t usually end up becoming programmers.
So how can they be expected to design and implement a socially dynamic environment? The answer is GW2 flash point questing. Which I love. Don’t get me wrong. But there also needs to be some way to build social groups outside of randomly joining a PuG with people who from their perspective, consider you a minion in their army of lewt or glory gathering.
(edited by XiL.4318)
What are you guys talking about???? mesmer’s get counterd sooo hard by assult guardians/trap rangers/necromancer pretty much every condition. kitten when will you people learn how to play your damn classes……. In P-TPvP mesmers are balanced now! finally! and btw our illusions are naked and just stand there in turnies.
What about 100b warrior/ backstab thief? you complain about 9 might stacks. Do you guys realize that the shatter damage wont be affect by those might stacks? You get the might stacks after you burst meaning it just gives mesmers like 10% more sustained damage.
Get off spvp zerg servers and play some paid tournaments……
No one plays paids. No one plays broken competitive PvP because of broken mechanics like this. Mesmer was already extreme burst, now they are extreme burst + 9 stacks of might, and they can also give to those stacks HB warrior and BS thieves making them OP + 9 stacks too.
Your entire argument is null.
Double OP is Double Stupid in competitive PvP. The point is to create competition based on player skill, not broken OP mechanics and pigeon hole team builds.
Heartseeker is just a very very strong finisher. However, while “heartseeking”, they are very fragile and vulnerable (No dodge, no stealth, no evade). They can easily get dazed and get oneshotted by the team. And quishy thieves die extremely easy (No good defensive cooldowns, 12k hp, no toughness).
In 1v1 heartseeker is very strong, if you don’t dodge or use defensive cooldowns when you’re under 50% HP, you will die. However, heartseeker is incredible easy to dodge or to evade. Also a dodge usually evades two heartseeker if you time it right (right before the heartseeker lands).
You don’t get it and don’t want to. Heartseeker is not used like that in practice. Heartseeker is spammed as a means to drain health bars completely, not as the intended finisher. And when you can use a skill 3 times with zero cooldown (up to 5 times with traits) that hits for 5k to 10k damage on each hit, while the target is running, and from range, with zero chance to miss, you create a problem.
And heartseeker is the hardest skill to dodge of any other skill because you might dodge once but here comes 2 to 4 more Heartseekers, and with quickness they come so fast that you cannot not even dodge again before all of them hit you.
It is stupid, it is broken, and EVERYONE hates it. Even thieves talk kitten about other thieves that Heartseeker spam because it is literally an IWIN BUTTON.
There is no valid argument to the contrary. The number one complaint I see in PvP is Heartseeker spam. Period. It is stupid OP to allow a single skill with no cooldown to spam damage greater that the highest hitpoint tank build possible.
Even if the skill was a 3 tier skill that ended in a 3rd step finisher that did WAY more damage… it would be preferable to all parties involved to this nonsense that is Heartseeker spam. It is just plain stupid and EVERYONE hates it except thieves that use it. Period.
XiL….your character is NOT random, you made it, so you trade off between strengths and weaknesses.
Build a balanced build without hard counters and learn to play with it.
If you build a niche build that hard counters some builds but with obvious glaring weakness(es) then yeah, it becomes more like a random number generator for you. You either encounter build that you are hard counter to or you run the risk of running into something that hard counters you…or you meet balanced build that you do not hard counter but who beats you due to his skill (he figures out your weakness and then uses it to beat you). (or you better have teammates that can compensate for the holes in your build)
Your argument would only be sound if there were no hard counters in the meta. If you get a hard counter verses the build they are designed to counter you essentially get a 100% victory guarantee. Which is exactly the same as choosing random characters in any MOBA. You get against your hard counter in competitive play and even a brand new player with no skill whatsoever can destroy you.
That is the opposite of what was stated by the developers is their goal in GW2 pvp. Joining a tournament is blind. You cannot see what other people choose so the end result (even though it was your own choice) is exactly the same as using random characters in a MOBA. You still enter blindly with a class that may or may not have the tools required to perform the role you need to fill. And meeting those requirements determines the match winner. Not the skill of the players or the synergy of the team.
We need a dev answer to this. It would be so much appreciated.
There is no Developer focused on Necro specifically so there is no one that could respond with anything more than a Generic “please try to understand we have a plan” response that focuses on even more meaningless justifications.
There simply is no Necro passion at Anet. And that is a shame. Necro is a massively popular class in MMOs. To have Anet just crap on it like this really sends a negative message to the entire MMO community.
When you buy a cheese burger and they give you a chicken sammich, you will get your money back or they make you a new cheese burger. That is how the sale of goods and services work. Everywhere. For everything. Period.
This is the worst analogy for this discussion. I can’t even begin to imagine where you thought this up from.
A better analogy would be a that you believe “loaded” hamburger with everything should include cheese, but the seller of the burger disagrees and cheese is extra.
But saying you wanted beef and got chicken is an entirely different thing.
Yeah lets argue about semantics while we are at it that is totally productive right?
The point is my Internet Arguing Champion friend, is that Arena Net advertised one thing and sold another.
I wanted Necro, instead I got Warlock. Beef, and chicken, are both meat. But I wanted beef and the menu shows me a picture of BEEF. Yet I open the bag… and WARLOCK.
So stuff yer semantics in a place that will remind you painfully how useful semantics are on the internet.
.. doesn’t limit you… more balanced..
Yeah no. The opposite is true. Not allowing people to swap traits and weapons in tournies just means that if they build a certain way before the match they cannot adjust during the match to suit the “unknown” circumstances.
It is sort of like Random Character in DoTA/LoL/HoN. And if you have played them you know that Random Character in those games means, you either lose or win based on what characters the random number generator chooses.
That is the exact opposite of what the stated intention of GW2 PvP combat experience is. This also makes truly competitive PvP impossible.
I don’t see HS as a problem considering its unimpressive damage above 5% health.
If a Thief managed to get you below 25% that means he connected his stuff without you blowing any anti-burst CD or dodging during the whole – which means you fully deserved the death screen.Your argument would be valid if all PvP encounters were 1v1.However they aren’t,why would you start a fight with a Thief anyway,just wait until it is time to finish it.
By the time you realise a Thief has shadowstepped into the fight and you will be dead in 3 seconds,it is normally too late.Except for classes that can quickly pop vulnerability and teleport.Doing big damage and being a gap closer at the same time without a CD it’s simply bad design IMO.And i’m not saying it’s OP,because it’s not.It’s designed with PvE in mind and that shows,like many many others (*cough Mesmer *cough).
Yeah something has to be done about Thief Leaps. They should probably target the ground at the feet of the target so they can’t just teleport leap over and over to a moving target and stab for up to 10k with secondary skills like Heartseeker.
I can guarantee with absolute certainty that if you go back and ask all the players who quit playing GW2 pvp the #1 reason 90% of them quit was Heartseeker spam. I understand the need for melee gap closers… but a gap closer with no cooldown that can’t miss even if the target is in motion… Especially one that can hit for 10k…
There is just no identifiable forethought in that decision. Other than the Lead Balance Dev plays Thief.
I agree with alot of the problems, not so much the solutions.
Necro, and really all classes, should be able to perform every meta role competitively. Not just focus on some arbitrary list of philosophies organized by a 15 minute vote in a single meeting.
Every class should have a high Burst, heavy Tank, Attrition, and Support option that is 100% competitive. Every single class. They don’t need it all simultaniously but it needs to be compeitively viable to have a MesmerTank or a Burst Engi. Or better yet a high Burst guardian, and an Attrition Warrior with condition management.
This pigeonhole bias nonsense they are deploying now is going to ruin any chance they had at making GW2 a viable Esport. No one will come back to a broken game no matter how well you advertise the fixes. And right now GW2 pvp is Broken.
it’s not once every 30 seconds, staff 5 on 32s cd, doom on 20 sec cd, and reapers protection. again this would be for hot join or WvW
Oh yer running my Universal Necro build. You can swap Amulets with this build in tournaments and play any role. At least until they locked item swapping in tourny.
It is a versatile build but you give up all your good Traits for Fear traits and you are locked into whatever gear you start a tourny with. Pretty much makes focusing on Fear not competitively viable.
You can argue that it might benefit you “theoretically” in WvW or PvE but truly what is effective in both is AoE damage period and you give up a good chunk of that AoE utility to run this generic build with fear traits and fear runes.
But really though, Chilling Darkness is bauce, not worth losing. 400 toughness while channeling… bauce, ground targeted wells… bauce, greater marks… bauce again (no block is essential), and no Life Force boosters? Huge fail. DS is our only save/weapon without a viable bust or tank build and without viable minions. You can’t throw away 3% on Marks, and 25% slower life force degen to make a situational skill with a tiny duration last 50% longer and do an insignificant amount of DPS.
Seriously the most DPS you will every see out of all those traits is like 15 damage per second in PvE or PvP. You just don’t have enough controalable fear to make it a buff.
This change just adds a layer of confusion to a class that is already not intuitive for new players. It really doesn’t have an overall benefit.
Props on using my build though. I didn’t think anyone else had realised yet that with 0/20/10/20/20 you can just swap amulets and run any strat just as effectively as focusing traits on it.
(edited by XiL.4318)
Currently, I’ve no opinion on this because I’ve been so discouraged with sPvP in general that I’ve been in a ‘wait and watch’ mode. I’m inclined to think this change limits player options and is a step toward homogenization. I could easily be wrong.
One thing that I’ve not seen in this thread is a justification. Why the change? Why was it needed? Why is it good? Why is it potentially bad? Seen a lot of opinions, but not much else. Can some one explain?
It helps prevent some classes from being able to build for mobility and extreme burst. Some classes don’t include Thief and Warrior which can still do both. But… yeah.
Other than that I see zero positive. This was not a win/win decision by any means.
I believe it’s a bug. A trait that gives 9 stacks of might is ridiculous when compared to everything else. The devs probably only wanted to tive it 3 stacks, as it’s the normal amount to be expect from those kind of traits, but at the moment it gives 3 stacks per illusion.
Putting this thread to rest.
1- You have to spec 25 points into Illusions, this is not all mesmers.
2- IF you are spec’d into it you get a 3 stack of might per illusion you shatter.
3- @Nerva – You should be killing the illusions anyways, not doing so you should expect to die
4- In order to share it with others Mesmers have to use one of their Utility skills for that single purpose.5- If your going to complain about something, please understand it fully before making a thread. You are giving people false information in which the people who don’t know the correct information feed off it like wildfire and it never ends. This is the way it is.
Mesmer did not need more synergy or damage. They got a large buff to both.
That is the point. And that is ridiculous.
I’ll just go ahead and say it.
Anet needs to start accepting applications for new people to head up their Balance team. The team they have now is completely detached from half the classes. They have consistently over buffed the same classes over and over since the middle of beta and show no signs of doing anything else in the near or far future. They are clearly bias towards the characters they like to play the most and without cleaning house and putting people in charge without a specific bias or balancing that bias with passionate players from EVERY class, nothing will ever change.
The exact same issue happened with EQ2 and SoE. The lead class dev that was in charge of final decisions played a Rogue and was a very active and competitive Rogue player. From launch day up until the day he was moved to another project (after TSO… so pretty much the duration of the game’s commercial success), Rogue was the most powerful DPS in the game, AND received the most kills in all PvP content available (including duels) We even got to see the metric from SoE proving it.
Bias well always destroy any chance or proper class balance if you do not accommodate your development philosophy and team make-up for controlling it.
I am willing to put a money on matching the Class Balance Team and their main characters against all buff/nerf decisions made since beta and it will show a pattern that will prove my assertions beyond a shadow of doubt.
Believe it or not Anet will end up killing this game. Yet they say oh we read the forums everyday…good luck in the long run
I bet they do read the forums every day, but without a functional context the forums are a mass of mostly useless information.
Because Ele either have ridiculously OP AoEs making point assault near impossible for all melee, or they Heal a crapload AoE causing the opposite yet same result.
Its the same reason people used to kill the Necro before trying to boon/rip condition stack the bunker.
Yeah it adds a little more condition damage AoE but you have to give up something like Chill on Blind to just get Terror. Let alone your Runes and the 50% Fear duration trait.
Fear is just too situational and it has no surprise mechanic supporting it. Conditions can be missed, sometimes people just don’t notice a condition stack on them. But Fear is 100% obvious to the player so it is 100% more likely to be cleared given a cooldown available.
But you should post the Build you use to get over 1k on Staff 5 without using BiP and Vulnerability. It would give people a proper impression of what they are giving up to see a large tick from Terror once every 30 seconds.
Terror damage buff – for someone who was already using a terror build. Again outside of Spvp. That was the one and only noteable change. If you spvp I doubt anything in the patch notes changed your play style at all, at a tourney level
Ahh ok, yeah I don’t see Terror Damage as a Buff. Without specing for a Fear build with Fear runes you won’t see any more damage that any other time you slapped down Staff 5 with 10 stacks of might on you and 10 stacks of Vulnerability on your target.
Pre-patch the highest I ever saw was 1100 and some change. Now if you Trait specifically for it you can increase that small about of damage by less than 50%. The difference between 1000 and 1500 damage when you are dealing with 20k+ health pools means nothing. Even with Staff skill 20% reduction what kind of DPS can you expect from this buff to Terror? Like 12 DPS total and that is with a theoretically perfect and infinite rotation?
In PvE building for Terror will definately put you in a Downed State more often though, and I can see how being able to double fear on Downed State + 50% damage might help you in PvE, but you have to die to use it…
Maybe I don’t play enough PvE for it to make a difference but I do have a geared 80 Necro with plenty of acheezment points and it makes zero difference to me.
To be honest if all they put in the patch was that shadow step can not be activated while immobilized i would have been happy.
Yay for a longer lasting useless jagged horror that does next to nothing. If anet maybe added a explosion at the death of the horror similar to bone minions that had a blast finisher on it maybe, but to a paltry damage then just die?
Fear doing more damage with a trait and condition applied? I admit i will try it but I’m not expecting much.
The water weapons are ok but still no one in PvP chooses to fight in the water…
The best part of this patch was the gluttony fix and the dagger run speed buff. which probably doesnt stack with the singet speed buff.
You know what I find especially kitten I could already destroy 2 or 3 people at the same time with Necro under water. It has always been ridiculously powerful under water. So not only is water combat like 2% of all combat but they buffed something that was already way OP. ProStyle
Reading comprehension please, and were on the same team…
Terror dealing 800 damage is perfectly doable in the mists, try it yourself. I had numerous people testing last night seeing around 1200 damage per tick with the 50 percent boost from a condition.
IF, note I said IF, since I have not tested, it stacked additive with the 50 percent dot boost and the person you were fighting still had a dot on them when the went down, it would deal 100 percent more than 800. That is 1600.
Now I don’t think this is the case because normally dama increase skills ignore DOT damage, I was speculating, which I made clear. I will test it later to cofirm.
Leave your sour grapes in the Spvp forum.
No point is you need to stop repeating those specific numbers because that is all people will see. High numbers + Terror = QQ.
Think before you post please. Not everyone is out to get you.
im definitley seeing 1.2k+ ticks on non-downed fears, its hard to track though since it doesnt show up in log. so if +50% downed damage works for #2 downed fear than 1.8k is possible.
I’ve always seen Terror+ Staff 5 hit over 1k on targets that have stacks of vulnerability on them, while I have 10+ stacks of might. That doesn’t make it useful. It requires stacking conditions and boons and even then you never get enough damage out of it to matter. This is all speculation of course since all PvP meta is heavily influenced by Stability and Condition removal which both cancel fear and any damage Terror might apply.
You still can only apply a significant amount of damage using this “buff” while in a downed state. And that should alert your common sense system. Building a strat around being dead is not brilliant.
That is the point. This is a buff like chocolate is a buff to ice cream. No its just another flavor. So presenting it like some fantastic gift serves only a misleading a negative purpose.
Information is information, if it is wrong I will delete the post. Feel free to save me the time testing. I come here to talk with and inform the necro community, if people want to cry so be it. Terror builds were good in wvw before and now they are much better. People who are not aware of that build choice should be.
Misleading information is not innocuous. You have to consider your audience. Most people who read these forums are looking for something to react to. So if you post something deliberately abrasive and repeat it, you will insight reactions to it. Didn’t you watch Inception?
People tend to focus on bits and pieces, like exaggerated damage numbers. And fear builds were never powerful in WvW. Only AoE is useful in WvW. You can’t fear arrow carts and Batista while yer in down state and our other land based fears don’t last long enough to matter.
The idea that Terror damage is somehow a viable improvement to Necro based on artificially inflated numbers is cancerous. That is the issue. Not that it was a buff to Fear. Of course it is a buff, but it is by no means a significant one.
No disagreemenrt with what you said here. There is a strong likelyhood people avoid spvp because of the fact necro is not intuitive or mobile. Personally my experience in spvp was an 80 percent win rate beating up on people that didn’t seem to understand the game, but that is low level spvp for you.
Necro has serious issues with cast times, balance, build diversity, etc. I am not ignoring that, I am focusing on the 1 positive from the last patch that brings some joy to the class (some of us).
What is the ray of sunshine though? Locust Signet?
A warlock to me (and the definition of a warlock) is a male witch. So no, they cannot have a warlock because it would have to be gender restricted.
They can’t use Demon Master because a lot of players who play the Necro do not use the demons and are just spell casters.
Necromancer is fine, it’s literal definition is broad enough to cover what Anet’s version of the profession is.
Just because your opinion is different, doesn’t make it right (or wrong).
Actually it does make it wrong. No MMO can remain successful without catering to player expectations carefully. The vast majority of long time Necro players expect Necro when they see the word Necro. If you want to make that Necro unique you must present that unique quality in addition to what is expected or you won’t sell the Necro experience. And that is the point. Anet is selling an experience. Not a philosophy. The Necro experience has been largely fictitious so far compared to their marketing and player expectations. That is a major problem.
When you buy a cheese burger and they give you a chicken sammich, you will get your money back or they make you a new cheese burger. That is how the sale of goods and services work. Everywhere. For everything. Period.
Stop playing 8 v 8…5 v 5 is better and less zergy
5v5 is no more functional than 8v8. You are either a tank or a burst roamer. So the only difference is you are zerging a bunker with fewer people and teleporting away with the Mesmer portal to your next bunker than needs zerging.
No Mesmer player without a regular team is going to have any QPs at all. No one can win paids without a dedicated team so unless you are willing to build up a new player with few or no QPs, you are likely not going to find anyone.
This issue isn’t going to go away until well after rating systems are deployed unfortunately. This means regular competitive teams have no feasible options for replacement members and new players cannot break into PvP without getting a mud hole stomped in their kitten over and over.
PvP in GW2 is a Lose/Lose model that they really did not properly plan for. It frustrates me to no end that the people I was playing tourny with are all gone within 3 months of release but now to be put in a position where finding a viable team to play with at a competitive level is impossible…
But good luck anyway. You will most definitely need it if you expect to find a competitively viable Mesmer that isn’t already playing with a regular team.
Agreed, PvP in GW2 has been a pretty large disappointment in general.
WvW is dominated by servers that simply fill the que more in a 24 hour period than everyone else leaving regionally specific servers lost in a sea of midnight zergs. And even when the servers are even it all boils down to how many bodies you can throw at the wall at the same time and which guild full of fully geared players has the most gold for siege weapons.
sPvP is borked. They launched without a viable model of any kind. They just threw some basic maps together and called it good. All their plans for PvP were back burner plans compared to PvE, even though they clearly sold GW2 as a competitive Esport. Class balance is broken, some classes have large swaths of their traits rendered useless by bugs and lack of forethought.
People farm PvP for glory. That is the only purpose and that is disgusting to me after being sold on GW2 as a competitive PvP minded title.