You literally can’t not be able to trigger this trait in any build (MoE + Dark Path, plus most builds have either Enfeebling Blood or Mark of Blood, if not even more bleed sources), whereas forcing it to depend on crits would completely gut it for a lot of builds.
Make it based on lifesteal procs instead, since the blood traitline gets life steals on any attack by default. 3 life steals = proc.
It’s not as simple for power spec. If I want to get blood bond in pve, I’m going to nerf my DPS by dodging when I don’t need to to proc mark of blood, dark path is not available on reaper.
No PvE power necromancer uses staff, so no mark of blood, and we use offhand focus not offhand dagger, so no enfeebling blood.
You won’t get enfeebling blood from weakening shroud either because the basic reaper build will use Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper, and only Soul Reaping would be substituted by Blood so we’ll never have a pairing of Curses+Blood as a power based reaper.
I wish it triggered off every 3 crits instead of being based around bleeds, so power specs can make use of this as well.
Druid will be last. It’s the most relevant and iconic profession to the theme of Heart of Thorns (jungle/forest).
Unfortunately that will also mean that it will get the least amount of beta testing and change cycles.
So, is MM the (second) best necro build in sPvP now?
I don’t see how. I mean, if ranger pets are melting right now and that’s a chief ranger complaint, imagine minions who are even squishier to cleave/aoe spam.
Don’t hold your breath.
Yeah, so much for preventing others from running away as a necromancer when you’re handing out condi removal and dashes like candy, especially to the class most overloaded with teleports/evades.
Stop putting yourself in a victim role.
If they made male characters able to wear dresses 90% of the community would complain, as opposed to the very small amount of people that complain now.
Just accept that the game is designed to cater the majority of the community, the majority that doesn’t wear clothes of the opposite sexThat’s exactly why we should question it in this game, jsut as much as in the real world. There are norms forcing people to wear something they actually don’t want to wear, just so they won’t get glared at. Or called things.
Remember that the gaming community aka. Nerds were once oppresed in a sense, I feel like it’s taken a wrong turn in that it is now discriminating others, and I want this to change.
I prefer to walk around in the buff, clothes are stuffy and annoying. But, I have to put clothes on or I get arrested. It’s oppression I tell you!
Not really the same. Both genders and all people have the standard applied equally: put on clothes. It’s not sexist in its approach. Telling each gender they must only wear X or Y however is sex discrimination, period. There’s no criteria besides what genitals you are born with.
Not that I’m concerned too much about this, but nevertheless what you posted is a false equivalence.
That was a question I had as well. Both my partner and myself wore pantsuits at our wedding and there was never any question of doing otherwise. With marriage equality being the law of the land where anet exists (and a few other countries as well) you would think they would assume there just MIGHT be some same sex weddings.
And same sex weddings still happen in game….just with dresses instead of a butch style.
The Upper (chest) and lower body parts (pants) don’t even fit, it’s as if someone took two different designs from two armor pieces and mashed them together.
The male norn’s lopsided hunch pose doesn’t help either.
Even more aggravating was them disregarding player feedback and leaving consume conditions, your least crappy heal, at an increase 30 sec cd AND still with the long cast time it had, with the self vulnerability as well.
The nerve….as if all necromancer heals weren’t mediocre enough and had long cast times, they proceeded to nerf the one players bothered to use.
They increased the CD because MoC reduces the CD by 33% instead of the traditional 25% so it was kind of bait trait they knew it was bad. That is aggravating.
They basically made the heal crap unless you take a trait. How is that not worse?
Skills should be good baseline!
That’s why I detest the design of corruptions as well, they shorehorn you into using staff or offhand dagger as a transfer tool or face eating up negative conditions for no good returns…
Even more aggravating was them disregarding player feedback and leaving consume conditions, your least crappy heal, at an increase 30 sec cd AND still with the long cast time it had, with the self vulnerability as well.
The nerve….as if all necromancer heals weren’t mediocre enough and had long cast times, they proceeded to nerf the one players bothered to use.
The cleric guardian build worked because the impact of a single player running it is not the same as a full pug group running soldiers/knights and then being surprised when everybody dies to the Urban Fractal packs because not enough damage happened fast enough to kill the adds and that extra bit of toughness still won’t stop mages/warriors from 2-shotting you.
I can just tell when a run goes badly because damage is lacking. It’s not the players’ fault, it’s the combat design and the aggro tables allowing mobs with 5-6k autoattcks to hit you simultaneously and without indication.
You’re just gonna have a terrible time in volcanic fractal, urban fractal, Molten Duo boss fight as examples of where soft DPS checks are established.
And the thing is, survival from toughness is so marginal. By far the biggest impact will be your aegis/protection/blind/weakness uptime on mobs.
Toughness is a hideously weak stat. I think if they buffed toughness by merging it with boon duration and vitality by merging it with healing power, those stats would become a lot more attractive in the “challenging group content” they have planned.
And quite frankly they should rethink power specs. Whereas condition specs will thrive in environments with toughness/vitality checks, power builds that don’t have the trinity of power/precision/ferocity lose far more damage than condi damage/toughness condi builds forgoing Sinister. They diluted the impact of power too much by making it so reliant on stacked precision and ferocity. I’d be happy if they’d just get rid of ferocity altogether and merged its benefits to the power stat itself.
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Anyone who thinks GW2 doesn’t have a trinity of its own is fooling himself.
PS warrior and ele are the pillars of any group, and for non-record runs guardian enters as well.
To the guy who enjoys playing ranger/necromancer, sucks to be you. To the guy who wants to play a mesmer as a competitive damage class instead of a portal bot running ahead while people do the actual fights, sucks to be you.
You want a MMO where class balance is a priority, don’t play F2P games, there’s no money to be made in constant and comprehensive class balance updates, so obviously these vast disparities in role performance fester for 3+ years as new prejudices are nurtured from development’s neglect.
I mean, it’s been years already where ballistas/arrow carts in urban fractals are obstructed to both mesmer and ranger greatsword/longbow autoattacks/attacks. This is simple stuff, really. Jade Maw targeting pets and spirits and clones…
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The problem with that is that they’ll need to keep increasing pet stats over and over to keep up with ascended and any new power boosts that they choose to introduce ala ascended.
Scaling pets with the ranger not only makes it so they scale with ascended stats so your upgrades do something (as opposed to nothing).
My ascended berserker ranger has 72% critical damage.
My pet has a pitiful 30% critical damage. That is wrong, the pet makes up 15% of my damage yet it can’t reach the offensive boosts my ranger gets from gear, or food, or runes.
Similarly you can give condi pets 1000 condi damage and that would be a pitance compared to what your ranger is sporting.
they will not increase stats beyond ascended, implementing ascended alone caused a backlash of epic proportions, them adding ANOTHER stat set above ascended after saying they never would will very likely be a death sentence.
The pet is not meant to do THE SAME damage as the ranger, so there’s no point in it having THE SAME stats as you, also it’s supposed to be a different entity, that’s half of the appeal of the pets, i can wear tanky gear and take an offensive pet and their damage is unhindered. If they actually gave us a condi pet we could deal hybrid damage without using celestial or rampager or another gear set because we could just go power ourselves and take a condi pet.
And if they gave our pet 1k condi damage that’s far from a pitance, since the expertise trait could up that to 1300, and that’s far from bad condi damage.
Also, people already complain that pets die too quickly, i believe you specifically have brought this point up yourself. If your pet scaled to your stats, you’re essentially going to never have a pet if you’re a glass build because even taking a tankier pet like a bear wouldn’t work, since it wouldn’t be tanky, it’d instead be squishy like you.
I don’t take bears, they autoattack for less than a burning tick of damage and an ele’s earth elemental does a better job since they don’t have any other elite better than glyph.
I use jaguars, which in case you haven’t checked are made of toilet paper.
I didn’t say jaguars need to do the same damage as ranger, I said they should gain the same stat upgrades from gear as I do, learn to read.
If my ascended berserker gear gives me ~10% increased damage output, so should my pet benefit. After all, all other classes are benefiting fully from that gear, whereas my ranger attack coefficients are less since the pet is factored in. So every class but ranger is getting 10% upgrade from ascended to ALL OF THEIR DAMAGE, not 85% of it.
Pets should adopt my crit chance and crit damage as well, this is a key point of going berserker, and why pets cannot help us keep up in damage with the other classes. So either the pets get their baseline ferocity (45% crit damage bonus) and prowess trait is a bonus on top of it (30% from trait), or they have to buff ranger damage to put it in the league of ele/engineer/warrior/thief.
If you’re saying that pets should scale to ascended stats, i totally agree, they could just make it so once you get X amount of ascended gear your pet scales up to ascended stats or something.
They should not, however, just take any of your stats, i mean sure if there’s a trait or something, but baseline they should be independent from the ranger.
And that’s fine, if you want to keep the separate entity, but if I upgrade to ascended, they should upgrade. They should have the same crit percentage and crit damage bonus I have.
They should benefit from the food stat bonuses I have, they should proc those bonuses such as life steal, and they should benefit from potions (like maintainance oil or + damage against x mob type), benefit from my rune set bonuses and my sigils (+5 damage, extra crit chance).
Chilling Nova: 15sec ICD and ~300dmg
same trait for Berserker but spreads burn: 2sec ICD and 680+dmg20sec Elite skill that does 3sec stun. yes it has 1sec self stun, but what about group pvp? 3sec for opponent. “rekt him boys”. the skill did 4500k+ crit on dummies against 1600 that Chilled To The Bone did
these people are joking in front of our faces. when it comes to Necro/Reaper it has to be balanced so they add a bunch of drawbacks, but when it comes for Warrior/Berserker, “what’s balance? what are drawbacks?”
It’s a joke how warrior is a top damage and utility class, and they add even more damage, CC and survival skills on top of an entire catalog of fire fields.
Reapers get….chill and some poison. Whoopie! What a useful PvE condition.
It’s not just human males. Norn males are deformed, hideous creatures with huge gap between their legs, a hunching pose with shoulders going inwards, drooping manboobs, and undersized heads for the body size. They have a bad case of chicken legs so tiny and stubby compared to their larger upper body.
If anything needs help in this game, it’s male norns. They look absurd in almost everything.
Meanwhile female norns are Amazonian babes.
The problem with that is that they’ll need to keep increasing pet stats over and over to keep up with ascended and any new power boosts that they choose to introduce ala ascended.
Scaling pets with the ranger not only makes it so they scale with ascended stats so your upgrades do something (as opposed to nothing).
My ascended berserker ranger has 72% critical damage.
My pet has a pitiful 30% critical damage. That is wrong, the pet makes up 15% of my damage yet it can’t reach the offensive boosts my ranger gets from gear, or food, or runes.
Similarly you can give condi pets 1000 condi damage and that would be a pitance compared to what your ranger is sporting.
they will not increase stats beyond ascended, implementing ascended alone caused a backlash of epic proportions, them adding ANOTHER stat set above ascended after saying they never would will very likely be a death sentence.
The pet is not meant to do THE SAME damage as the ranger, so there’s no point in it having THE SAME stats as you, also it’s supposed to be a different entity, that’s half of the appeal of the pets, i can wear tanky gear and take an offensive pet and their damage is unhindered. If they actually gave us a condi pet we could deal hybrid damage without using celestial or rampager or another gear set because we could just go power ourselves and take a condi pet.
And if they gave our pet 1k condi damage that’s far from a pitance, since the expertise trait could up that to 1300, and that’s far from bad condi damage.
Also, people already complain that pets die too quickly, i believe you specifically have brought this point up yourself. If your pet scaled to your stats, you’re essentially going to never have a pet if you’re a glass build because even taking a tankier pet like a bear wouldn’t work, since it wouldn’t be tanky, it’d instead be squishy like you.
I don’t take bears, they autoattack for less than a burning tick of damage and an ele’s earth elemental does a better job since they don’t have any other elite better than glyph.
I use jaguars, which in case you haven’t checked are made of toilet paper.
I didn’t say jaguars need to do the same damage as ranger, I said they should gain the same stat upgrades from gear as I do, learn to read.
If my ascended berserker gear gives me ~10% increased damage output, so should my pet benefit. After all, all other classes are benefiting fully from that gear, whereas my ranger attack coefficients are less since the pet is factored in. So every class but ranger is getting 10% upgrade from ascended to ALL OF THEIR DAMAGE, not 85% of it.
Pets should adopt my crit chance and crit damage as well, this is a key point of going berserker, and why pets cannot help us keep up in damage with the other classes. So either the pets get their baseline ferocity (45% crit damage bonus) and prowess trait is a bonus on top of it (30% from trait), or they have to buff ranger damage to put it in the league of ele/engineer/warrior/thief.
Make spirits invulnerable or immune to aoe, and allow the ranger to reposition them like engineers and warriors can reposition their turrets/banners.
Spirits definitely shouldn’t be so easy to kill. Even in PvE now they die easily, not to mention the fact that you have to sacrifice them (your source of healing) and resummon them in such a clunky manner.
Are you using the trait? And are you putting them a ways away since they’ve got a 1k radius on their passive? Or are you dropping them at the feet of the enemies and praying they’ll be fine?
Wait guys, let me walk out of melee range and stop attacking, doing zero DPS, so I can place the spirit in a place which I hope the Molten Shaman doesn’t conjure a fire storm over it or the Jade Maw doesn’t target them either.
The whole babysitting argument is a load of crap. This game’s PvE rains AoE all over the area, Molten Bros is a good example of it it desn’t matter where you place it, aoe from the boss will kill it.
you can just do the smart thing and put them down BEFORE the fight starts, since you know, the common PvE build starts in longbow anyway.
And yeah, there’s a lot of AoE, but the spirits stand a better chance against that AoE at range, than they do in melee range where they’ll not only get hit by fire storms, but can be hit by his whirling defense, or the churning earth 1 shot ability.
I’ve ran spirits in Fractals too, and don’t have half the issues you guys seem to have, which leads me to think it’s you guys placing the spirits stupidly.
You placing them down on the Jade Maw fight to begin with seems to support this theory… everyone knows you use as little AI on that fight to make it as painless as possible.
Another thing about spirits…I remember when they were mobile and Nature Spirit used to heal the other spirits and Water Spirit I think at least healed Storm Spirit when it attacked, but that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.
They still get healed by both of theses, including the regen that water spirit gives, but just like they did way back before the patch came out, the spirits prefer to buff, or in this case heal, player targets over AI targets, so it’s unlikely to see.
You do realize you told me not to use a spirit in Jade Maw because the game’s mechanics specifically punish the use of these utilities exclusive to the ranger, right?
There’s deep irony in telling us spirits are fine on one hand and then telling us we shouldn’t be using them in some encounters. I don’t recall that ever being the case for banners let alone any thief/ele/warrior/guardian group utility.
Moreover, I can lay a spirit running in once. Once the spirit dies, as it often does in Molten Bros or what have you, my option is to place it on melee or stop DPS and go deposit it somewhere far away. Spirits are not permanent, they die after some time, so in longer encounters at some point I will need to renew the spirit. This will be the case particularly when they implement “challenging group content” with fights that last more than 30 seconds/1 minute.
More importantly, the whole “place it far away” comes with the caveat that if I do so, and we happen to move the boss, we might move out of the spirit’s range since we were barely in it to begin with.
The problem with that is that they’ll need to keep increasing pet stats over and over to keep up with ascended and any new power boosts that they choose to introduce ala ascended.
Scaling pets with the ranger not only makes it so they scale with ascended stats so your upgrades do something (as opposed to nothing).
My ascended berserker ranger has 72% critical damage.
My pet has a pitiful 30% critical damage. That is wrong, the pet makes up 15% of my damage yet it can’t reach the offensive boosts my ranger gets from gear, or food, or runes.
Similarly you can give condi pets 1000 condi damage and that would be a pitance compared to what your ranger is sporting.
I don’t want pets to scale to Rangers stats, because then I’d always have to use the same damage type pet as I was wearing. Just improve the base condi damage and that of Expertise Training. I’d give em 300 base and then make Expertise Training give +500 instead of +300. That way you could get them over 1500 condi damage with Might.
Which wouldn’t be a problem if you had pets which apply conditions.
BM bunkers is the very reason pets got nerfed while they were still weak.
Just to confirm, this is from a PVE perspective, right? Because in PVP I imagine the high updtime for evades would contribute meaningfully to the overall performance of the weapon.
Some are arguing from a PvP perspective, others from PvE. Since both have near opposite playstyles and desires for skills, its not going well.
Yes, the evade on AA is gold for all forms of PvP.
It’d be gold in PvE too if the autoattack damage didn’t suck.
The evades built into the weapons are there because the ranger himself doesn’t have much immunities besides a 60 sec cd signet of stone.
Rangers don’t have access to aegis, or constant blinds, or teleports, or much stealth. Its access to stability is also limited to very long cooldowns and one of them has a whopping 1 sec cast time.
The built in evades help to close that survivability gap compared to the other classes, which is still kinda short and why you don’t see much frontline rangers in WvW or spvp either.
You can blind every 4sec with Go for the Eyes and hawk or eagle (also very strong is the weakness on f2), maybe more like 6 with f2 response time.
Protect me can be traited for a 48sec cd stunbreak / immunity which is second lowest timer for a physical damage immunity in the game (distortion is 44sec) and it lasts longer than traited Endure Pain, and we are the only class that can put together a 12sec immunity on demand.
18sec of stability (SotP, SotW) every 60 (48sec traited) is more than all but warriors and guardians, and guardians would have to stay inside their hallowed ground to surpass that.
Go for The Eyes has the built in delay from all F2’s and it doesn’t protect you against multiple sources of damage, especially ranged ones. It’s relative to your idiotic pet’s positioning.
Protect me disables your pet from attacking and CC’ing while it is procced, making it the only immunity skill that actively nerfs your damage considerably and kills your pet in the process.
Signet of The Wild is not even a reliable source of stability. It has a 1 second cast time, so you actually have to preempt CC application by 1 second, too bad most CC skills are half to a quarter of that cast time, and Signet of the Wild itself has a large tell on top of its large cast time.
Strength of The Pack is good, won’t complain about it.
Something else that might have been taken into account is that the thief requires one or two lands. Clones seldom survive/hit for a full burst.
All in all I’d say that thief is a bit weaker on burst, but the poison and dark fields probably make up the difference.
And the mobility/escape. And the stealth rezzing. And the stealth group openers.
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You assume 0 starting clones from the mesmer at the start. The mesmer isn’t always going to burst without any clones to start with. The thief on the other hand doesn’t have any way to boost their burst apart from what you’ve already said.
Duh? The clones shatter on who they’re cast on.
If we assume an advantage of existing clones, we also assume an advantage for the thief in that he can switch targets and burst much better than the mesmer who needs to shatter the first set, bring up clones on another target to get that mindwrack on them.
In any scenario where the mesmer has additional existing clones before the burst, there’s been a delay in the burst where the opponent has had the opportunity to simply swing his sword. Clones die to a single autoattack worth of damage.
Who knew, pvp full of people with a campaign for their own class supremacy faking concern for “balance”.
The Berserker Heal is hilariously far more powerful than the shiro one.
For 6 seconds you heal for 50% of your damage (since a zerker banner warrior with fury up will pretty much be crit capped).
50% of a 14-20k 100blades, followed by whirlwind and evicerate is obscene healing.
Hell, just from autoattacking with mainhand axe or greatsword a warrior will heal far more than Shiro’s daggers and in a shorter time window as well.
Ignoring all other sources of healing and traits and comparing them simply by trained healing skills. A list of the easier ones to take into comprasion;
- Healing signet – 362 hp/s. 0 Input needed from user
Revenant – Jalis+Shiro in current state;
-Jalis – 5526hp (was buffed by 20%), cures 3 conditions and provides 2sec retal for each of them. 184hp/s, 30cd
-Shiro – Assuming we will land all daggers, no poison, no retal on – 6488hp, 5148damage. 216hp/s, 30cd
Total; 12014hp – 400hp/s, cures 3 conditions, 5148 damage.
Howered in combat its not really accurate as you wont use both off cd back to back drastically reducing hp/s due to dual heal nature, retal which will also reduce healing from daggers by ~200 and so on.. It wasnt rare for me to pop up Shiro heal, then 10-15sec later pop Jalis in which case hp/s drops to about 338hp/s, assuming you were attacking someone who had 2k power and retal up, we will end up with ~298hp/s. And now if you also wont proc all daggers..its getting quite bad, and it wont be rare to not proc all of them as you cant really trade damage to stay up alive+blnd,s kiting and so on..
Not all that great, huh? Enchanted daggers could be changed to heal for 6,5k on initial and it would be balanced still
This is missing adrenal healing, which warriors often take in conjunction with healing signet.
Either way, the berserker heal is even crazier. Take 50% of 15-20k damage in a 6 damage window and it’s an obscene heal on a low 20 sec cd. It’s more frontloaded as well as opposed to the shiro heal.
I don’t think the damage the shiro heal does justifies how backloaded the heal is.
You can be also kited for 6 seconds and get jack kitten out of that heal.
Nobody serious is gonna replace HealSig with that for PvP.
You talk as if being kited is something only warriors deal with. The shiro heal is just the same, people can kite you so you can’t hit them in melee and trigger your daggers.
There’s no reason why a warrior isn’t running longbow either whether they be power or condi spec, so the kiting question is irrelevant.
In WvW with the metric ton of aoe berserker is poised to do now, popping that heal will probably cap him on health all the time.
Same goes for team fights in spvp. Signet is susceptible to burst, this heal not so much.
So they have a choice of the two strongest heals in the game…
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Just allow utilities to be used in death shroud. I don’t get the silly limitation.
I don’t think spectral mastery granting a damage bonus would do much good as it would encourage necromancers to pop spectrals even when they don’t need them to do extra damage.
The Berserker Heal is hilariously far more powerful than the shiro one.
For 6 seconds you heal for 50% of your damage (since a zerker banner warrior with fury up will pretty much be crit capped).
50% of a 14-20k 100blades, followed by whirlwind and evicerate is obscene healing.
Hell, just from autoattacking with mainhand axe or greatsword a warrior will heal far more than Shiro’s daggers and in a shorter time window as well.
Ignoring all other sources of healing and traits and comparing them simply by trained healing skills. A list of the easier ones to take into comprasion;
- Healing signet – 362 hp/s. 0 Input needed from user
Revenant – Jalis+Shiro in current state;
-Jalis – 5526hp (was buffed by 20%), cures 3 conditions and provides 2sec retal for each of them. 184hp/s, 30cd
-Shiro – Assuming we will land all daggers, no poison, no retal on – 6488hp, 5148damage. 216hp/s, 30cd
Total; 12014hp – 400hp/s, cures 3 conditions, 5148 damage.
Howered in combat its not really accurate as you wont use both off cd back to back drastically reducing hp/s due to dual heal nature, retal which will also reduce healing from daggers by ~200 and so on.. It wasnt rare for me to pop up Shiro heal, then 10-15sec later pop Jalis in which case hp/s drops to about 338hp/s, assuming you were attacking someone who had 2k power and retal up, we will end up with ~298hp/s. And now if you also wont proc all daggers..its getting quite bad, and it wont be rare to not proc all of them as you cant really trade damage to stay up alive+blnd,s kiting and so on..
Not all that great, huh? Enchanted daggers could be changed to heal for 6,5k on initial and it would be balanced still
This is missing adrenal healing, which warriors often take in conjunction with healing signet.
Either way, the berserker heal is even crazier. Take 50% of 15-20k damage in a 6 damage window and it’s an obscene heal on a low 20 sec cd. It’s more frontloaded as well as opposed to the shiro heal.
I don’t think the damage the shiro heal does justifies how backloaded the heal is.
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I think stuff like Vital Persistence and such mandatory features need to be baked into the core class much like the staff mark size was.
Spite doesn’t have too much. Neither does SR. The other traitlines just need to be brought up to par.
I agree, but I think challenging group content won’t become challenging until the raw damage output some setups can achieved is touched. Unless their new combat design prevents groups from turreting damage.
We’ll see ;x
Because every single group is going to have a chronomancer? And all fights will be over in 32 seconds or less?
Currently that’s the case ;(
Maybe they’ll last over 32 seconds but that would mean inflating boss HP so much to put up with 32 seconds of burst under quickness from a warr/ele/ele/thief/chrono group, it would take ages for a non-berserker or less optimal group to whittle down the massive boss hp increase.
I mean, I still don’t see why unreleting assault would not be worth it while you’re not using impossible odds.
I think pets should scale to the ranger’s stats, but what do I know. I mean, scaling to ascended stats, far greater crit damage than a pet can ever get on its own since pets do not get more than 30% crit damage from a trait, they do not benefit from runes or food or potions or sigils.
Might just be the reason why pets suck at the moment and make a marginal 15% of our damage.
Yeah, if you do the numbers on unrelenting assault, you’ll see that you can pull off some pretty ridiculous damage on a single target. As a PvP’er I can see it getting toned down a little bit at some point. It’s just going to be devastating 1v1.
I don’t really PvE much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the damage is as impressive there as it is in PvP.
They better split pvp/pve balance with that skill. That skill alone is what’s keeping revenant competitive in PvE.
Impossible Odds and Embrace the Darkness are the two skills that are keeping Revenant PvE damage competetive. Unrelenting Assault isn’t even worth casting when you’re in Shiro stance with the current numbers (other than as a gap closer).
Why rely on Impossible Odds when the chronomancer is providing you with 32 seconds of quickness?
Edit: Had you used a better dictionary you may have had a better argument under some definitions but not all.
gasp oh hell no, you didn’t just diss Merriam-Webster!
They can put offense in those utility lines as well.
Take a page from mesmer’s inspiration, where you’ve got temporal enchanter to increase quickness uptime for your group and grant resistance.
Blood can also compete with Spite/SR if Vampiric Presence is made not total crap (as most our life steals are).
In fact, Blood becomes more attractive than soul reaping in PvE. PvE uses wells. So you’d have Vampiric rituals for prot+cd reduction on wells, a powerful vampiric aura.
Make Blood Bond work off a counter of crits like Chronomancer. On your 3rd crit, you apply Signet of Vampirism.
Alternatively Quickening Thirst can grant a flat 10% attack speed to the necromancer (all weapons and shroud) above the health threshold on top of its current features.
Voila, Blood is now a viable and really attractive PvE specialization.
Death Magic won’t change until minions change. And given that not even ranger pets or mesmer illusions and their related issues with aoe and AI seem to be touched, I wouldn’t bet on minions receiving an overhaul either.
Doubt it would change.
You can make might stacking equal across classes, warrior would still be mandatory because no other class provides 170 power+condidamage+precision+ferocity and 150 power from empowered allies. And warrior stacks might so simply, just use your regular attacks and the party will be might capped, no utility slots necessary.
Similarly you will always bring elementalists. Permafury from persisting flames, the highest DPS in the game besides thief and sinister engineer, water fields in your weapon, 25 vulnerability or pulsing blind from glyph, earth elemental to tank bosses for free (compared to ranger who needs to use a garbage DPS bear to do the same and with less health).
Nobody can stealth skip or blind like a thief. They have the highest single target sustained DPS. Stuff like their traps allows them to do tricks like the lamp orbs in Arah p4 with ease.
Mesmer has portal, alacrity, and quickness with some reflects.
Guardian is the king of reflects, aegis, group stability and protection uptime.
Sinister Engineer is the staff elementalist version of a condi spec, with the best water field in game (the turret), and just a vast amount and variety of fields and blast finishers.
People are saying to wait and see, but waiting for these next changes will still not make the Reaper top DPS, let alone top an ele’s dps by such a degree that people would rather take a reaper over an elementalist/warrior/thief/engineer without the group utility.
Shouts will still be bad in PvE. Minions will still be selfish and little more than a 1v1/roaming pvp gimmick. Wells are still not enough utility and too long a cd. Traits will still be PvP centric with no damage modifiers and few of PvE interest.
You’re really banking on the damage buffs to greatsword to be so large as to eclipse elementalists/engineers/thieves in the damage department by such a degree that reapers will become an option in meta groups. I’d call that unrealistic.
Make spirits invulnerable or immune to aoe, and allow the ranger to reposition them like engineers and warriors can reposition their turrets/banners.
Spirits definitely shouldn’t be so easy to kill. Even in PvE now they die easily, not to mention the fact that you have to sacrifice them (your source of healing) and resummon them in such a clunky manner.
Are you using the trait? And are you putting them a ways away since they’ve got a 1k radius on their passive? Or are you dropping them at the feet of the enemies and praying they’ll be fine?
Wait guys, let me walk out of melee range and stop attacking, doing zero DPS, so I can place the spirit in a place which I hope the Molten Shaman doesn’t conjure a fire storm over it or the Jade Maw doesn’t target them either.
The whole babysitting argument is a load of crap. This game’s PvE rains AoE all over the area, Molten Bros is a good example of it it desn’t matter where you place it, aoe from the boss will kill it.
Minions at the very least require the same thing pets and illusions require, AoE avoidance.
No amount of HP, you could give them 50-70k hp and in WvW and PvE that’d still be insufficient because the aoe damage going out in those situations is absurdly large and meant to be DODGED/BLOCKED/IMMUNITY SKILL.
Minions/pets/guardian spirits/illusions don’t dodge or try to get out of aoe/cleave by themselves, so they should at least receive AoE resistance to mitigate that problem.
The other problem is that the minions themselves don’t bring much of worth to a group, they’re just extra damage with the odd immobilize or blast finisher taking up precious utility slots. MM builds are roaming/1v1 builds, not team play builds, and that’s a problem in a game where a vast majority of the content/formats are meant to be played in teams.
All’s Well That Ends Well should cleanse 2 conditions per well use on top of its 2 seconds of alacrity.
Just to confirm, this is from a PVE perspective, right? Because in PVP I imagine the high updtime for evades would contribute meaningfully to the overall performance of the weapon.
Some are arguing from a PvP perspective, others from PvE. Since both have near opposite playstyles and desires for skills, its not going well.
Yes, the evade on AA is gold for all forms of PvP.
It’d be gold in PvE too if the autoattack damage didn’t suck.
The evades built into the weapons are there because the ranger himself doesn’t have much immunities besides a 60 sec cd signet of stone.
Rangers don’t have access to aegis, or constant blinds, or teleports, or much stealth. Its access to stability is also limited to very long cooldowns and one of them has a whopping 1 sec cast time.
The built in evades help to close that survivability gap compared to the other classes, which is still kinda short and why you don’t see much frontline rangers in WvW or spvp either.
Yeah, if you do the numbers on unrelenting assault, you’ll see that you can pull off some pretty ridiculous damage on a single target. As a PvP’er I can see it getting toned down a little bit at some point. It’s just going to be devastating 1v1.
I don’t really PvE much, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the damage is as impressive there as it is in PvP.
They better split pvp/pve balance with that skill. That skill alone is what’s keeping revenant competitive in PvE.
Honest question:
What do you think it would take to make Necro a good enough option to take over current PvE meta classes?
Enough stuff can be retooled.
Make Spectral Grasp AoE 5 target cap. Voila, necros now have a binding blade utility.
Soul Spiral should be our reflect (not projectile destruction, which is inferior and doesn’t add group DPS).
Make Vampiric Aura life steal not total garbage so it actually adds comparable group DPS.
Blood Is Power is brought back to 15 stacks, aoe 15 sec duration (it’s a corruption with a 30 sec cd and no other feature than the might stacks…)
I don’t even understand why we’re adding projectile destruction to Death’s Charge. I don’t want to displace myself with a projectile defense feature in PvE. Once again, a design that only considers PvP implications without considering its use in PvE.
Well of Blood converted to a water field. Make it transfer conditions on you to opponents inside the well.
Bring down Well of Darkness to a 25-30 sec cd. Same treatment for all wells above 25 sec cd (at least as a PvE only change if WvW starts crying).
Locust Swarm affects 5 allies as an aura. Life Drain (dagger 2) is an aoe 600 range health channel that works like transfusion and heals allies nearby you. Lower its channel time or increase its DPS.
Corrosive Cloud weakens and periodically blinds foes in addition to the poison.
Retool the shouts the following way: (all shouts are instant except Chilled to the Bone)
“Your Soul is Mine!”
Make it give the full heal for the opponent cap. Instead, grant x amount of vigor to self and allies per opponent hit.
“Nothing Can Save You!”
Make the unblockable feature groupwide, give the group fury for x amount of time per foe hit.
“Rise!”
Jagged Horrors grant the bond to 5 allies ala Phantasmal Defender from the mesmer.
You and allies gain quickness per foe struck.
“Suffer!”
Immobilize, then chill. Allies gain resistance per foe struck.
“You are all weaklings!”
Add slow as well. Might procs are groupwide.
“Chilled to the Bone”
Cooldown reduced to 60 seconds. Quickness for 6 seconds for 5 allies (you are counted in the 5 figure).
Basically, make the theme more vampiric. You drain from foes to grant to your allies.
Minions would involve a much larger post.
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I mean, why not just buff a deficient trait instead of nerfing another one to make the crappy one look good with the shifted functionality?
This stinks of the same logic they used with rangers.
“Oh, you guys aren’t using longbow? Here, let’s nerf shortbow and see if you guys use longbow.”
No, like I said, you’re still not taking anything I’ve said into consideration. doubling the attack speed of Life blast builds it much faster. I suggested a nerf from 15 to 10-12, which would still technically be faster at building, and only a bit less potent at holding that max stack (so long as you use life blast somewhat frequently, it wouldn’t be a major issue with Runes of Strength), and doesn’t touch Signet might building at all. Technically, this would be MORE reliable, overall, with a faster Life blast. You simply cannot go buffing Life blast and leave the supporting traits alone.
The part where Reaper comes in however, is that I suggest the faster cast Life blast and shorter Duration system over the two-hit Life Blast because with Reaper using a faster attack, Reaper’s Might is too good, and suffers the same balance issue a faster life blast would already, effectively making it better than Chilling victory, which is being held back because of this trait. The faster Life Blast but shorter might idea that I had would keep it relatively close to how it is now for base necromancer (again, given a faster attack speed), but reduce its potency slightly for Reapers, allowing for Chilling Victory to be better balanced and useful as a whole, which is currently, as a Master-Major, getting outshined fairly easily by Reaper’s Might, a minor-adept in spite.
Essentially, two birds with one stone. The two-attack might fix only keeps it the same for base necromancer but does very little to solve further issues with speed variations between the shrouds.
This is the problem, Reaper’s Might with Reaper is not too good.
The distinction between grandmaster/master/adept is also an irrelevant one now that you’re committed to an entire line, it doesn’t matter where the traits fall in if you’re going to take that combination regardless.
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I think the objection to your point is that not having the boons outside combat is effectively the same as having them outside combat. Nothing happens.
Unless you are contending that because the timer works at all times, you might enter combat and not get a boon till later because the timer already ticked before.
I mean, why not just buff a deficient trait instead of nerfing another one to make the crappy one look good with the shifted functionality?
This stinks of the same logic they used with rangers.
“Oh, you guys aren’t using longbow? Here, let’s nerf shortbow and see if you guys use longbow.”
Why are you nerfing Reaper’s Might instead of buffing Chilling Victory.
I don’t understand it, we’re balancing a necromancer within a vacuum instead of taking a look at what the strong classes have.
Necromancer self might buffing is hardly a problem….
The shouts aren’t useless at all, our traits all got rebalanced really nicely, we have access to a crapload of fields and our finisher situation is getting better, I’d be surprised if Gee doesn’t address it when he can.
This complaining makes no sense. Necromancers have been getting a lot of great attention, and now we’re going to start complaining that other professions aren’t getting shafted? That’s idiotic.
The shouts are useless in PVE. Feel free to argue that point. Nobody will use any of the shouts except perhaps the healing one, and even then that’s debatable compared to signet of vampirism. We will use the wells we always have, maybe signet of spite since death/reaper shroud is a DPS loss in PvE (unlike warrior’s berserker stance, which gives them a built in 10% attack speed and more frequent use to powerful burst skills).
I also don’t know what crapload of fields you’re referring to, or if you even read my post before hitting the reply key because I already acknowldged dark fields, which are USELESS IN PVE.
I don’t even know what finishers you’re referring to, in pve the only finisher of worth is a blast finisher, and where is ours?
You also mentioned traits being rebalanced nicely. So please explain to me the impact of Cold Shoulder and Shivers of Dread in PvE. Shivers of Dread Particularly since your only source of fear will be reaper shroud’s infusing terror explosion on a 20 sec cd. A minor to basically trigger 3 seconds of chill every 20 seconds? Very useful in PvE, where you want to use fear in particular.
We are going to start complaining that there are classes coming out, untweaked, with built in GROUP UTILITY.
You know, more fire fields on a warrior because if something was needed for warriors was more might stacking with the current state of Phalanx Strength warriors, and to top it all the next class to get a reflect is not the necromancer, who brings nothing of value to a group, but warrior who’s already a mandatory class in a PvE meta group.
I’m glad you’re happy about your reaper in your pvp. I’m not happy about reaper relative to the others in PvE.
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We get a set of useless, selfish shouts and now a warrior can not only reflect projectiles, he basically rains down fire fields and gets a heal that heals for far more than our shout heal on max targets and a 10 second cd stun break….
And then a trait that gives 7/14% precision as ferocity while we are stuck with a 3 second chill on a 20 sec cd fear and 20% less damage from chilled foes…
Meanwhile we still have a few dark fields (weak) with even less access to combo finishers.
And reaper shroud is still less DPS than our normal mainhand dagger and now greatsword while the warrior’s primal burst skills are strictly designed to enhance his damage.
Just did a fractal 50 yesterday, 1 guard 1 mesmer 1 ranger 1 engineer 1 warrior. Went super fast and smooth, despite the lack of eles. We got Cliffside and Volcanic fractal, did volcanic fractal with the bonus chest from shaman phase 1.
Zerk and meta is not the problem. The problem is morons looking at record runs ingeniously using certain classes to shave down some extra time, and assume that the alternatives are so much worse.
This game is just exceptional in that its community seems to enjoy a greater share of self important tryhards.
Rest assured though that those pugging tryhards are all bark, just phonies. Successful raiders/hardcore guilds don’t PuG and don’t go around creating bad publicity for their guild by taking a crap on pug players.
I mean look at DnT/rT, they publish guides for ALL classes. Brazil makes youtube videos of worthwhile builds, even on the much despised reaper. If it was truly that group of players pushing a message that other classes besides ele/warr/thief/mes/guardian had no place in higher level content, you wouldn’t see Brazil or spoj making guides for the lesser classes. The content is perfectly doable by all classes, yeah ele is OP, but if a group is kicking you out based on your class you quite frankly dodged a bullet.
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Blood is Power isn’t a meaningful group utility when Warrior brings 25 might permanently solo, or just fire fields + blast finishers, and BiP is such short duration it actually hurts the might stacking due to pushing off higher duration mights.
You mean like the long duration might stacks from Phalanx Strength?
I hope you weren’t being sarcastic and implying PS warrior clones short might duration into the group. A PS warrior with strength runes is a guaranteed 25 might stacks every 100 blades, and the might won’t fall off thanks to 100b having such a short cd with forceful greatsword.
And forceful greatsword is just a chilling force on steroids with no low uptime conditional (necro doesn’t have the uptime of chill to the degree a warrior is critting).
PSEA warriors are horrendously broken. 25 permanent might stacks in one button pres, 170 power+ condi damage (banner), 170 precision+ferocity (banner), 150 power from empowered allies, and the best group resurrection skill in the game (since the ranger elite spirit was nerfed into oblivion despite the fact the spirit had a cast time to spawn and another cast time to rez, courtesy of the always wonderful spvp whine breaking one class/spec at a time).
So long as PSEA warriors and eles with persisting flames continue to exist as is, all other classes and their lesser might/fury generation skills will be obsolete and suboptimal.
They need to nerf ele fire field uptime and the might duration from blasting the field (or alternatively put a cap on the amount of blasts per field, it’s way too easy to cap might with a single field). And Phalanx Strength/Forceful Greatsword need a nerf as well, while the stat contribution from warrior banners need to be given to other classes as well so having a warrior in the party isn’t mandatory).
Are you grossly exaggerating, or am I missing something? Hundred Blades hits 9 times, and sure as hell doesn’t generate 3 stacks per hit.
You do with 3+ targets.
Against a single boss you still give the party 25 perma might because PS clones any might you gain into allies. You get 9 from 100b on a single target+3 for great justice.
A PSEA warrior runs with eles. An ele sets down lava font as part of his rotation. he generates 6 stacks of might from arcane brilliance and arcane wave on it, plus everytime somebody else blasts the field.
So those 6 stacks he aoe buffed the party with, you cloned unto the party for 12. This is a conservative estimate.
The point is your group will never run out of 25 might stacks with a PSEA warrior around. ESPECIALLY with cleave.
Either way 9 might stacks aoe on a single target from 100b is absurd, necro gets an aoe 8 stacks of might for 8 seconds on a 30 sec cd as a UTILITY SKILL.
Doesn’t PS only clone the might stacks you generate yourself?
Yes, and that includes for great justice and fire field blasts on top of what the elementalist is generating.