Guild Wars 2

gavyne.6847:

Are you roaming on base necro by choice or because you don’t have HoT? It’s just strange to forgo added mobility, personal stab, more cc options, and more chill by playing base necro. Even if they ever so slightly boosted axe and finally righted lifeblast, I just don’t know how you could compete with even necro’s own elite counterpart.

Because the thing to remember is that it is a video game, and therefore for having fun. Just because Reaper is more optimal doesn’t mean it isn’t fun to go back and play with the core abilities. I personally enjoy every single part of the Necromancer class, including the more fickle playstyle and the burstier Shroud from time to time.

It’s also fun to kill people on something that has a public perception of being so subpar.

Hesacon.8735:

Corrupt boon has half the cast time and between 1 and 5 seconds less cooldown depending on traits, so it’s a mixed bag. I take spinal shivers personally, but I could understand a reason to run corrupt boon. The wvw forum is awash with people complaining about boons.

Well of corruption is another option that works well with power necros, either base or reaper. Of course wells are hard to use 1v1 since the target will almost always dodge roll out of them unless they expect to drop you by continuing to pressure.

Depending on situation, it might not be wrong to run all 3, especially as a roamer. Other roamers are always eager to engage a necro I’ve found.

Well, to be fully fair, Corrupt Boon has between 1 and 10 seconds less of a cooldown depending on traits :P I love Wells for the potential burst, but the likelihood of landing it is somewhere in the ballpark of 15% on average, so meh. And at this juncture in time, I feel most people have no fear of base Necromancer because they know they aren’t packing most of the mobility/pressure of Reaper Shroud, although I personally almost only roam on base Necromancer if I have Flesh Wurm on my bar to help alleviate that a touch.

Bhawb.7408:

Don’t worry guys, by the time of the next expansion they’ll finally get time to give a meaninglessly small buff to Axe again. Maybe we’ll even get a few CD reductions randomly spattered on our skills again.

Don’t forget the nerfing of something due to some other class’ strengths or something that hasn’t even come out yet.

Hesacon.8735:

I looked into agility sigils at one point for the quickness boon when entering shroud. It would double Life Blast’s damage output for the first second, but I decided sigils of air and force were better for average DPS. One second of quickness is hard to take advantage of.

One of the complaints for axe on another thread was that it’s ranged-but-not-really and people can run away. Focus #5 is a fantastic skill since it removes 3 boons and applies chill. With so many boon stacking classes in today’s meta, being able to strip them is very important. Having a shorter cooldown for focus #5 goes a long way, I find myself landing the skill about twice as often as before the patch.

The OP did address that with Corrupt Boon, but I find a utility slot to be more precious than a weapon slot.

You have a lot of valid points, and I fully agree with your Agility sentiment, I just find it more entertaining to play with to a point. The big thing with Corrupt Boon and Spinal Shivers is that the classes where a boon strip is important usually also have resistance these days, so you could argue that while Corrupt Boon has higher uptime, Spinal Shivers also dealing damage is worth more when facing the statistical chance that the opponent keeps resistance and Corrupt Boon does nothing in comparison to the Shivers.

For offhands, I personally find that Warhorn is more consistent with the ambiguity of the daze and better against thieves, dagger is better against heavy conditions and decent against power builds slower than thief, and focus is better for higher burst damage when you aren’t the focus of an enemy (no pun intended).

I tend to like using Pack if solo, since Fury uptime is pretty important after stat-balancing is taken into account. Otherwise Strength is fine as always, as is something with higher defensive characteristics like Scrapper or Durability.

Sigils are pretty straightforward; Air and Fire are go-to for burst, but others like Agility and Rage with Axe and Shroud-swap can be potent and unexpected. I tend to enjoy the Agility sigils, since they feel like they have more play to them.

mazut.4296:

Zero Solstice.9754, your troll is not appreciated. Do not post if you have nothing to add

Speak for yourself while you hop off of your Silverado high horse, and try hosting as strong of a discussion as I have so far. Up to this point your posts have either been “I agree with you” or “Erroneous buff to X should be made!!!”. Advocating against something is just as important as advocating for it, and so far my counter-arguments have been peaceful and respectable.

So to that I say: mazut.4296, your troll is not appreciated. Do not post if you have nothing to add.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Even though they weren’t exactly meta, they still had their meta-builds to play.

Also, being able to detonate marks would help against downed players, buildings and would allow for proper utilisation of the combo field and -finisher found on staff. Just because it wouldn’t have all that many uses doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a helpful change.

Detonating marks on downed players doesn’t really matter, as it’s easy enough as a Necromancer to cleave out downs through other means, and if someone else comes to ress then they’ll pop the marks for you. The finisher argument is very valid, although blasting the staff’s own field is a poor example, as the field blasts weakness on opponents, meaning having it actually hit anything would involve having an enemy trigger it as normal for you. Having it affect structures is pretty wasteful too, since structure damage is generally abysmal, so it’s just kind of a waste of those cooldowns and there are better ways to damage structures anyway.

mazut.4296:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

Zero Solstice.9754:

mazut.4296:

And with all this, Staff is the second least used weapon after focus.

I would love to know where you got this statistic, considering Staff has been included in just about every single Necromancer build for the last 3 years, with the exception of the Viper Horrors PvE build, which uses Sc/WH & Sc/D

Staff has never been included in any PvE Necro build, at least not any meta one.
Staff is used in WvW and PvP because it’s the best way for us to get life force (despite locking us into Soul Reaping) and well, because there really aren’t any other good options. It’s a weapon you use because it’s the lesser evil, so to say. I mean to be fair, the staff utility isn’t too bad and does help out, but it’s still not great and the damage on it is pretty much kitten imo. I mean, what else would you take over staff, even if you had the option?
Staff marks should have innate LF-regen, we should be able to manually detonate them and the auto should be slightly improved imo.

Well said, especially the part where LF generation should be implemented in the weapon, not as trait. If there is similar trait in Soul Reaping it should even must affect all weapons!!!
We take Staff in PvP because of LF generation and 3 of its marks are decent, but thats not enough. We take it only because we have no alternative in both LF generation and long range. It need better and more persistent utility or damage buff.
And of course changing/buffing our other weapons is needed too and if it happens(I almost gave up hopes) staff will be even less usable.

I feel this is slowly turning into less of a “Staff could use help” thread, and more of a “Necromancer needs buffz boiz” thread. Staff marks having the capacity to be “detonated” is pretty worthless in my opinion. There are only three major times a mark goes off: An enemy activates it by touching it and gets hit by it, an enemy dodges through it and evades it, or an enemy triggers it while you’re blinded and it misses. In every single one of these cases, detonating the mark yourself does literally nothing extra. A mark not activating on something considered an “enemy”, such as Tequatl, is either a fringe occurrence, or is generally a waste of your time and cooldowns anyway; Tequatl isn’t exactly difficult, so why bother wasting your marks on it or Staff-autoing it when you could just use Axe, Scepter, or Dagger for greater DPS?

I never hear any of the other high-level players I play with complain about Staff, not because it’s “bad” or “good”, but because it has a pretty clearly defined role/playstyle of being a ranged area-denial weapon used for pressure and resource acquisition. The downsides of Staff are pretty easily offset by the rest of the class. If the argument here is becoming about how mandatory Soul Reaping is, or how bad other weapons might be, then I think we need to make another thread.

Also, “Staff has never been included in any PvE Necro build, at least not any meta one” because until at least the Specialization update a year ago, or more aptly until the release of HoT, Necromancer in PvE was never meta to begin with

mazut.4296:

And with all this, Staff is the second least used weapon after focus.

I would love to know where you got this statistic, considering Staff has been included in just about every single Necromancer build for the last 3 years, with the exception of the Viper Horrors PvE build, which uses Sc/WH & Sc/D

Shadelang.3012:

It would still be a kitten good aoe nuke. But it would cap out how good it COULD be. And prevent the more extreme examples. (Every condi necro here has dreamed of eping all the condies on a keep/castle lord in wvw onto the zerg around it).

Shade please, it ceases to be a dream when we have been doing it daily for weeks :P

Anchoku.8142:

Axe should apply poison and weakness on its AA cycle.

Ehrm… No.

This is just poor design; Permanently reducing your opponent’s healing and invalidating Power damage and dodge-rolling isn’t fun design space. Plus consider an identical case: Elixir Gun auto-attacks. E-Gun autos are slow moving projectiles that fire with a cast time of 0.83s, have identical range, and apply weakness and bleed. You’re suggesting the Necromancer Axe have auto attacks that hit twice every second, don’t use projectiles, deal greater damage, and punish our opponent even harder by getting hit by them.

Staff is, and has been for a very long time, a utility-based weapon. It deals moderate damage, it applies Regeneration on a short CD, it gains very large amounts of Life Force over time, it controls our opponents through CC, damage mitigation, healing reduction, movement speed reduction, and CD increases while at range, and it offers a condition transfer. All while at the second longest in-game range and with the potential of being entirely unblockable.

Staff marks really don’t need to trigger on downed corpses, because Necromancer as a class is already rather great at cleaving. Pulsing Mark fields would skew balance between optimal and regular circumstances: How do you balance the power aspect against the repeatedly-applied condition aspect? How do you balance the condition application to be worthwhile when the mark only hits a couple of times as opposed to hitting the target every single time?

Is staff a phenomenal weapon? Not really, but it has a pretty clear-cut usage currently, and I don’t necessarily think that it needs major functionality overhauls.

CynicalFred.9135:

Zero Solstice.9754:

This isn’t the correct call by any measure. We don’t need to allow full healing through shroud at all, what we need is for sustain to not be so powerful among other sources. People constantly complain about how “HoT brought so much power creep into the game”, but then people like you say things along the lines of “my ability is weaker than this other stuff, so it needs BUFFS!” rather than saying “my ability is worse than these other super-powered things, so I think they should be brought back a bit”.

Necromancer being choked on Life Force or sustain sources in general wouldn’t be an issue if other classes weren’t capable of sustaining so heavily. Even putting aside the now-ironic thematic concept that Necromancer was supposed to be the “Attrition class”, other classes being able to heal so effectively while committing so little to doing so is what’s wrong with the game.

So in other words, one or two things are weak, while many others are strong on account of HoT and your solution is “Nerf them all!” rather than buff the few. K den…..

Yeah, it really is. Considering the major overarching complaint of balance is “I hate how strong X is”, the correct answer in my mind is definitely to set a bar, and balance everything to it. Will certain things still be strong/weak? Sure, because that’s the nature of having abilities that do contrasting things. But to a point there isn’t anything fun or special or appreciable about getting 10k crit by an auto-firing ranged ability, or healing for 10k+ from one skill every 20 seconds.

Besides, at the end of the day, most of many things that are strong on account of HoT came out in HoT. Feel free to disagree, I won’t lose sleep.

I did in fact forget about the health and toughness reductions, so it’s fair to call it a nerf, but to be fair it’s also not a healthy type of skill to have in the game, hence why they nerfed the scrapper version Bulwark Gyro as well. Having free passive damage mitigation that requires no real input isn’t a rigorous or skill-intensive design. The fact that Necromancer as a class has so few defensive capabilities beyond Shroud is a major issue, so this nerf combined with the previous change to Infuse Terror hurts on the surface, but in total it just requires more active play on your part to have sufficient survivability.

The balance patch was perfectly fine. Nothing got nerfed, while at the same time a number of skills got buffs or QoL changes. The change to Rise means that Reapers need to take more damage, but that also means that the minions stay alive longer. The change really only made it so that it becomes harder to sustain, but the amount of damage that Rise mitigates is still roughly the same.

Thieves: Thieves simply kite you out with their superior mobility. Given an unknown amount of time and good skill/patience, a thief can win every single 1v1 in the game, especially against Necromancers. That said, not every thief is patient enough and may overstep their bounds at some point. Major methods of assisting your fight against them is to run Warhorn and any combination of Weakening Shroud and Spiteful Spirit. Having on demand multi-hit and instant-hit abilities severely helps cleanse blind, which is the major shortcoming of the duel, given our slower attacks.

Rangers: 1500 range is painful, and the slower movement of our abilities, plus lack of mobility, make it extremely painful at times to try to close the distance. Celestial Form cleanse is also rather brutal, given base Necromancer’s slow application speed. Putrid Mark is a pretty heavy breaker in this matchup, as the size of the mark effectively allows you to range the mark to roughly 1440 range. Another thing to realize is sometimes you need to think outside of the box; Plague Signetting or Putrid Marking the pets is a very valid path to take when in a difficult position. If you find you run into a larger number of Rangers than other classes in a given day, I highly recommend running Corrosive Poison Cloud, it helps to greatly shore up our weakness to the longbow as well as provide decent Weakness uptime. Also plays exceptionally well against Bristleback.

Warrior: The same way thieves beat the kitten out of us, we can beat the kitten out of Warriors. The name of the game is kiting here. You need to be capable of maintaining distance between you and them, and find ways to regularly reopen gaps. The matchup is much easier with abilities like Foot in the Grave, Corrupt Boon, and Summon Flesh Wurm, since they give you easy ways to protect from getting locked down, ways of dealing with Resistance and Stability, and ways of reopening the gap. Another strong way to kite warriors is to jump-dodge into their abilities; since the pathing of abilities like Rush cause them to move to where you are, jump dodging through them before they hit you allows you to gain distance through them when they’re locked into the attack animation. You can also dodge towards the origin of their Whirling Blades for a similar effect. The duel isn’t an auto-win, but it’s a perfectly fair fight if you know your way around it.

Hope some of these tips helped!

Prince Vingador.8067:

For pvp is just bad and for pve is not so bad but still bad imo cause like i said u can take WAY BETTER, u dont need the might in pve cause the group is always stack with 25 stacks in raids and pve organize groups.
There is a raid forum and fractal forum and a www, if u need better understanding in such areas.
Lets just leave it at that.
Take blood is power and enjoy man if u like it good for u ,i just hope u dont get in my team in pvp

I wouldn’t want you on my team in PvP to begin with, judging by your inability to understand what is going on around you and being said to you in this thread.

This is not a PvP forum, nor is this a thread dedicated to the PvP perspective. If that bothers you, then feel free to go elsewhere. And to moot your point even further, you actually can’t take anything better than this in PvE for the most part; when this skill is good in PvE, it’s generally unmatched in how much free damage it gives you over a span of time as opposed to anything else. A well isn’t better, a shout isn’t better, a minion with Death Nova isn’t better.

@OP:
The corruptions don’t need reworking because not only do they do their jobs uniquely, but they also do them efficiently. Nothing else in the game compares to Consume Conditions, Epidemic, or Corrupt Boon in terms of utility or active effect.

The thing you need to remember about design in games such as these is that not every ability is supposed to be as good in every area of the game as each other ability. Blood is Power doesn’t need to have any sort of use in PvP because it already has a perfectly valid home elsewhere in PvE. Besides, you would rather have an effect in PvP that has some actual utility to it, not just extra damage, so having this on your bar in PvP is simply painful regardless.

There’s nothing wrong with the state of Blood is Power. Besides, the last thing we need is to add to the game’s power creep by attempting to increase the strength of abilities that aren’t godlike across the board.

Shaogin.2679:

The issue with power necro has nothing to do with condi being meta. 3 out of 9 classes are currently running condi meta builds, that is hardly a condi meta. Power nexro has same issues as always, low mobility, easily focused, and easily avoidable attacks.

1. 3 classes out of 9 are condi, but all 3 of the classes are the meta. Mesmers, Warriors, and Necros make up every game of PvP you play in, assuming you are in average-to-high-level games.

2. You restated my own point: Power Necro is too easily kited. The lack of sustain and “easily avoidable attacks” are (mostly) irrelevant to the issue of being kited, they simply mean that while being kited, you die faster and with less hassle than some other classes.

FrostDraco.8306:

Zero Solstice.9754:

The percentage damage modifiers on abilities/traits such as Close to Death have no impact on the damage dealt by conditions. You should only take abilities such as those if you intend to play a build with Power in it.

Depends really. Vipers build are hybrid builds, and the increased damage effects the skill rotations, so i dont think its bad to use if you dont need or like the other grandmasters.

You’re right, Viper builds are hybrid builds, but as my original point stated: it has Power in it.

The percentage damage modifiers on abilities/traits such as Close to Death have no impact on the damage dealt by conditions. You should only take abilities such as those if you intend to play a build with Power in it.

Here’s a scenario for your judgemental ideology: The ANet guild in-game includes ANet employees from all walks of life, including graphic designers. A graphic designer claimed that keep.

Are you honestly about to tell me from your position that you believe that a graphics designer on a different server than you claiming objectives under a guild no different from any other in the game displays favoritism? Are you afraid that ANet is about to make YBBL Keep look cooler than every other keep in the game?

Even taking into account your “background”, your ideology on this subject not only lacks correlation to your experiences, but is also shortsighted and, to a point, entitled.

This isn’t the correct call by any measure. We don’t need to allow full healing through shroud at all, what we need is for sustain to not be so powerful among other sources. People constantly complain about how “HoT brought so much power creep into the game”, but then people like you say things along the lines of “my ability is weaker than this other stuff, so it needs BUFFS!” rather than saying “my ability is worse than these other super-powered things, so I think they should be brought back a bit”.

Necromancer being choked on Life Force or sustain sources in general wouldn’t be an issue if other classes weren’t capable of sustaining so heavily. Even putting aside the now-ironic thematic concept that Necromancer was supposed to be the “Attrition class”, other classes being able to heal so effectively while committing so little to doing so is what’s wrong with the game.

NeXeD.3042:

Zero Solstice.9754:

Minions only scale off of three player-based stats: Condition Damage, Condition Duration, and Boon Duration. If you were to plan on using minions, Condition Damage over Power is the route that you would rather take anyway.

Is this accurate?

Entirely.

EremiteAngel.9765:

Thanks for ur insightful thoughts!
I admit the warrior didn’t look good at all during the fight. but he was from BG’s QQ guild which is a collection of really strong roamers and he had a season 2 pvp legendary title. i did wonder if he was new to the class or did i really play well. So I asked around and had confirmations from 2 of his QQ guild mates in the WvW forum thread that he is one of the best warrior roamers though. But they also agreed that he wasn’t performing up to his usual standards.

Well, we are talking about QQ; if they lost a fight, they’re going to tell you they’re not playing up to par. If they’re in the guild, then their guildies will claim that they’re “the best”. That’s simply how their ego is. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a very subpar warrior, because in my time fighting them, the only warrior I remember is Hadi, and he was definitely nothing special.

RLD.7439:

Zero Solstice.9754:

…snip

Can’t thank you enough for the effort. I got some good insight and food for thought.

I made a few changes (also forced to take cost into consideration unfortunately).

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vREQNAW7Yn0ICV3gd2Ae3A83gjihi+ETxtGDgBIBmrwMEDA-TBSAQB5UJ4VU+xk9Hk2FBAJq/AgnAQO0NkOzfkCYRlVA-e

Looks pretty good. Give it a test run, see what you like and what works, and what you don’t like and what doesn’t work, and go from there. Hope you find something you really enjoy!

Hi bud, not a big deal if some parts of build making don’t make sense or what have you, learning how to do it is something everyone goes through, but it pays off when you can use your knowledge to make just about anything happen build-wise.

Ignoring power completely isn’t a bad thing at all if you’re planning to play a condition-based build. Something to understand about GW2 is that every statistic is based off of a points system, i.e. your helmet will have 43 points of toughness and vitality, and 60 points of condition damage. If you’re trying to get power onto your gear, it means that those points you’re investing into power have to pull away from a different stat to make up the difference. To get a build to do exactly what you want it to do within the points limitations, you need to balance out exactly how many of one point you need to get the desired effect, and then put all of the remaining points into the other stats you want. This is known as “stat-balancing”. So by not having any Power in your build, you’re maximizing just how much Condition Damage, Toughness, and Vitality you get instead, but since you aren’t trying to scale anything with Power, it doesn’t actually make a difference.

As of HoT, Condition Duration is actually considered a stat that can be affected by gear through an attribute called Expertise. If you want to get more condition duration, you can use gear with Expertise on it and/or use foods such as Rare Veggie Pizza, Tuning Icicles, and Toxic Focusing Crystals. Since you have so much Vitality, I might recommend stat-balancing some pieces of Trailblazer’s into your gear, which is like Dire but with Expertise replacing some amount of the Vitality and Toughness, as well as using whatever duration foods you can afford.

Minions only scale off of three player-based stats: Condition Damage, Condition Duration, and Boon Duration. If you were to plan on using minions, Condition Damage over Power is the route that you would rather take anyway.

While the terminology might be a tad confusing, % damage has no effect on your Condition Damage, so Close to Death and the Force sigils actually do nothing for you in this build. I would recommend replacing them with Spiteful Spirit and Sigils of Malice/Bursting (if you can afford them). I would also recommend Bitter Chill instead of Spiteful Talisman, as Vulnerability causes Conditions to scale.
Spite isn’t overly suited to Conditions builds, and I would recommend Curses/Death Magic instead, but I don’t want to completely overrule your major decisions; that’s half the fun of making builds.

Transfusion and Vampiric Presence are nice if you plan to run minions, otherwise you would probably get more value out of different traitlines, like running Curses for Master of Corruptions to be able to use your Corruption abilities more often for greater DEEPS.

EremiteAngel.9765:

Cecilia.5179:

Terror Reaper? People still use Terror? XD

The other 2 options in the curses tree aren’t that much of a game changer either. More boon corrupt on shroud 2 or shorter corruption CD…hmm nope.

Never undersell these two traits, especially Master of Corruption. There’s a reason why Terror sees so little play anymore: The other two traits are as highly, if not more competitive. With stability always running around, it’s better to have more boon corrupts to get rid of stability than it is to have fears deal damage when the target doesn’t have it. Also Master of Corruption gives the spec something Condition Necro has always lacked: sustain. More frequent Consume Conditions usages means higher HP recovery, as well as playing very well in the current condition-heavy meta.

Terror is simply too inconsistent and unreliable.

The major issue with Power Necromacer is that it is too easily kited, due to lack of a reliable high-damage ranged weapon. The reason it’s almost impossible to see consistent success with Power Necromancer is because conditions are the meta currently, and Power Necromancer completely eats it to consistent Chill, Cripple, Immobilize, and Weakness uptime. It’s obviously possible to gear out your utilities for heavy mitigation by running Plague Signet, Suffer, Well of Power, etc., but uptime simply makes overall performance too high-variance. It was possible to see reasonable success with Berserker Greatsword Reaper in season’s past, but that was due to the effectiveness of Durability runes more than most other things.

Get out of here, Cinna. No one wants to see your usual high-quality gameplay.

With proper stat balancing, you should be able to achieve the following rough stats:
2600 Power
30% Base Crit Chance
210% Crit Damage
2400 Armor
22k Health

Use a strong mix of Valkyrie and Cavalier’s, with Berserker weapons and trinkets, and you shouldn’t have too much of a problem achieving a strong mix of the stats you need.

Note: The reason for 30% Base crit chance is due to the exceptionally large number of sources of Fury currently, between Heralds, boon share Mesmers, Pack runes, and Guardians, you should easily find a combination of factors to where you have nearly 100% Fury uptime. Combine that with Death Perception and you have 100% crit chance while in shroud.

Most warriors are relatively easy kills with Foot in the Grave and Flesh Wurm. The name of the game is kiting, and as long as you can keep stripping the stability and resistance off of them, and you understand proper stunbreak and Death’s Charge usage, they should have a hard time fully locking you down.

Hi friend, welcome back. Let’s dive straight in.

The race is really dependent on what you find aesthetically pleasing: Human and Sylvari animations are very smooth, and not a single one of them feel out of place in terms of native modeling, but you might find them bland since many abilities of the Necro class use similar animations. They also look great in regards to armor. Charr animations are very large and telegraphed, although many are rather clunky and Charr light armor is, in my opinion, pretty horrifying to look at. Asurans are reminiscent of humans, but much smaller, and Norn are a bit larger. If you really can’t decide, then make one of each and take them into the PvP lobby “Heart of the Mists”; Everything is unlocked in PvP, so it’s a great place to bring a brand new character to look at all of the skill and weapon animations.

Necromancer has a solid place in PvE after the release of Heart of Thorns. Dungeons have fallen off the radar for the most part, but are very easy for most any class. For fractals and raid, most people favor towards Viper’s Condition Reaper for it’s extremely high potential damage output, heavy soft CC, and the usage of Epidemic. The thing to note is that raid meta is tending to pull away from Necromancers in favor of a higher Elementalist count with Condition Druids, but that’s mostly just on the radar of high-end groups, so pugging should still be quite easy as a Condition Reaper.

With the release of HoT, and more specifically the extremely heightened group strength that came from Chronomancer Quickness and Herald Boon-Botting, most every class is capable of high-end PvE content, as long as you are properly specced (meaning gear quality moreso than specific gear) and knowledgable in the encounter. You may remember from the past how dungeon parties would kick players almost instantly for being a certain class, Rangers and Necromancers especially. That practice really doesn’t see too much usage anymore, with the exception of the most min-maxxed, dedicated Raiding groups.

All in all: Perfectly safe pick if it’s what you enjoy playing. Best of luck and have fun!

I don’t understand the fixation with the Blood Bond synergy, because it’s a single trait in a line that is otherwise worthless to you as a Condi Necro. The problem is that even in a reasonable situation, such as after Chillblains, Chilling Nova, and Hydromancy, those 3 stacks of bleed are still a DPS loss of almost 70% as compared to the previous Chill damage. Even when you consider this playing nicely with other Necros, not only is that a poor idea to stack Necros just in the concept of what the class does, but it’s still a DPS loss of at least 10% when stacking 3 Necros.

Did Deathly Chill need a nerf? Absolutely; it made it too easy to deal damage with Condi Necro and it added a “kill you faster” switch to a condition that I believe is already too punishing on its own. However, I don’t think completely gutting its functionality was the correct way to balance out why people hated Reapers.

So in light of the recent change to Deathly Chill, I would like to try to start a discussion on ways the trait to be reworked to be a nerf to what it was, but not as serious as the current iteration.

As of now, Deathly Chill was reworked to apply 1 stack of bleed whenever Chill is applied to a target. As a note, this includes all applications, such as standing inside of the Chill field from Executioner’s Scythe. The issue is that the rework nerfed Deathly Chill, in an average good scenario of applying Chill 3 times, by more than 70% of its former damage. For a Grandmaster trait, I believe this is too much of a downgrade, and it doesn’t really adjust the original and still present issue of why Chill is too strong: Because it’s too punishing of a single condition.

What I would like to talk about here, while there’s still time to hopefully catch some dev’s eyes and cause a change, is how we could work things out to balance out both Deathly Chill’s standing as a build-defining Grandmaster trait, and Chill as a condition in general.

Personally, I believe that the real issue lies in Chill being too punishing of a single condition. I think a more appropriate nerf would have been altering Chill to reduce movement speed and cooldown recharge by only 33% each. This makes Chill less oppressive by itself, and also puts Cripple in its appropriate place as the go-to movement impairing condition. Alongside this, I think Reaper-side Chill durations should be reduced. This could be done by toning down the individual Reaper skills, or simply taking away the free 20% duration increase gotten from Cold Shoulder. Touching baseline Necro Chill durations, such as Chillblains, would punish the core class a little too much for the strength of Reaper, and would just maintain the hierarchy of power creep between elite specs and core classes.

With the above changes, the previous iteration of Deathly Chill could be appropriate, if not decreased by some percentage in scaling. It could also maintain it’s current functionality of dealing damage when first applied, however I don’t believe bleeding is the correct way to implement such damage, as bleeds scale too poorly and don’t make up for the damage lost, at least not with the current 1 stack.

TL;DR – Deathly Chill got axed almost entirely. What are some ways we could try to make it balanced while we still have time to try to give devs input for the patch?

In general, I just want to mention that the loss of death shroud has very strong consequences on the sustain of the class. Try to take a PvP fight as a necro without using your shroud, it would be difficult to win it!
This is why I think it is very hard to know how strong or not this elite spec would be, and why I may (or may not) have overturned some defensive elements.

Of course, it’s hard to understand the effects of most design/balance decisions without seeing live implications in a natural ecosystem.

I obviously was not clear enough in my description. The reason I settled for a short cast time is because the skill DOES NOT track the target. It appears at its feet and then stay there, so by simply stepping away, the enemy avoids the bulk of the damage.

As I said, many things may need tuning, but this is not as strong as you understood it.

Ah, much better.

Just one detail, “nothing can save you” is a reaper skill, meaning that as it is currently, it won’t be available to the next elite spec.

Of course, I just listed it as another option in the ways of unblockable potential.

This is a scaling to only one skill. I don’t know if this is really that strong…

The thing to remember is that with raw DPS modifiers, you need the straight DPS increase to not clearly outweigh the other trait options in the same line. Since this is already a DPS-centered specialization concept, you want to make sure that raw DPS increases aren’t the only good options, as it severely linearizes the gameplay decisions and leads to less interactive/more passive gameplay mechanics.

I did hesitate for this one. My main reason to go for this is that 10s is not much seeing as it only activates on entering shroud. Most of the traits of this type try to arrange for 50% vigor uptime “base”, and I figured 10s in shroud and 10s waiting for shroud will already mean 50%. Stay longer in shroud and you get less than 50%.

This is reasonable, but the other thing to remember is that Vigor isn’t necessarily in the Necromancer flavor, and also that with the introductions of Boon Duration foods, gear, and abilities, you don’t want bases to be too high overall so that they don’t get out of hand in the “above average” to “best” case scenarios.

I most probably agree with you. In one hand, I would love boons to have as much counterplay as conditions have since they are supposed to be alter egos. On the other hand, I know boon corruption already feels over the top. Maybe boon rip?

This is kind of a grey area; there are a whole slew of interesting ideas that could slot in here. What about the concept of hexes from Guild Wars 1? Maybe, using the Mantra on an individual with X boons will give you an X-scaled amount of some ability like quickness, superspeed, ferocity, or something new entirely? You’re treading in completely fictional territory, be creative!

I did hesitate for AOE vs single target. Overall, I see the warlock as a duelist/executioner, so single target makes more sense. I still went for AOE because I know mantra of pain (very similar utility) is AOE and still barely used…

Thing is Mantra of Pain has lower scaling in general, and is also only power damage, while Blaze applies both direct damage and Burning.

I’ll be honest with you, the concept looks very fun, but both offkey and too strong as it is on paper.

For example, Necromancer as a class just doesn’t need to have stealth; it’s not in our flavor chart. However, there are fun ways we could create pseudo-stealtkitten to Necromancer’s flavor. For example, imagine if instead Death Veil put down a 900 radius smoke field. Instead of stealthing the Necro, the Necro turns into a shadow, which is still targettable and visible (kind of like the Strawberry Ghost food), however immune to all damage via evade for as long as they remain in the field and have not attacked a target. Opponents in the field may or may not get blinded, depends on how strong the concept is in action.
This creates a very Necromancer-style ability, in which the Necromancer is simply stronger than the opponent through area denial and the mitigation of the evade, however it gives Necro a pseudo-stealth capacity to attack an opponent precisely when they feel the timing is right.

Another concept which could use help is Hellfire. In your tooltip, this appears to be a ranged ability with no windup, no projectile, and multiple strikes of increasing coefficients.
The thing to understand is that for abilities like these, to offset the extremely high damage potential of the ability, you need to make sure it has a “tell”, so that players can have time to react and counterplay such an important cooldown. Also, being that you want this spec to be for burst-style play, that means this ability should have low base values and high scaling. With that in mind, you really need to obey that balancing rule. It could be that you meant for the 1/2 second cast time to be preparing the ability, and the strikes come after, but that remains unclear. The AoE and fire field aspect of the skill also feel overtuned, as an ability that tracks a target shouldn’t really create a field, and an ability that tracks a target shouldn’t be able to cleave out the people next to him, especially if the actual target is dodging the ability, but those ideas are mostly just my opinion with no real backing.

As for traits, there are some pretty real issues:
Intimidation is too strong as an adept trait, and its effect is erroneous given that a large number of Necromancer CC is already unblockable, such as Wail of Doom, traited Reaper’s Mark, corrupting Stability with Corrupt Boon, and any combination of abilities with “Nothing Can Save You!”. Also, it doesn’t make sense to make fear unblockable, but not the actual ability that applies fear.
I like the idea of Mantra of Fear applying Torment instead of fear, but with this trait, it also fears for a very short duration, pretty much long enough to be a daze.
Shadow Fury scaling is too high for an adept trait.
Otherworldly Immunity seems too strong with your idea of stealth, but I think it could be workable after tweaking the durations with the above listed idea for Death Veil.
Ghostly Avoidance doesn’t need to exist, since Necro already has Reaper’s Protection.
Unbound Soul vigor has too long of a duration, probably shoot for something like 6 seconds.

For mantras:
Mantra of Corruption is a little over the top when combined with a lot of the baseline Necromancer corruption that has been added in recent time.
Refer to above for Mantra of Fear.
Blaze should be single target to make coefficient balancing easier, however the burn application being AoE could be something to play with.

To be completely honest, I would probably trade the concept of using life force purely for Shroud to acquire a few utilities along the lines of “Assume a spectral shell for a short duration, blocking all incoming attacks. Each strike to you drains a percentage of Life Force.” Active defenses would be wonderful, even if it required us to alternatively use our class mechanic.

Akashi.3245:

Zero Solstice.9754:

Akashi.3245:

full dire is still a good way to go. the precision is not a huge loss for the amount of survivability you get out of it when the majority of your damage is condi based. the precision can also come from the curses traitline (2% per condi on target) if you choose to run it or decimate defenses from the reaper traitline along with bitter chill from the spite traitline. shroud scales along with Vit. Boons like fury and might also exist.

This isn’t correct. The scaling from Target the Weak only comes from your actual Precision stat, not from crit chance modifiers.

^ correct. was referring to the crit chance not the damage modifier. i should have said that instead of precision

edit: was not referring to decimate defenses either

All good bruv, :+1:

Well, aside from the fact that you’ve proven yourself to be abrasive, stubborn, and you attempt to make yourself out to be of a higher standing and have more weight than everyone else here, while refusing to give any evidence of the standing which you are trying so desperately to cling to, you have also repeatedly referenced World of Warcraft in your arguments for how things should be, so in my eyes you generally also lose all credibility; Not only is World of Warcraft a completely different game, and therefore should not be applied to the scope of Guild Wars 2, but it is also a game which, in recent years, has completely fallen from the graces it once knew long in the past, therefore making it a debunked foundation for how a game should be handled.

You’re losing because you have Fivedawgs on your team, and he’s appropriately dead in the image.

Akashi.3245:

full dire is still a good way to go. the precision is not a huge loss for the amount of survivability you get out of it when the majority of your damage is condi based. the precision can also come from the curses traitline (2% per condi on target) if you choose to run it or decimate defenses from the reaper traitline along with bitter chill from the spite traitline. shroud scales along with Vit. Boons like fury and might also exist.

This isn’t correct. The scaling from Target the Weak only comes from your actual Precision stat, not from crit chance modifiers.

Spectral Armor, both active and Last Gasp passive, is not properly removed upon entering Shroud. For the duration of the ability, it supplies the Necro with life force whenever they are struck, even if they are in Shroud.

I understand English may not be your first language, but outside of the fact that your grammar made this difficult to fully understand, not only is the concept of a “burst rotation” usually too situational, but you’re trying to show a rotation using a suboptimal build that sees no play. Is it wrong to see or play a build that it “different”? Not at all, however, you shouldn’t use it to show other people how to follow appropriate decision trees. This is pretty much exemplified by the fact that a number of your statements rely on “if” rather than “when”, for example your opponent running into your Spectral Wall.

I find the best way to explain burst rotations to people is in retrospect. Most individuals know which abilities do damage, so the best way to explain burst isn’t in how you would burst a target, but rather in why you chose to burst a target in the way you did. It’s better to understand the thought process and decision making that went into ability usage.

Even in its current state, GW2 is still basically the best game on the market. If you’re questioning coming back, then it’s probably not worth your time, because nothing has really changed from when you left to begin with. As for Power Reaper, it sees play in WvW, but it’s been phased out for the time being.

Full Dire is a DPS loss, and also a generally suboptimal use of stat allotment. I would recommend Rabid and Dire statbalancing, using Rabid until roughly 33% Crit Chance, and then loading on Dire. Another option is to use Trailblazer’s instead of Dire if you’ve got the money for it.

Akrasia.5469:

Anyway to get the Devs to notice this trait for consideration for future updates. This and Unholy Martyr need some love.

Unholy Martyr honestly doesn’t need any love. I remember almost single-handedly getting it nerfed when it first came out last July, when the LF gain was 10% instead of 7%. I never saw anyone else run it, but I ran it for something like two weeks, and the Shroud upkeep time was way too high. To be fair though, that was back before the HoT power spike hit, so it might not hurt to tweak UM accordingly, but the trait was stupid strong previously.

Here’s a qt match I played, talking about rotations and the obvious effect that they have on the game as it’s being played.

Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9RXFUNaOxw

MasterElements.5023:

What tier of wvw are you on? What numbers do you usually run with? What role in the group are you fulfilling? There is no best build, just best at. Spite/Blood/Soul Reaping in full Berzerker is the meta for full zerg well bomb, but it sin’t the best thing to run solo in wvw.

This is simply incorrect all around. You should never run full Zerk, you should stat balance so that you don’t get one-pushed. Also, it’s typical to drop Blood Magic because Reaper is pretty generally an upgrade to Power Necro. The only thing that puts you at a disadvantage in small group/solo vs. big group are your utility choices, since you likely won’t have a stunbreak while running with a larger force.

Boon Corruption, as per the programming involved, involves removing a boon, and then applying a condition based on what the removed boon was. For that reason, it functions with all application synergies, for example corrupting stability will apply fear, and applying fear will also apply chill if you are running Reaper.

bearshaman.3421:

onevstheworld.2419:

Ikihiki.2316:

I don’t have all hero points in reaper yet, so haven’t really learned to play with reaper elsewhere.

Am i losing compatibility too much, if i’m not reaper?

Personally, I do think you are short changing yourself by not using reaper. It’s the reason there are so many necros in PvP.

As condi reaper, you’d still be using staff + scepter/X, but your F1 changes into a melee shroud instead of ranged, which does take a bit of getting used to. Trait-wise, Deathly Chill is one of the best… it makes chill cause damage in addition to it’s usual slow + skill recharge slowing effects. And reapers get lots of chills.

Which traitline would you have him trade out for reaper?

Death Magic easily.