Guild Wars 2

Bhawb.7408:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Is this actually a buff? we get 1 extra stack of bleed, but lose 60% duration. This seems like a significant nerf to me for overall PvE dps.

You lose 1s of bleeding from Scepter 1’s first and second hit, but gain kitten of bleeding from the final hit, and more poison. On top of that you get 2-7 stacks of Torment. I wouldn’t take anything as gospel yet, wait for a red post or the patch notes on Tuesday.

Robert Gee.9246:

I want to quickly clarify something about this note. The change is that specifically Plague form and Lich form will not destroy your minions. We can’t do this universally for all transforms because it can cause problems with the balance of events or story steps that transform you.

What about Moa Morph?

Is it more than one stack on the final hit? Dulfy has it as just a single extra stack.

With the duration decrease it works out to a wash.

Currently:
2 stacks of bleed every 1.5 seconds, or 1.333 stacks/s. Base 5s duration, 100% from runes/minor/food + 100% from LC = 20s duration. This means you max out at 26 stacks from auto attack.

After balance patch:
3 stacks of bleed every 1.5s or 2 stacks/s. Base duration kitten , 100% increase and 50% from LC = 13.5s duration. This means you max out at 27 stacks from auto attack.

This is a pretty useless change unless I am missing something. Scepter is still crap dps.

http://dulfy.net/2015/09/26/gw2-twitchcon-skill-balance-update-preview/

Is this actually a buff? we get 1 extra stack of bleed, but lose 60% duration. This seems like a significant nerf to me for overall PvE dps.

Hopefully the balance changes are in for this weekend. I’ll be trying out a condition reaper in the raids.

link to info? can’t find it anywhere?

I honestly can’t tell if this is a sarcasm post or if you are serious?

If it is sarcasm then well done! if it is serious then I will let someone else explain all the problems, mistakes, and errors in your post.

I’ll just end by saying that 90% of your post either doesn’t apply in HoT, or is done significantly better by other classes. The last 10% may be useful in raids, but we won’t know for sure until the next BWE!

Cheby Shev.4671:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge#Ascended_equipment_stat_change

This is basically why they introduced this recipe. You can change stats for very little investment.

Nothing little about it. “All upgrade components slotted in the equipment will be destroyed in the process.”

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Upgrade_Extractor

$20 and problem solved!

Just announced on the stream.

We shall finally see if we get actual challenging content or not…

Stream is live here:

http://www.twitch.tv/twitchconlive

GW2 channel is down!

NEED HEALS IN SHROUD!!!!

Also make parasitic contagion heal in shroud!

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_Forge#Ascended_equipment_stat_change

This is basically why they introduced this recipe. You can change stats for very little investment.

Donari.5237:

Heck, it could be the roots of a tree growing over a rock … We’ll know pretty soon, just over an hour until streaming commences and the trailer will be in the stream towards the beginning.

The trailer will be shown at the main stage presentation which is in a little over 5 hours from this post. So still a while to wait.

lordkrall.7241:

“In the meantime they have posted a picture of somethings foot:”

Fixed that.

We do not know if it is Mordremoth.

I think it is a fairly good assumption. The GW2 launch trailer revealed Zhitain, and given the size of the foot it seems fairly likely. I suppose it could be one of his lieutenants, but that doesn’t seem like launch trailer material to me. I mean we’ve been secretly or openly fighting this dragon for almost 2 years now and still haven’t seen him!

8 hours left until the launch trailer.

In the meantime they have posted a picture of Mordremoth’s foot:

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/647078672797712385/photo/1

Zalavaaris.5329:

Sustained dps is 20 seconds? Rofl no wonder my raiding friends didn’t want to come play this game, that’s embarassing. I wonder what burst dps is, 2 seconds? Lol

It is measured at 20s because that is the longest CD. You could measure it over any amount of time you want, but it will always come down to what your longest CD is on a standard rotation.

But yes in the current metagame, bosses live from 2-25 seconds before dying. The problem is there is a very high skill ceiling in this game. Low skill groups still fail many of these dungeons, average skill groups take 3-4 minutes to kill a boss, and high skill groups can kill the same boss in 11 seconds or so. Many people are hoping that raids are different.

The biggest problem with necro/reaper is that they bring nothing to the group.

Bring an ele- best dps, multiple condition cleanses, multiple heals, multiple blast finishers, perma group fury.

Bring a warrior- good dps, 25 might, 150 power, 120 power, 120 precision, 120 condition damage for the whole group

Bring a guardian- good dps, protection, aegis, reflects, reflects, reflects, reflects, quickness, condition cleansing.

Bring a mesmer- good dps, stealth, alacrity, slow, quickness.

Bring a thief- awesome dps, stealth, stealth, stealth, venom share, some group buffing, unlimited blast finishers

Bring a revanent- good dps, 50% boon duration, good might stacking, blast finishers, amazing support if needed

Bring an engineer- great dps, blast finishers, good healing, lots of utility, stealth, ranged rezzing, condition cleansing.

Bring a Ranger- good dps, spotter (ranger’s are pretty bad just like necros)

Bring a Necro- ok dps, your downed teammates don’t die as fast?

Necro/Reaper may be fun to play, but what role are they filling in raids? They share no boons, they can’t blast fields, they can’t reflect, stealth, or give any group buffs. The only thing they can do reasonably well is strip boons, which mesmer and thief can do as well. I’m sure they will be fine in open world noob zerg events, but that is not what the game should be balanced around. It should and will be balanced around the raid environments.

Sigmoid.7082:

Remember that damage from “special” conditions (terror and deathly chill) do not benefit from the condition changes, and do not recognize partial seconds. 1s of chill does the same amount of damage as 1.9s of chill. You can not get partial ticks of the special conditions, and thus it is almost never advantageous to spec into additional duration of those unless it boosts you to the next full second.

This is incorrect. Literally you can just hop into game and test this. I just did this and using reapers mark and the fear of death trait. A 1.5s fear will tick twice. Once for full damage and the second time for partial damage. Doom, a 2.25s fear, will tick three times. twice for full damage and once again for partial damage. So yes, traits that make conditions do damage have partial ticks.

Always take bleed duration over chill duration.

Again this is from a totally condition perspective. I was in no way relating chill duration to the chill damage trait when stating you can get 70% duration. The two things are totally separate in my post. The only reason i brought up bitter chill at all was to state that because chill is more common than fear that bitter chill wont do more damage than terror. That it. There would be no real point on taking bleed duration on a power build focused on chill would there?

Can you post kitten of this, or can someone else confirm? unless they changed this recently this is not how it works. You can get 2 ticks in 1.5s if you happen to sync up with the server in a nice manner, i.e you apply it 0.3s before the server ticks the damage and then again 1s later, or 2 ticks in 1.4 seconds. I know they changed all normal conditions to work in the way you describe about 1.5 years ago, but terror was not included in this change since it was actually the trait that does the damage and not a condition. Granted there are a lot of “stealth” changes, so it could have been changed and I missed it, but last time I tested this (about a year ago) it worked as I describe.

You posted about chill duration and deathly chill damage so I just pointed out that chill duration isn’t worth it from the condition damage perspective. Obviously if you want to do nothing other than max chill duration then taking chill duration is the way to go. The benefit of .8-2s of extra chill over 20% might duration, 2k air sigil crits, and 10% bonus damage is still questionable imo, but it certainly would have situation usefulness depending on the build.

Zalavaaris.5329:

spoj.9672:

Zalavaaris.5329:

SlyDevil.3952:

Ele sustained is averaging around 19k dps, necro zerker is around 10k, condi necro is less. This is small hitboxes without icebow. Getting up to 8k bleed ticks isn’t bad, except they aren’t sustained, the max tick you reach on a condi doesn’t necessarily mean your dps is near that number as well.

Cough cough bull kitten cough

Edit: unless you’re talking about that little casual pve mode where there is no such thing as sustained dps because the boss dies in 15 seconds.

Lava font + fireball.

Doesn’t matter what they have, nobody is sustaining 19k in a real fight (more than a few seconds). That’s delusional.

19k seems a little high. In a good group with a PS warrior my ele can pretty easily keep ~14k dps. Though to be fair it is more like 11k dps +3k from IB rotation. But either way the average is still 14k.

Sigmoid.7082:

You can get a max of 50% chill duration

In pvp you can get a max of 70% on a reaper. 20% from cold shoulder, 30% from runes of ice or grenth, 20% from sigil of chilling. 1s-> 1.7s , 2s -> 3.4s , 3s-> 5.1s , 4s -> 6.8s, 5s -> 8.5s

While the actual duration of a condition is never rounded, the display in a skill’s tooltip will show the duration rounded to the nearest quarter of a second (0s, ¼, ½, ¾ and 1s).

@About Deathly Chill
I would say it wont ever do more damage than terror because how easy chill is to access compared to fear. Though terror is also master tier so who knows.

Remember that damage from “special” conditions (terror and deathly chill) do not benefit from the condition changes, and do not recognize partial seconds. 1s of chill does the same amount of damage as 1.9s of chill. You can not get partial ticks of the special conditions, and thus it is almost never advantageous to spec into additional duration of those unless it boosts you to the next full second. Even then it is iffy. even with a 70% increase, a 2 → 3.4s chill only gains you ~800 damage. Contrast that to an 80% increase in bleed duration, in which a 10s bleed becomes an 18s bleed giving you an extra ~1600 damage per stack. Always take bleed duration over chill duration.

Thaddeus.4891:

IMO, Reaper will improve the position of Necro in PvE. The damage will be increase that’s for sure. At which level? That we’ll have to test it out at the expansion. My guess is that it won’t be at the bottom like right now and will be more on par with the other profession.

That said, I doudt that would make Necro a meta build. Two thing can give you a place on the meta. Group Support (Mesmer, Thief, Guardian), or High DPS (Elementalist). Reaper won’t have a dps comparable to Engineer and Elementalist and for now don’t have enough support to compete with the other meta profession.

IMO it will be in a similar situation than ranger is now. Still some hate because of minions and fear, but overall a decent profession that will do the job with decent dps and some nice tools.

What could change that is if the new PvE content ask for different form of support. 2 mains things.

1) Mobs have precision and can dodge. Suddently weakness go from a decent condition to a powerful support condition that necro have a lot of.

2) Mobs have powerful boons that you can rip of corrupt. Think about it. If bosses get 10s of protection each 10s. Only the necro could remove it on a regular basis. So having a necro would boost your party dps by around 33%, putting necro very high on the support profession.

They talked about giving precision to mobs in the fractal post, but sadly other than that I’m pessimist that Anet will use those game mechanics in PvE.

1. Weakness is very sporadic in its defense. You will take significantly less damage overtime if you replace necro with a profession with high protection sharing uptime. Use a guardian or ele to improve group performance.

2. Necro’s corruptions have 40-50s CD’s, making them very poor for 10s boon strips. You will be significantly better off with a profession that can strip boons more reliably. Replace the necro with a thief or mesmer for significantly more consistent boon striping, plus stealth, boon sharing, and higher damage.

If those are the best Anet can do then necro will be even less wanted than now since mesmer, thief, guard, and ele will take even higher priority plus do more damage.

The biggest problem with necro condition builds is ramp up time. Power builds ramp up to their max dps almost instantly, and can burst significantly higher in short time spans. This is invaluable in most boss fights that have burst phases and defense phases.

Unfortunately it seems that Anet wants to strengthen this meta by making raid bosses the same way. A burst phase followed by a run away phase where you can’t hurt the boss. This gives the advantage to power builds right off the bat. Then there is the problem that most bosses have a “hard” shift in phases instead of a “soft” shift. instead of bosses just driving you away from them, most of them enter a new state that either makes them invuln or purges conditions. Both of these have the same effect of drastically lowering a condition builds dps. If conditions are purged, all your damage is just lost. even if you had 50 stacks of bleed on the target for 2 minutes, as soon as the boss hits a “hard” phase change it instantly drops all 50 stacks and takes no damage.

So not only do condition specs have a long ramp up time they also get their dps reduced by phase transitions. Top it all off with the fact that condition builds can’t even reach the same sustained dps as most power builds and they are all around just worse.

There are many possible solutions:

1. Reduce ramp up times. Give condition specs a ramping trait of some sort. I.E if target has less than 10 stacks of bleed, you next crit causes 5 stacks of bleed for 10s.
2. Remove “hard” phase changes. A boss shouldn’t purge your conditions when it changes phases, just let bosses have the condition fall off naturally and finish taking the damage already applied to them.
3. Increase condition dps to be 20-30% higher than power builds DPS and leave the long ramp up times and hard phase changes. This would let us do the same amount of damage and give us an advantage in longer fights, but still limits us in condition cleansing and short burst fights (this is how every other MMO in existence does it)

As it stands currently however, condition builds bring nothing unique to the fight except lower damage.

Lonewalker.4027:

Some of this seems to be covered in the twitchcon event, or are the events about Raids and ledgenday journey just old news?
I don’t think we will get any information about Druids until the twitchcon event

Here is a preliminary schedule

Friday, September 25
Starting Out in Guild Wars 2
First Look at the Ranger Elite Profession Specialization
Musical Performance
“A Taste of Tyria” with Jennifer Hale
Adventures in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Premiere of the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns Launch Trailer
PvP Discussion
WvW Discussion
Masteries
Skill Balance Preview
And more!

Saturday, September 26
Designing Raids in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Returning to Guild Wars 2
Making of the Launch Trailer
Legendary Journey
“A Taste of Tyria” with Jennifer Hale
Story Missions
Intro to PvP
Heart of Thorns Maps
Community Showcase Live
Voice Acting in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns: Behind the Scenes
And more!

http://dulfy.net/2015/09/23/gw2-twitchcon-and-stornghold-beta-event/

I didn’t see the full schedule before. It looks like most of this list will be covered at twitchcon. Should be a good weekend… too bad i’m going to be gone on Saturday, I feel like I am going to miss out on some major market shifts.

If you wait 4 more weeks for HoT to release there will be new legendary weapons which will require much more skill, and much less gold to obtain. They will be more of the status symbol you are probably looking for.

We have 4 weeks until the launch of HoT! We were told there would be the following information revealed before launch:

1. Legendary weapon blog
2. Legendary weapon Twitch presentation
3. Guild Hall leveling Info
4. Druid presentation
5. BWE 3+4
6. Info on legendary armor
7. Info on raid rewards
8. Info on raids in general
9. Launch trailer (tomorrow!)
10. Specialization runes/sigils

We should be getting the druid presentation today and tomorrow, and I suspect a BWE next weekend, but how about the other info? Looks like it’s going to be a busy 4 weeks!

I’m personally most excited for the legendary weapon info, can’t wait to see what we get.

If I missed anything they told us they’d talk about before launch let me know and i’ll add it to the list.

“a preview of upcoming skill balances,”

Woot ele is finally going to get nerfed! took long enough.

With any luck we will see the necro scepter/axe rework as well!

Maybe a burn nerf and a bleed buff to top it off?

There aren’t really any good hybrid specs anymore, it is mostly either full power builds or full condition builds. Power builds are better in pretty much every way, but some people enjoy playing the condition builds. If you just want raw power get a mainhand dagger and use power/precision/ferocity gear. That will give you the best damage a necro can do. There are plenty of builds floating around this forum, so i’m sure you can find one to your liking as you level up.

Also none of your story choices have any effect on anything other than the story, and even then it is only a very limited effect, so choose whatever you want!

BobbyT.7192:

Robert Gee.9246:

A raid boss having defiance doesn’t mean soft-CC won’t be valuable in a raid encounter.

Is that still true after a group skips all the trash mobs?

I am 99.9% certain that raids will be more like traditional MMO’s instead of GW2 dungeons.

In every other MMO i’ve ever played the trash mobs can’t be skipped, they auto aggro and never lose aggro until you kill them or wipe.

Additionally they specifically said that GW2 raids will be made up of part boss fights and part dynamic events. It could be that 50% of the “boss” fights are actually dynamic events where you need to hold an area from some crazy strong waves of “trash” mobs. These situations greatly benefit from weakness and chill since even if you have a bunch of stuns, you can’t keep everything stunned.

Trash mobs are actually somewhere that necros can shine since we can AOE weakness and chill. If the mobs don’t die in <10s then you can’t just burst them down.

I remember in wildstar dungeons some of the trash mob encounters took more skill and practice than the bosses did. I hope we see things like that in GW2 raids.

Anyone serious about making a new legendary already has already saved 250 of each brick. Anyone else wasn’t really serious about it.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Whirl finishers: Whirl finisher bolts are capped at 5 bolts per skill, and only deal 198 damage per bolt. It is technically a DPS increase, but again, negligible enough to not matter over the course of a fractal/dungeon run.

Not true on the cap. For example, Soul Spiral and Whirling Axe both send out far more than 5 bolts. Each one can actually shoot out more along the lines of 30 or more. Shredder Gyro puts them all to shame, though, setting off 30 whirl finishers on its own (with many, many bolts).

Whirl finishers will produce more than 5 bolts, but only the first 5 will do anything. After 5 bolts hit, the rest of the bolts do nothing.

Which is why whirl finishers are pretty much useless.

Considering there are zero texts, whether in-game or even on the wiki, or even anyone else stating this, I will have to call bullkitten on this claim.

Perhaps you are confusing things with Chilling Bolts where only the most recent 5 matter?

Well considering that chill whirl is reapers main combo it seems very relevant.

Why is it that every other class can get 20-30 bolts but reaper’s whirl combo only gets to use 5 bolts? Just another way that anet screwed over reaper with their chill changes.

We do get full benefit of all the bolts as far as application goes. Sure, the oldest stacks fall off, but, for example, Bitter Chill really racks up the Vuln. Even at the old Chill cap of 9 stacks, we would still have seen some bolts being “wasted.”

However, Necros do have other fields to combo with for greater stacks. Our poison fields stack up poison stupidly with Soul Spiral, for example. Dark Fields, while we don’t get the healing, do add a lot of damage. Well of Blood results in mass cleansing like mad.

Bolts after 5 knock off the oldest application? Has this been tested? This would be even worse than I was thinking. That would mean the 5-6s chill would get knocked off by a 1s chill reducing the overall chill even further than if they were just useless.

The cap just needs to be removed completely in PvE, there is absolutely no reason for it to exist at all. It neuters the reaper and has no logical reason.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Quarktastic.1027:

Whirl finishers: Whirl finisher bolts are capped at 5 bolts per skill, and only deal 198 damage per bolt. It is technically a DPS increase, but again, negligible enough to not matter over the course of a fractal/dungeon run.

Not true on the cap. For example, Soul Spiral and Whirling Axe both send out far more than 5 bolts. Each one can actually shoot out more along the lines of 30 or more. Shredder Gyro puts them all to shame, though, setting off 30 whirl finishers on its own (with many, many bolts).

Whirl finishers will produce more than 5 bolts, but only the first 5 will do anything. After 5 bolts hit, the rest of the bolts do nothing.

Which is why whirl finishers are pretty much useless.

Considering there are zero texts, whether in-game or even on the wiki, or even anyone else stating this, I will have to call bullkitten on this claim.

Perhaps you are confusing things with Chilling Bolts where only the most recent 5 matter?

Well considering that chill whirl is reapers main combo it seems very relevant.

Why is it that every other class can get 20-30 bolts but reaper’s whirl combo only gets to use 5 bolts? Just another way that anet screwed over reaper with their chill changes.

Setz.9675:

I don’t think I play necromancer too much to give proper feedback but condi reaper right now is pretty strong if you do it right.

I used curse(3/1/3)/soul reaping(2/2/3)/reaper(2/1/2) 20% bleed duration, +20% chill duration.
Malice sigil (10% c.duration), toxic focusing crystal (10% c.duration), ele runes (20% burning/chill), pizza food (+40% c.duration): +80% bleed duration, + 80% burning duration, + 100% chill duration and +60% vulnerability duration.
Your soul is mine / blood is power / suffer / you are all weaklings / Chilled to the bone

I played scepter/dagger + staff during beta and this is what I did:
Start staff, skill 2-3, swap weapons, skill 2-5 on s/d, swap to reaper, 5-4-AA till 4 stacks burning. Surely this isn’t optimal for my dps but mobs melted away.

The problem however with this build was the lifeforce starvation others mentioned as well.
Staff was on the low end of generating life force while doing low end damage as well.
Scepter has decent bleed generation for 13-27s/bleed but would only stack to 20-25 if I wasn’t using reaper form, + reaper form turned it into 10-13 stacks. Scepter/dagger overal had seriously abyssmal lifeforce generation.

Your soul is mine was simply a weak heal, healed like 3.5k (on a 19k hp pool) and generated very little lifeforce vs 1-2 mobs. (Imo it should get a buff where for the next 4-6 seconds it generates 5-10% of dmg done while in reaper form as hp).

Shouts have good effects vs larger groups but become less effective vs less targets really fast. Imo the utilitys of a necro are well balanced unlike some other classes.

On the other end of the spectrum, dagger/warhorn + greatsword (berserker) with spite/soul reaping/reaper was drowning in lifeforce.

What you describe is about 7k dps. Less than half of what a standard ele build does. Your build takes 20-30s to reach 7k dps. Ele builds burst 40k dps then slowly go down to 14j dps.

Not sure how you can consider that strong.

Lily.1935:

Quarktastic.1027:

Lily.1935:

Quarktastic.1027:

Two lightning hammers in a water field gives you both proactive and reactive defenses. (not that any of your proactive field combos work on bosses anyway)

GG.

Fields don’t stack. Also blind reduced the break bar last I checked, weakness still reduces their damage, frost armor gives you a passive 10% damage reduction, and stealth prevents you from getting focus fired by the boss.

GG.

I know fields don’t stack, but blast finishers do.

Do you even lightning hammer?

Blind reduces break bars, but so does other soft CC that’s more readily available (like cripple). Weakness doesn’t reduce the effectiveness of critical hits, and only lasts 50% as long on bosses. Blasting a water field heals for more than that 3 seconds of 10% damage reduction will prevent.

I’m not saying other fields aren’t useful, but in the current meta, spamming blast finishers in a water field is basically like turning on god mode.

So you’re double blasting water? That isn’t both proactive and reactive. That’s just reactive.

Healing will always be weaker than damage mitigation. This is just a fact. We know this to be true, I can prove it in ever single RPG ever mad. Thats why heals have to heal for so much. Aegis blocking a 5k attack is better than healing after the fact for 5k, blind causing an attack to miss is the same, weakness reducing the damage of all outgoing attacks are more valuable.

Thank you for your vast enlightenment! I shall now require all my groups to have 5 siphon necros who blind spam the bosses! this is clearly vastly superior! Silly top tier players getting it completely wrong for 3 years. If only they had you to enlighten them earlier! Thank you for showing us the error of our ways!

Rizo.9534:

You don’t know yet???
They already told, that you have to complete all HoT leaving story achievements and clear all raids with core ranger, to open druid for it!

I’m more afraid that it will come in a “future content patch” like the rest of the legendaries… or the guild hall features… or the armor sets… or precursor crafting.

I don’t actually play a ranger so it doesn’t directly effect me… but if it can happen to them it can happen to anyone…

Looks like Scapper is the last elite profession to get a POI…

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/644904491263881216

I guess Anet really does hate rangers…

Will ranger still be getting an elite spec or has it been removed all together?

What are you getting exp for? Leveling a new character? if you are just leveling then store up tomes and just insta level when it launches.

If you are talking about getting tyria mastery xp to unlock the new legendary weapons then I think there are a couple of options.

I think the fastest option will be COF1 farm groups. Running COF1 70 times should unlock all the precursor masteries. It takes about 8 minutes per run in a good group, so 70 runes should only take you about 10 hours of running COF to max out.

SE1 is similar as well. It should be noted that the rewards are on diminishing returns, but the xp is constant I believe so you can just run them all back to back.

Next best option is probably a good EOTM farm group. MUCH slower but still a good rate with boosters.

Lily.1935:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Lily.1935:

ODB.6891:

Substatic.6958:

Lily.1935:

the necromancer has outstanding sustainability now and can hit extremely hard with sustained damage. Other professions have much higher burst damage than we do, like elementalist and warrior, but their sustainability is no where near as high. As fights last longer the necromancer has an advantage in that regard since our life force generation has actually improved greatly over the years letting us quickly build our bar back up. This means we can stay in the fight much longer. We’re also very self sufficient as compared to other professions. We can stack 25 might without the use of foods are relying on ally buffs. We can also dish out 25 valn on our own meaning we literally don’t need anyone else with us in a fight.

Meanwhile in lfg “LF2M lvl40 Fractal No Necro/Ranger”

the necromancer will have a solid spot on a team.

Beta people said this before release of Vanilla too.

To be fair, this person is apparently talking about open world in a thread about raids and instanced content…this judging from the above reply where they talk about open world specifically in the reply to me about this.

As far as the thread topic though, ANET really needs to pull their heads out of the sand/PvP and fix our PvE participation chances…I mean its been 3 years now. Its clear from the persistent no necro sentiment in PvE group content that the things they do give us are not good selling points for necros in instanced PvE. Its is undeniably proven, after 3 years of observation, that being an unhealable hp sponge that cannot participate in the boon/utility circle of life…has ostracized necromancers from high level PvE instanced content.

To be fair, I’m well respected in the necromancer community and also a group organizer for my guild. I also know how to run dungeons in both might stacking groups and running without pre-buffing and playing the content without stacking. And I can tell you, most party buffs from skills and traits have a 600 range or less. You’re not going to be expected to be within that range while in a Group. Organized or not. Some times you can, however if Raids are what arena net are promising its not going to be often that you will be able to.

Why would you ever be further than 600 from your party members? you are doing something terribly wrong if you find yourself further than 600 from them. I can only think of 1 or 2 instances in all the dungeons where you’d want to be further than 600 from your party members. Obviously really bad pugs tend to spread out, but no truly organized group, or even well organized pug would ever do what you are describing.

The fact is, if it is safe for one person to stand somewhere, then it is safe for the other party members to be standing there as well and there is no reason NOT to be standing there. Other than the occasional debuff that makes one or two people leave the stack I doubt raids will be any different.

You’re comparing dungeons to raids. Which is your first mistake. Raids are not going to be dungeons. And if it is what arena net promises than you’ll need to have a full range of your party. Meaning you’ll have people at 1,200/1,500 range from the boss, people at 600/900 range and people at melee. This isn’t going to be perfect, especially the first time going through, its going to be sloppy and people stacking together in 600 range will get the mopped up by the boss really easily. These areas you should also expect to have your party broken up in to smaller than 5 man groups. Expect several situations were you’re stuck with only 2 of your allies or none at all within your range.

Here is a list of some mechanics that can break your party up:

• An extremely large boss that requires several focal points around its body.

• Effects that forcibly teleport players away from the fight into a location that puts them out of your range.

• Areas that require a certain number of players while one maybe 2 players stay behind to maintain a switch or something similar.

• Defender fights that put way too much pressure at the point that is supposed to be defended in that 600 range so you need people posted at each of the spawn points. Spawn points could be 3-5 and be far away from each other so you can’t rely on all your allies buffs.

• Too many people close together could trigger new types of foes or new abilities of the boss that is specifically designed to counter that.

• An Aoe Field that has a 600 Radius that interrupts each second and deals massive damage that also targets a party member at random… Several times.

Many of these have been seen before in other games and we’ve seen this to a very minor degree in GW2. The aoe field of the last example has been done before in GW1 minus the interrupting part.

All you’ve done is designed a bunch of gimmicks that adhere to your specific pipe dream of what the game should be while completely destroying all the team aspects of GW2. This will never happen so i’m not going to bother to argue against it.

The most effective strategy in raids will be to work with your teammates, not run around ignoring them. Anything else will make raids trivial.

It has to do with a change in design that happened part way through development. Originally the elite specs were meant to replace something and lose something in order to gain something new. People didn’t like this and the devs changed direction pretty early on.

Unfortunately some specs were already close to completed by then. Reaper was the first spec finished so it adheres to this most closely in losing DS to gain RS. Dragonhunter was also one of the early ones so it had its virtues fundamentally changed.

The later specs follow the new design which is pure gain no loss. Daredevil, chronomancer, tempest, scrapper, herald, all have ENHANCED class mechanics with no tradeoff, they lose nothing.

There is also the spec that seem to have been built in a transition period. Berserker. It’s class mechanic changes only during berserk mode and then goes back to normal once the mode ends.

Not sure where druid will end up. It was revealed first, but seems to have been either reworked or stuck in limbo for a while now.

If reaper had been designed later I am almost certain we would have gotten an F2 and been able to choose which mode to go into.

Lily.1935:

ODB.6891:

Substatic.6958:

Lily.1935:

the necromancer has outstanding sustainability now and can hit extremely hard with sustained damage. Other professions have much higher burst damage than we do, like elementalist and warrior, but their sustainability is no where near as high. As fights last longer the necromancer has an advantage in that regard since our life force generation has actually improved greatly over the years letting us quickly build our bar back up. This means we can stay in the fight much longer. We’re also very self sufficient as compared to other professions. We can stack 25 might without the use of foods are relying on ally buffs. We can also dish out 25 valn on our own meaning we literally don’t need anyone else with us in a fight.

Meanwhile in lfg “LF2M lvl40 Fractal No Necro/Ranger”

the necromancer will have a solid spot on a team.

Beta people said this before release of Vanilla too.

To be fair, this person is apparently talking about open world in a thread about raids and instanced content…this judging from the above reply where they talk about open world specifically in the reply to me about this.

As far as the thread topic though, ANET really needs to pull their heads out of the sand/PvP and fix our PvE participation chances…I mean its been 3 years now. Its clear from the persistent no necro sentiment in PvE group content that the things they do give us are not good selling points for necros in instanced PvE. Its is undeniably proven, after 3 years of observation, that being an unhealable hp sponge that cannot participate in the boon/utility circle of life…has ostracized necromancers from high level PvE instanced content.

To be fair, I’m well respected in the necromancer community and also a group organizer for my guild. I also know how to run dungeons in both might stacking groups and running without pre-buffing and playing the content without stacking. And I can tell you, most party buffs from skills and traits have a 600 range or less. You’re not going to be expected to be within that range while in a Group. Organized or not. Some times you can, however if Raids are what arena net are promising its not going to be often that you will be able to.

Why would you ever be further than 600 from your party members? you are doing something terribly wrong if you find yourself further than 600 from them. I can only think of 1 or 2 instances in all the dungeons where you’d want to be further than 600 from your party members. Obviously really bad pugs tend to spread out, but no truly organized group, or even well organized pug would ever do what you are describing.

The fact is, if it is safe for one person to stand somewhere, then it is safe for the other party members to be standing there as well and there is no reason NOT to be standing there. Other than the occasional debuff that makes one or two people leave the stack I doubt raids will be any different.

Good Tofu.9376:

Excuse my ignorance, but why would you roll for T6 mats on this anyways? Ectos are really expensive….and you also need to spend spirit shards and obs shards.

It was a much better deal in the past when ectos were like 29s and T6’s were above 75s each.

I wouldn’t recommend doing it now with T6 low and ectos high.

Cat Has Ducks.1982:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Necros are only good against bad DD eles. No serious DD ele is going to put high burn stacks onto a signet necro. They can outheal our dagger damage, and blind us faster than DS AA. The only way a necro can win against a DD ele is if that ele is bad.

You need to watch Nos kitten on top tier Cele Eles all day. Necro has the tools to beat the beast.

Was that in 1v1’s or team fights? I do fairly well 1v1, but once you get 2 ele’s vs necro + anything else my win rate goes from ~50% down to ~1%. ele’s share all their healing and boons while necros don’t share squat and can only strip from single target.

Necros are only good against bad DD eles. No serious DD ele is going to put high burn stacks onto a signet necro. They can outheal our dagger damage, and blind us faster than DS AA. The only way a necro can win against a DD ele is if that ele is bad.

Man I wish I had your luck, I have like 2 stacks of those stupid clovers from gambling for T6 mats. I ended up just vendoring one of the stacks, I keep the second around just in case.

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bjarl_the_Rampager

I’ll admit he doesn’t have the actual buff… but he is still immune to all CC except when he CC’s himself…

see video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkb_Oo11ikg

he just ignores the CC instead of having a buff icon. Not seeing how that is any different. He is still a boss who can’t be CC’d unless very specific conditions are met.

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

tboneking.2531:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

depends on the class. I think currently ele and thief make the best use of assassin gear, and possibly one or two other specs for certain classes. Warrior, which it looks like you are using has zerker being slightly better in every current spec I believe.

Some classes never use high crit gear like necro since they have traits that up their crit chance. Some necro builds can drop precision entirely, and take a defensive stat and still do just as much damage as a zerker build.

I am curious as to why certain classes make better use of assassins than others. Is it because of on-crit traits (especially ones that cause vulnerability with no icd)? Because I have also heard that assassins is quite good on engineer (which with grenades and vuln on crit can be very effective). However because Warrior mainly has damage modifiers and not on-crit traits, could that also be why zerker is superior?

Edit: I suppose it is also worth mentioning that the Intelligence sigil can give you the crits where it counts- on those massive Primal Bursts. So the increased crit chance isnt as necessary?

As far as I understand it I think it has to do with attack speed and damage modifiers. Ele’s have slow attacks that hit really hard, meteor, lava font, etc. having it hit for 4000 or 4200 isn’t a big difference but having it for 4000 or 9000 makes a big difference when your attacks are slower. I’m sure a lot of it has to do with traits as well as you suggested. It certainly does in the case of Necro.

I haven’t seen any detailed analysis for Bezerker yet. It may be that assassin is better for certain bezerker builds.

Jekkt.6045:

fyi, rshroud 5 + 4 = bye breakbar. it’s 11 chilling bolts + pulsing chill from the field, there is no way any breakbar is gonna survive that.

There is a limit of 5 chills. after the 4th bolt the other 7 do nothing. Additionally chill is being changed to a break bar degen effect meaning it will be a constant degen as long as chill is on the target, meaning after the initial chill field application the other 11 chills will do nothing to the break bar.

If you want to break a break bar bring an ele. In fact if you want to do anything in this game, bring an ele.

depends on the class. I think currently ele and thief make the best use of assassin gear, and possibly one or two other specs for certain classes. Warrior, which it looks like you are using has zerker being slightly better in every current spec I believe.

Some classes never use high crit gear like necro since they have traits that up their crit chance. Some necro builds can drop precision entirely, and take a defensive stat and still do just as much damage as a zerker build.

It’s pretty clear they don’t want necros in raids. They keep beating us with the nerf bat when it comes to raid viability.

We bring nothing of value to raids. Our “lifesteal” is so pathetic that passive heals from other classes vastly overpower it. Our rezzing pales in comparison to stealth invuln rezzing, and our healing through transfusion is just sad compared to an ele blasting a water field. Boon corrupting is the only thing left, but 90% of the boons we corrupt don’t affect bosses, and boons are just spammed in PvE, so it won’t actually keep them off the bosses. Cleansing is far superior and faster than transferring so we won’t ever be needed for that unless it is a gimmick fight.

That covers all our “unique” things. We offer no group buffs and subpar DPS so there is really no reason left to take us.

RIP the debuffing role.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/10104/Guild-Wars-2-Its-Hammer-Time-The-Scrapper-Engineers-Elite-Specialization.html

Don’t know much about engineer, but it seems like those drones will be quite useful in raids.

Here are a few things to try to make the PS easier for you:

1. Make sure you are in level appropriate gear. You gear should be within 3 levels of your actual level. If you are having a hard time upgrade your gear first. From level 1-50 green gear is fine. Above level 50 I would recommend yellow gear.

2. Make sure you have trinkets equipped. Many people think these aren’t important or forget about them completely. They are very important and make up nearly 50% of your stats. Make sure they are updated as well, with jewels inserted.

3. Make sure you have runes/sigils in your weapons. The yellow ones are only 2-3s each but make a big difference in power.

4. If you are having trouble staying alive pick an armor with 1 offencive and 2 defensive stats. Power is the most important stat, always pick gear with power (or condition damage if you are a condition damage user). Counter-intuitively taking more offensive stats can help you survive since you will kill things much faster.

5. Make sure you have traits equipped. Many people forget about their traits and they are a huge damage boost.

6. You don’t say what class you are but make sure of your defensive utilities. Every class has utilities to help them survive. If you give us more information on your class we can help you select better utilities.

7. Buy food. Food is HUGE in this game. food gives you a buff equal to an entire extra piece of gear. If you are dying, try some vitality or lifesteal food, it can make a big difference.

Hope that helps!