Did a quick spreadsheet on the main and minor count of each 3 stat mod.
Power has 3 main and 8 minor choices.
Condition damage comes out at 2 main and 3 minor.
All fine and dandy except that our power related attacks are either location locked dots, melee range or so slow it can be outrun.
Honestly it seems we should be spending more time in DS popping off LBs than we at present can, if going by the numbers. This likely because they spent the time since the last BW to reduce our bunker effectiveness but failed to up our damage output to compensate.
And this exemplifies the problem of the necro, there is no happy medium. You either have to chain out your abilities like a champ or get used to repairing armor. There is basically no room for error.
I speculate that the issue is not the wells themselves, but that they are our major non-condition aoe source outside of DS Life Transfer.
Heck, they may well be our major non-condition (especially non-bleed) damage source completely (unless we attempt to maintain DS above 50% at all times).
And this gets especially aggravating in massive champion/boss groups where the bleed stack will be hardlocked to 25 thanks to incidental bleeds from other professions auto-attack and crit procs.
I find myself wondering if the whole Guttony issue could be one of it being multiplicative rather than additive. a 5% increase on 3% results in what, 3.15%? That is basically going to disappear in noise. This seems to be much the same issue as with Hemophilia, as it may give an extra second while paired up with the scepter duration trait, on its own it just vanishes in the noise because they scepter bleed durations are short.
Honestly, some of the design choices around boons and conditions make it seem as if Anet didn’t do percentage math. Or when they last did, the numbers affected were a magnitude or two higher than they are now.
While I was not present for the BWs, that may well be what was observed as making the necro hard to kill. And based on that what we are seeing as bugs because behavior and tooltips do not line up, could actually be the post-BW tweaks done and they simply forgot to update/modify the tooltips to match.
(to be fair he didn’t have a swimming animation, but still).
Seems to enjoy floating around when slapped with confusion by them neon skeletons in the mad kings labyrinth tho. First time i wondered if the thing had gone religious.
Best i can tell, the necro issues stem from the devs at some point having the idea of giving the death mage a special down state. But they just could not make it work alongside the rest of the professions, as it made the necro a tough nut to crack in PVP point captures. And that is no fun in a game aimed at e-sport. So they nipped and tucked rather than consider alternative profession mechanics, and things ended up where we are now.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
Or simply start the cooldown/recharge the moment they are summoned, not on death.
Yep, going into DS with any kind of “on X percent health do Y” trait or rune equipped will lead to strange things.
Starting to wonder if the Necrotic Grasp loudness is a similar bug to the loud voices that used to be in cities. This in that the code can’t make up its mind where the sound is originating from outside the character so it is played as if point blank on the character and ends up being overly loud. This because i have so far not noticed any such loudness from fellow necromancers in group events.
Just wish it didn’t interrupt auto-attack, as popping into it quickly for any reason requires me to hit 1 again to keep stacking bleeds once i exit.
This because the point blank Enfeebling Blood it can be traited for has a 10 second shorter cooldown than the off hand dagger one, meaning it can be used almost as often as Grasping Dead.
(edited by digiowl.9620)
And that touches on something of a festering issue. What works in sPVP may not work in tPVP, never mind WvW or PVE. Hell, even open world PVE and dungeon PVE requires different considerations.
Like lobbing rotting corpses over a city wall…
Seems almost as if we are better off flipfloping DS than staying in there then, unless we need the “timeout”.
I came to the realization today that cepter/dagger may be our biggest non-staff AOE source. There is scepter #2 and both the off-hand dagger skills providing some kind of AOE. Sure, there is axe #3. But we can drop scepter #2 faster, is is not PBAOE, and it hurts for more is the bleed is not removed (axe #3 relies on the enemy beating on you). MH dagger has no AOE, and both focus and warhorn have one (the the warhorn one being a silly long cooldown PBAOE).
If it is more than 5 targets, that would be very odd. Because all AOE attacks are supposed to be limited to 5 targets.
Honestly i feel like DS should be more like this than its current state.
The one indication i have that LF is related to health was while switching between weapon sets. One set had a vitality boost, another did not. With a partially filled LF bar i noticed the endpoint slightly shifted when it swapped back and forth between the sets. But with no real numbered overlay i find it a pain in the behind to keep track of exactly how much of a change that was.
And fall damage is worthless as a test, as it is designed to kill people of all levels after a equal distance fall.
Fall damage is no good as it takes a percentage based bite out of health. This so that a level 1 and a level 80 dies after dropping the same distance.
I find that part of my problem is that i forget DS is even charging.
I cycle between checking my skills, health and the damage numbers, but forget that green bar in the corner.
As for Furious Demise, is there some kind of internal cooldown or can i maintain a near constant fury by traiting DS for 5 sec cooldown?
Death Shroud feels like the Mesmer Shatter system – both require alot of Trait input to get anything solid from. Without them they are pretty subpar.
Except that you do not put aside your whole skillset each time you shatter your illusions. Instead you simply loose what additions they provided, not that different from a thief running out of initiative or warrior spending his adrenaline.
At present there are very few out of DS benefits from LF, and going into DS means loosing access to your weapons and utilities for the duration.
The main design focus of DS seems to be the damage absorption, but for that we trade away our access to weapons and utilities for the duration. IMO that is not a fair trade, as 4 out of 5 trait lines focus on those weapons and utilities.
Sure, there are some utility on there. But to access that utility we have to tap dance on the keyboard in a similar fashion to an elementalist. There are 4 keys set aside for the profession mechanic, move dark path and doom to two of them, perhaps put Life Transfer on the third, and put DS minus the mutated down state on the last. Then fold Reaper’s Might into the base DS package so that there is both a offensive and defensive benefit for going into DS. Or leave it as a traitable, but have it grant might over time rather than connected to a specific skill. the out of DS profession skills would have to drain a percentage of LF on each use obviously.
My main issue is that i have to basically change my play style each time i fire up DS. Or i have to build my play style around being in DS as much as possible, meaning that i can just as well ignore what weapons and utilities i have beyond their ability to rebuild LF. I want to see DS as a kind of time limited booster to my main play style, because at present it feels as if i am switching between two different toons mid play.
Not sure i see the benefit of cripple, as we need to be in their face to do damage in the first place. Cripple more benefits ranged weapons like axe of scepter as it allows us to kite in a tighter area. for melee, chill would be more beneficial as it slows down the opponents non-auto skills.
Looking at Neck’s table, it looks like a good old signed integer issue.
This means that a numeric variable in the code can be both positive or negative, and the downscale code ends up reducing it so far rolls over from positive (doing damage) to negative (giving health).
This with the added insult of it apparently doing a better job at healing the mob than it ever did healing us.
Sounds almost as if someone used a signed integer for the damage, and it ends up rolling over.
Honestly i am wondering if i am doing more damage with down #1 than with dagger #1 since the patch.
I would not expect our rate of LF generation, nor the rate of loss while in DS to stay the same after such a change. But at present it feels like i’m better off just ignoring DS altogether, as trying to wrap it into a build just end up a compromise. We either have to build for LB to be our primary damage, or just not bother, as any time we go into DS we leave the majority of our build behind for 4 skills, 3 being on cooldowns. Meaning that we spend the majority of our time in DS watching LB pop off once a second. I would much rather see DS be some kind of boost to our existing weapons and utilities than some cross between a down state and a transformation.
Honestly, necro is a meat grinder profession either way. all our best damage sources are DOT, not burst.
The more i play the more i find that our damage profile is grind, not burst.
Our wells are DOT, our main damage source is conditions, and axe is basically built around stacking up weakness with 1 and then grinding the health away with 2.
As such, i propose to convert the current DS into a quickness source.
When F1 is pressed the DS effect would come on, and we would be granted quickness for the duration of DS while it also acted as the current damage absorber (meaning that any damage to us would in effect reduce the duration of our quickness boon).
No more this transformation into a walking down state, instead we would have continued access to our weapon and utility skills but would for the duration put out twice the dps we normally do.
The problem i see is that the necro is built to grind enemies down, not drop a ton of hurt fast. Dagger is our fastest attack, but thanks to the short range we lose most of our damage if we try to apply mobility to keep alive. also, we have very little short cooldown AOE. End result is that being ganged lead to issues.
Yellow mobs are not enemies. They are neutrals. Even so, necro wells should not heal neutrals.
The confusion comes from them turning red the moment they go aggro on you. So if they do that out of view, you can’t tell if it was always red or not unless comparing it to the rest of the local fauna.
The pets have a AI?
Yup, let me quote the A-Net Wiki entry for the “AI” (minion) acronym:
The acronym AI stands for Artificial Idiocy. Your pets and minions will behave erratically and unreliably. An additional feature is that they do often nothing at all.
Heh, seems Anet has engaged in newspeak…
All this confusion would be avoided if Anet had put a numbers overlay on the LF bar. Then people could tell at a glance.
Honestly, at this time it seems they expect us to always run Soul reaping 30.
dual wield swords <3
Even just replacing main hand dagger with sword and granting a cleave would be nice. What is really lacking is any kind of up close auto attack aoe. Best we have are well, but they are not really applicable for extended fights.
Enough GS drool, it has too much love as it is.
Could just as well replace staff #1 with a scythe swing.
Given the near pointlessness of Blood magic 15, perhaps it could provide DS stack or two of bleed pr attack instead? That is assuming that said trait currently operates as intended.
Dies, and with Death 30 spawns a cloud of poison.
With 10 points in spite, 15 in curses and 30 in soul reaping we can maintain a constant fury and a near constant retaliation by cycling DS every 5 seconds.
Heh, must admit i have barely touched WoP. Likely because it has a long cooldown. This makes it really unforgiving when used too soon. May have to take a closer look tho.
I stick with my suggestion that they should be replaced with a mini bone wurm, or perhaps be given a ranged attack. Then at least they have a chance at doing some damage before they time out. Other option would be that each attack hurts them rather than this automatic bleed they have at the moment.
Best i can tell that ours major in DS damage source, and our major out of DS damage source do not overlap. Drop into DS and we have two solid damage abilities. One that pop of once pr second, meaning we have about 25 seconds, with 12 of them spent doing reduced damage. Another that do AOE every 40 seconds or so (and may well attract more attention than we like).
For this we give up all access to our weapon and utility skills for the duration.
No other profession makes such a trade off. Nearest are Elementalists and Engineers juggling their atunements and kits.
I would have less issue with DS if Life Blast had a fire rate on par with cepter. Hell, i would even trade its pr attack damage for a higher rate.
Honestly, i find it weird that they would even consider giving any of the auto-attack skills a lower fire rate than half a second. This because a second feels like a eternity when you have something coming after you with murderous intent.
This seems to indeed be the case, tho the tooltip still says 20% chance.
Tested on the target golems in the mist, and swear there was a combo heart for every shot from the staff into the CPC i have put down right before.
Nope, seems to last just as long as it always has here.
Calling Anet out will just get threads closed, so not worth it.
So they fixed two skills to remove aegis rather than be blocked by it, reworked our down skills some (dark combo, yay…), and played around some more with spectral walk. I am getting the impression that the vampiric traits are meant to be as lackluster as they are.
Apparently this requires that the mob starts as yellow.
I think the thing that makes warrior, mesmer and thief rule PVP is the human element.
Warrior simply hit hard. So if they can blindside their target, bam they are down. This because anything other than another warrior, necro with full LF, and perhaps guardian, are a soft target.
Mesmer because they have the potential to confuse the hell out of players. One clone retreat that break target lock and you have the ball rolling.
Thief because of stealth. If their initial attack fails to gain them a serious advantage they can stealth and find some other target.
The rest of the professions are not that lucky. Sure, elementalist can hit as hard as a warrior. But any protracted fight and the player really needs to know his keyboard so he can move and switch attunements as required by the flow. Necromancer and guardian can bunker up to try to outlive their opposition, and the rest can basically run in circles while spamming ranged attacks.
They could make the death trait horror into a wurm, would at least allow it to damage something right after spawning.
One of the main points I thought Anet wanted to make was that you could play how you wanted? You don’t have to be a tank (“defensive profession”), a healer, or a dps; you can free yourself from those archetypes.
I think the main issue is that while you can trait for any of those, the nearly random aggro mechanic results in everyone turtling up in case they run into some mob that will ignore everyone but them. This also makes a bad dodge less expensive in terms of health and repair costs. And in any kind of PVP it provides some measure of protection against being blindsided by a heavy hitter. End result is that once people go beyond open world PVE, they convert their build into a tanky healer as best they can.