I know it needs SOMETHING. Maybe a 300 range cleave like ele’s dagger in fire attunement.
Would not even need extra range, just being able to hit an arc with the auto-attack would go a long way towards making vampiric builds more viable, as you would then be bringing in 50 health pr target pr slash. if you could get them to pile 5 high, that is 250 pr slash. More if you happen to land a wave of crits.
Not surprised that bunker builds work, as that is what Anet tuned the necro around after the last beta. There bunker necros were fond to be nigh unkillable.
And even if eles have it worse, it still means that we are in 7th place at present. Not exactly a position to be cheerful about.
The majority of insignias right now favor power builds. power is either a major or minor stat on close to 90% of them, with precision following close behind. Heck the only one that mix toughness and vitality has power as its major.
And that is why i would love for Anet to put a straight numbers overlay on the LF bar, less confusion that way…
Nah, we were nerfed before launch.
Well daze says it makes the target unable to use skills, while chill makes skill recharges take longer. But i have never noticed any slowdown in auto-attacks while chilled, meaning that chill do not really affect mainhand auto-attack skills. Daze on the other hand will, as it locks the skills rather than make them take longer to recharge. Meaning that daze will be way more effective on any profession that rely on auto-attack for their steady DPS.
This makes me wonder, are MH #1 considered a skill for this? If so it is in some ways a stronger control than chill, as chill only affects the recharge, not the activation time. And #1 skill usually do not have a recharge. as such your buying yourself 2 seconds of no incoming damage. I really do have to reevaluate my ignorance of warhorn, especially if i am to revisit daggers.
I suspect the main reason it gets ignored is that there is no proper indication of how wide a cone we are talking about. If it has been AOE like the Axe Feast people may have been more likely to take a look at it.
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From over on reddit it was brought to my attention that ranger pets come up as green rather than the blue we see in that shot. Do wonder if that has any relation to the flaky AI.
Edit: never mind, i should have guessed that they showed up blue for the owner and green for everyone else. Never really put much thought about it before now.
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“I will admit, however, that one thing is true — to play a necro decently requires much more knowledge, awareness, and finger dexterity than just running around spamming 2 like a certain very annoying, faceroll-friendly profession. If elementalists are playing Bach on the keyboard, we’re at least performing Chopin’s fifth over here”
And this may well be the main culprit. I can understand classes that need effort to shine. But it seems ele and necro need effort to be “passable”. And that to me sounds more like a balance issue than a l2p issue.
“Undocumented DS nerfs”
Appears to be the main culprit. It seems the two professions with the most “l2p” leveled at its players also have the games most clunky profession mechanics.
Funnily fear is the one thing that can bypass stability.
did a quick bit of math on this elsewhere, and it seems that LF drops by 12% for the duration of LT. The ambiguous bit is if the LF collected is pr hit or pr target. If it is pr target you will only break even around about 4 targets (5 is the max on any AOE). If it is pr hit, you can break even on a single target. If Barti’s observation is correct then it is pr target and the effect is minimal at best. And if so, LT is not worth bothering with for the LF “boost”.
Honestly i would have loved to see the builds and numbers of the beta weekend characters that prompted Anet to adjust things to this degree.
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There is also the mark of revival trait that put down a reaper’s mark (staff #5) when you start to revive someone. May buy that extra second.
Not that those marks mean much against anyone using ranged attacks (and even a warrior thief should be packing some kind of ranged attack, unless the player is really blank).
Rainbow sparkle shroud, now available in the TP for 999 gems.
ok, so 12% rather than 15. Leaving a net of 15, or 3 extra seconds if LT is used on a single target…
And that still depends on LT being 3% pr hit rather than 3% pr target.
For a second there i thought it said Gungan…
My impression was that they would skip today’s patch to focus on the Halloween event.
Lets see, 3% pr hit, 5 targets max, 9 attacks.
In theory, Life Transfer should produce 135% LF under ideal conditions.
Even with a single target we should see a LF increase of 27%. But this is over some 3 seconds. What is the pr second drop of LF simply from being in DS again? Oddly, that seems to not be documented anywhere.
Ok now, lets say it is 5% (100 divided by 18, as i swear i counted 18 ticks from a full bar without Viral Persistence traited. That means that in the time LT gathers 27% we have lost 15%, leaving us with a net of 12%.
All this assumes that LT gets 3% pr attack. If it gets 3% pr target, it is basically worthless as a LF collector below 4 targets.
And with the current tooltip wording, it can be either way.
@Merch Point. Tho i may well trade that damage for an attack that can hit more reliably.
See example attached, please. My Death Shroud isn’t working properly, so I figured I would send you a visual example of what I am experiencing.
It happens to me too. Same bug. I use DeathShroud, it works for 1 second, then it goes in a stasys status for some second. You can understand that since the reaper’s icon on the right become a grey lock instead. During these seconds you can’t do nothing. You can’t use DS spells nor return to a normal form. You can just move and see your life force fall. This bug is really really a big problem for me.
Extra info: I’ve talk with 4 others necromancers in my guild. Seems that just I got this bug, so isn’t even easy to proove it… Anyway the video posted by Evalana is really clear.
Do you happen to have a rune set with transform equipped? they seem to trigger as if going DS sends the health to (near) zero for a moment.
Anet is working on that, if you feel like gathering or buying tickets…
They had a problem during the later beta weekends with some players figuring out how to keep LF topped up so that they could stay in DS virtually constant. End result was a nigh unkillable Necro, unless everyone ganged up on him.
On the bounce thing, i could have sworn that Focus #4 bounce on target multiple times if there is nothing else in range. Is that perhaps what they also intended for Deadly Swarm to do, given the tooltip? Or are we basically looking at a badly worded tooltip? If the latter, i guess they should insert “up to”…
Passive regen? Lets see, there is 5 second regen when health drops below 90%. There may be another 5 second regen if you take Mark of Evasion (10 second internal cooldown). And then there is the one in the focus, tho you need to be within 600 of your target for it to bounce back to you.
If you manage to get them all going you may be looking at 2500-3000 heal in total (not counting healing power gear) if you manage to not get hit in the next 15 seconds.
As for life siphon, thieves do more with their Signet of Malice passive than we do when we dump 15 points into blood. At present our vampiric traits do not scale with healing power, and we are not sure if that is a bug or intended.
While they (supposedly) fixed the necro fearing another necro with auto-fear trait that resulted in 20 second fears, a similar one can apparently happen if a your auto-fearing necro fear a mesmer that reflects CC effects. Could that be what you’re seeing, Heartling?
Well even with maxed power trait at level 80 your looking at a reflected damage of maybe 300 pr attack. That is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. Also, i don’t think that Retaliation actually removes any damage from you. It only damages whoever damages you.
Guess i should have included the :P
KTKTKT.1853 – please solo a solid built guardian or a wolf/bear beast sigil ranger and post a video of it, second true that there is a L2P issue since necros have the highest learning curve (mesmers might have the highest skill ceiling power, but necro ele and warrior do actually take the most to master, yes i am including the warrior since while he can do great with facerolling, you can squeeze out at least 40% more damage with good adrenaline control and combo weapon swap attacks).
Now if only Ele and Necro behaved like Warrior, in that one could get by with the profession equivalent of faceroll but with effort could really shine.
But both Ele and Necro have some very clunky profession mechanics. Want a quick heal with Ele, that is two keys, three if you want to go back to the previous element. Similar with Necro if you want to fear someone, first you need to enter DS then you need to hit Doom. Then you will need to exit DS again if you want to continue attacking with your skill setup.
in comparison a warriors profession mechanic involves monitoring a progress bar and hitting F1 when it is full to dish out soild dose of hurt.
Guardian have what is in effect 3 sigils as his mechanic, again just one key away from application.
Thief, again one key press.
Mesmer, same.
Ranger, same.
Engineer, also one key pr toolbelt slot.
The difference seems to be like playing piano with just index fingers vs playing using whole chords once you select Elementalist or Necromancer.
So to me Necro and Ele are left fighting the UI as much as they are fighting the enemy.
But you’re supposed to play the game, not the interface…
Well well, i stand corrected. Given that they seems to have about the same stats, but Guildhead do not list them as sharing the same model, i guess only one of them is supposed to be animated.
Heh, sweet. Need to have a glance at that arm. Anyways, how about the Lidless eye?
I have not seen it in game yet, but from what i understand the eye actually moves.
Meaning it will be fixed faster…
Well given that melee’s complain that they can’t spot tells because of all the ranged effects, i suspect it more likely that the elementalists will get theirs toned down than ours spruced up.
Bumped into a group doing a dynamic event chain and tagged along. At some point the Whisper NPC started talking about Asurans causing trouble. At that moment one player piped up “yes yes, pick on the Asura. Racists!”. It so happened that he was playing Asura.
So you turn into a 3 meter tall green neon ghost, and is granted extra crit…
Consume Conditions mostly. To make full use of Well of Blood we need to stand still, and the game is not really built around “tank and spank”. Add to this the cooldown is 5 seconds longer than Consume Conditions. Tho i may opt for it if i am speced for back row support and have wells traited for ground targeting.
@Whargoul Hard to say. each condition would deliver about 8 extra damage pr 100 done by the attack. Best i can suggest is head for the mist and fire off some bites on the golems before and after placing some conditions.
We also have a heal that is actually stronger the more conditions we have on us at the time. And it is the shortest cooldown heal next to popping the floating blood bag.
Heh, I had the impression that warriors needed 10 hits to fill the adrenaline in total. I stand corrected.
Btw, i notice that elementalists and necromancers may have the most clunky profession mechanic in terms of UI.
While the elemental one gives access to a big pool of skills pr weapon, quickly using one from a different element require 2 presses, 3 if they want to go back to the previous element (like quickly popping a water heal while focusing on fire damage).
Every other profession mechanic besides that and our DS (F1, Path/Doom, F1) is a one button affair (Adrenaline burst, steal, tool belt, pet ability, virtues, clone shatter).
That begs either for perfect player coordination, or some kind of macro keyboard. Especially if one want to chord that off while strafing and dodging, never mind trying to lay down ground targeting or combos on the go.
@merch err, mark of blood is not a blast finisher.
Mark of Blood is not a blast finisher, but you do get a blast finisher when dodging with the Mark of Evasion trait in Blood Magic (which creates a Mark of Blood after dodge).
Never noticed, and seems to be a undocumented “feature”.
@merch err, mark of blood is not a blast finisher.
I think our main problem is that our available weapon finishers are too reliant on enemy interaction. If we had some way to remotely detonate marks, it would perhaps be a different story.
thx, last time i’ve seen there is’t this formula.. now i can see that toughness points are usufull!! XD
Yea, it is highly effective in a mixed build with vitality as it acts something of a health multiplier. But it is worthless against condition damage.
Heh, yea i have wondered why necro staff auto attack is a pierce while the mesmers is a bounce. The latter is much more likely to catch targets that are a bit spread out without having to goad them into a conga line.
There seems to be multiple sounds, with one or two that are particularly grating. The one i really notice starts with a uh or oh sound.
Btw, i think Focus #4 share sound effects with the staff auto attack.
There is a formula up on the wiki, seems the total armor acts as a divider on direct damage. note tho that the direct damage shown on weapon skill tooltips are pre-computed using a set armor value (2600 at level 80).
Actually, warrior adrenaline charges pr strike the warrior does, and it takes about 10 of them to get it filled.
Personally i think DS should be split up, so that various abilities are available via F1-F4 rather than having to pop into DS to gain 4 abilities.
How about this:
F1, offensive DS. Grants quickness, rapidly loose LF.
F2, defensive DS. Provides the ability of using LF as a alternate health pool just like today.
F3, Dark Path. spend LF to send out a claw.
F4, Doom. spend LF to scare the target.
LF can’t be collected while in F1 or F2 DS.
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At present there is quite a few traits were we are not sure if they work as intended or are bugged, so i give it 50/50.
And the next patch Monday will be skipped so that they can get the Halloween event ready.
ah, yes. Sometimes that is how i feel playing my Engineer…
But now i am drifting badly off topic…