Guild Wars 2

Hey!

Visceral Gaming is currently looking for 2 core players.
We are not looking for specific professions but players
who can play multiple professions at a high level that also owns
a good sense of how rotations and tactics work on a top-tier
playing field.

Right now the roster consists of:

Me (Djooce)
Xerrex
Didi

pm me ingame if you are interested!

HF & GL

Djooce

Bhawb.7408:

Anelyn.4593:

Regarding burning – while the damage is nice for sure, it only takes ~6 stacks of bleed to equal the damage from burning with same condi power. Am sure most of you can self sustain 10+ stacks easily in pvp. (and even aoe).

You will never, ever see 10 stacks of bleeds sustained on any decent player in PvP unless they are 100% out of condition cleanses; and it just will never happen in team play. That is why burning is so strong.

This Sir, is not true! And tbh i think that going for foot in the grave is a way better replacement option for dhuumfire with most teams running a spirit ranger these days.

Heyo!

We are currently looking for a ranger (spirit) that aims to be as good
as possible with the goal of reaching/maintaining a spot in the top of the leaderboards.

The team consists of former top100 players but have been without a consistent roster and schedule for a while. We are looking for a player that is willing to put in several hours every day to practice if needed.

The team consists of:
Guardian
Ele
Necro
Warrior/Engi
You?

If you are interested in trying out for us contact us ingame:

djooceboxblast.9876
Vuh.1328

Oblivion.8307:

Could people please stop flaming me? I was asked to post the video for a friend, get off your high horses jesus christ. The fact I previously used my stunbreakers and berserkers stance prior in the fight means i’m just delaying my death essentially. Oh, and i’m running valks. – I’m running lyssa too.

So you do everything your friends tell you to do? In a constructive post i do not think that your videos show any evidence or proof of what this topic is about. I am sure that you have better videos of you playing necromancer which would seem more appropriate for discussion. If you do not like people flaming you, ask your friends to fulfil their wishes themselves instead or post videos that are relevant.

jmatb.6307:

I have no idea how people are this clueless about Necro. Blows my mind.

Stop blaming others for being clueless when you are exactly the same. It is as if people think that the fotm build is the only viable builds for necromancers at the moment.

Let me ask you a question? Where do you think condition necromancers are most effective?

I will answer the question for you because clearly you have no understanding of how a good condition necromancer is played. UP CLOSE! UP CLOSE! UP CLOSE! (weakening shroud, mark of evasion, geomancy sigils, dark path and so on) Up close is where condition necromancers do their best burst, so reducing the range will not help you here and will only make more balanced builds worse.

Phantaram.1265:

djooceboxblast.9876:

snip

Djooce! good post. I love your suggestions and also agree that weakening dhuumfire to something not so crazy could open up the possibility for more builds like you said 0/30/10/0/30 or even 0/30/20/0/20 and people that still want maximum pressure could still use the weaker dhuumfire. (whatever it may be changed to)

I would even suggest removing dhuumfire from spite and adding it to curses (master or grand master) while (maybe) changing it to torment instead of burning. One would lose the condition duration from spite, balancing the current condition pressure of the necromancer severely, but instead get another unique condition to
cover for the main damage source (bleeds). You would still be able to get a good amount of bleed duration from curses (hemophilia, lingering curse) or even runes and not lose a lot of damage if able to keep your stacks on target. The spite tree just fits way too well with all of the ways a condition necromancer does damage and even includes chill of death (boon strip and chill + good damage) which is a very powerful master trait.

KarlaGrey.5903:

That is hardly an argument, given the fact bleed stacking isn’t exactly the main source of engi damage to start with.

It is not but if you start to nerf other means of doing condition damage as an engineer they will start to look even worse compared to necromancers. Burning on engineer is fine and should stay as it is because they cannot reliably stack bleeds and therefore needs the amount of burning they have access to right now. Now necromancers have good access to burning, can stack 15-20 stacks of bleeding in a short amount of time, lengthy poison, torment and TERROR! All those conditions smacked together do an insane amount of burst and is what makes the necromancer over the top pressure wise at the moment. You cannot really compare necromancer and engineer condition pressure right now since necromancer just does it all way better and has more ways of cleansing plus transfers etc.

KarlaGrey.5903:

leman.7682:

I haven’t read the whole topic so I don’t know if anyone already suggested what I’m going to write.

I realise people will be angry with me for this idea, but here it is – just make Terror a GM trait to limit the number of builds you can run it with. Switch it with the scepter or weakness trait so that you forgo defense to go full offense (i.e. 30/30/ whatever / whatever/ whatever).

• This way, you can’t have Soul Marks and Last Gasp in one build with Dhuumfire and Terror.
• You also can’t have unblockable marks in the same build so that you have to make choices.
• Corruption, warhorn and the the swapped trait all become viable again. They help the necro offensively as well, but in a different manner.

Some things during the Terror trait swap would have to be figured out, like if the traits are good enough for their tiers after the swap, but that’s the easy part I guess.

The aim of the change is to bring back the old-school 0/30/w.e/w.e/w.e condi necro, maintain the ultimate damage hybrid as a possible and a high risk/high reward build, force build diversity and drive away the fotm players from the necro

Coming from an exclusively-and-constantly-since-beta necro.

Please don’t hate me too much, just trying to help.

• Yet-another-edit:

To potential people concerned about the change having a negative impact on PvE/WvE – it doesn’t.

B-But….your suggestion to make terror GM would kill my 0 20 20 0 30 terror build (sacced lingering curses, because blockable marks are, with all due respect, nothing short of terrible, especially given their relatively high recharge). I like to consider my build well-rounded (apart from lack of raw damage), because I just can’t imagine running some glass necro without lf generation on marks and lower recharge on DS skills, which I consider one of the most important necro traits, utility-wise :‘(. It was never OP before dhuumfire, so why setups that aren’t even connected with dhuumfire to start with.
Just rework dhuumfire and let other things alone.

+1

People have started mentioning things that were never mentioned before dhuumfire was introduced. Marks were never a problem before and have not been changed so why are they are problem now? Dhuumfire is a problem because it gives necromancers another condition for opponents to cleanse that also does a good amount of damage. This is where the main problem lies and i am afraid that most people do not see it and therefore point out things that are not the main issue forcing the necromancer in a direction where it should not be headed.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

djooceboxblast.9876:

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

The main part of necro being over the top dmg-wise are the marks. You can compare that to Grenades from the HGH. But without any counter to it (projectile-reflection), nor does the necro need skill to place them. They are instant (no travelling of procteile whatsoever), they are unblockable, when not triggered they remain on ground and the area of these marks are horendous. Marks are one of the main reasons why necro doesn’t require any skill at all. While grenades required you to predict the movement (also the area was slightly smaller) they had also an obvious animation, where ppl could actually dodge them. This part of depth is lost with marks in place. You can predict them but nothing else. Animation of it is not obvious and look all the same.

You clearly have little to no idea of what makes the necromancer over the top. Marks are not the problem and do not do the same amount of damage as grenades and with the newest patch most necro’s wont have unblockable marks. The marks have an extremely high cd and can not really be compared to grenades. If you make marks have a travel time like grenades then missing a mark will be way too risky. An engineers grenades have a very short cd and a miss wont be as crushing as if a necromancer misses putrid or reapers mark. And if you think the marks are so easy to hit, why do i see so many necromancers who are considered good miss mark by mark on their streams (even with greater marks)? With this said, i do agree with you that the marks need some kinda differentiation to their casting animations or visuals, so people can actually see and know what they are dodging.

Marks provde non-skilled play, as every other AoE that has no dedicated animation and is instantly in place after the cast. This denies a lot of depth to the gameplay and the class itself. Furthermore it doesn’t require any skill to be effective.
DPS-wise you’re right, the problem relies more in traits.

I would not mind having a tiny bit of travel time on marks but it should not be as long as the grenades. If so, the marks should have a reduction on their cd’s. The solution could be to make something similar to dark bindings beams with a color representing the individual mark. Just throwing ideas out there since we know that the developers are reading this. Im all about making necromancers balanced because i actually agree with them being a tiny bit over the top. I just dont like people mentioning things (marks etc.) that are not a contribution to the current “op” state of the necromancer.

Empathetic Fighter.2065:

The main part of necro being over the top dmg-wise are the marks. You can compare that to Grenades from the HGH. But without any counter to it (projectile-reflection), nor does the necro need skill to place them. They are instant (no travelling of procteile whatsoever), they are unblockable, when not triggered they remain on ground and the area of these marks are horendous. Marks are one of the main reasons why necro doesn’t require any skill at all. While grenades required you to predict the movement (also the area was slightly smaller) they had also an obvious animation, where ppl could actually dodge them. This part of depth is lost with marks in place. You can predict them but nothing else. Animation of it is not obvious and look all the same.

You clearly have little to no idea of what makes the necromancer over the top. Marks are not the problem and do not do the same amount of damage as grenades and with the newest patch most necro’s wont have unblockable marks. The marks have an extremely high cd and can not really be compared to grenades. If you make marks have a travel time like grenades then missing a mark will be way too risky. An engineers grenades have a very short cd and a miss wont be as crushing as if a necromancer misses putrid or reapers mark. And if you think the marks are so easy to hit, why do i see so many necromancers who are considered good miss mark by mark on their streams (even with greater marks)? With this said, i do agree with you that the marks need some kinda differentiation to their casting animations or visuals, so people can actually see and know what they are dodging.

Oh and btw, you can dodge through the marks (with horrendous radius) laying on the ground.

The latest patch has made me such a happy necromancer. It has made the necromancer more of an attrition based profession which has been the ultimate goal all along. The new default mark radius is more than perfect (GJ Anet – Finally) and has opened up a variety of new options for many builds. The bugfix on ds damage mitigation has made a huge difference in survivability and i have a really hard time understanding players who whine about the changes. I mean come on, does it hurt you to actively think and do something according to your enemy to be effective?

Currently running a 0/30/10/0/30 build effectively killing good elemantalists, rangers, guardians etc. shows that the necromancers damage was fine before dhuumfire was born and that the trait was not needed.

Now on to the OP’s topic about necromancers doing too much damage and pressure with conditions. One of the main strengths of the Necromancer is applying conditions with long durations which makes it possible to stack an insane amount of bleeds (15-20 lasting for well above 10 seconds) topped with poison, chill, weakness and now burning and torment too, in basically a 5-7 ability combo. What makes the ability to do this too strong is the burning and to some degree torment! Not only do they cover the bleeds, they also do an insane amount of damage over time (30 points in spite – 4 nightmare – 2 lyssa gives you a 60% uptime on dhuumfire). Personally i think that what the necromancer needs is a way to cover the bleeds without gaining too much extra pressure/damage.

Suggestions that could solve the main topic of this thread (i really do think that dhuumfire needs to go if Anet is not willing to remove the burning or change it to something else):

1. The dhuumfire trait could be changed to proc torment instead of burning and we would be somewhere close to balance.

2. Give necromancers a new non-damaging condition that we can actively use to cover our bleed stacks with.

3. Keep burning but reduce bleed duration across the board for necromancer abilities. (This would make builds without burning suffer a lot and is not the best solution if you want build variety.)

4. Change blood curse or rending curse on scepter aa to torment instead of bleeding adding an extra condition to cover for bleeds or other conditions.

5. Add travel-time to scepter aa making it slower to apply bleeds. (Currently the best aa in gw2 for condition pressure – Try going 30 spite, 30 curses with lingering curses, hemophilia, condition/bleed duration runes and earth + agony sigils. You will be able to stack and maintain 15 stacks of bleed, poison and burning just by auto attacking. A test has shown that this setup has the pressure to kill a heavy golem almost as fast as a zerker warrior 100b)

Good idea! I agree.

As a necro player i think this change would work great. It would make you choose between more damage or better utility. I would certainly go for the utility!

It is over the top! After having tested the 30 spite variation condition builds with terror before the patch i can safely say that it was very very very strong without the buffs that necromancer received. Now put torment, burning, longer poison on scepter AA, a buff to doom and a build that was strong suddenly becomes somewhat over powered.

Without these new conditions and buffs you had to rely purely on your bleed bombing with fear as a utility to keep your opponent from cleansing your damage. This required some skill and the condition burst was balanced since it would not one-shot people who actually knew what they were doing.

Now if only some of the old/new necromancer players had actually tested and learned to play a necromancer before deeming it unviable previous patch we would not have had the consensus that necromancer was under powered and needed an offensive buff. All that crap about having to run from elementalists and other professions because you did not stand a chance is just pure nonsense. I myself have beaten several top tier players without the recently received buffs and others would have been able to do the same if they had just put some time in to actually learning to play necromancer with the right offensive/defensive mentality.

Now what the necromancer actually needed was a better way of being an attrition based profession. A way of being able to regenerate life force faster and more reliably. Being able to get healed in death shroud etc.

I find it funny that this post is coming from you Purie. Not so long ago i overheard you on a stream saying that you hated everything about the necromancer and that you did not want to play the profession. What has changed since then that made you make this post about necromancer not being op? My knowledge is that you have been playing necromancer consistently after the patch was released. The profession mechanics did not change, so why are you now so obsessed with playing a profession that you dislike?

ManaCraft.5630:

Well, I suppose some cautious optimism is in order. Still, I think the lack of viable stunbreakers in particular needs to be addressed. I also don’t understand how Death Shroud is supposed to be the attrition mechanism of choice for the necro if its skills are to be based around keeping you in close contact with the enemy. If I’m trying to mitigate damage, that’s the last place I want to be, so I just don’t understand the logic behind that decision. Unless you’re a dagger necro maybe…

Necromancer lacks good stunbreakers. I would love to see a stunbreak on signet of the locust! I think the most common mistake for most necromancer players is that they play way too defensively trying to stand on range as a turret. Whenever they get attacked they panic and try to run away putting down marks or whatever hoping for the best. Up close is where the condition necromancer puts out the most pressure. Being up close makes it easier to hit ground targeted abilities and grant use of traits like weakening shroud and mark of evasion while being able to proc geomancy (which by far is the best choice for a condition necro). When reading posts about the necromancer profession i always stumble upon players thinking that necromancers are slow at applying conditions, which is true if you are being passive on range. One of the main strengths of the aggressive condition necro is rapidly applying multiple (+10) stacks of bleeding.

I can understand the worries they have about making dark path a ground targeted blink/teleport. One of the main problems with dark path is the projectile travel speed which makes it kinda unreliable. The speed makes it hard to hit on range against players who see it coming since it does not always track the players movement (it sometimes does). The fact that it is a projectile brings me to another problem, which is the high risk of hitting something in front of your actual target in a team fight, specifically ranger pets or mesmer clones. My solution/idea to prevent these really annoying factors would be to make the cast time a bit longer, but make it a teleport to target kinda thing. This would make it more reliable and it would fit the developer idea of necromancers being hard to get away from. Right now necromancers are pretty easy to get away from especially because of dark paths unreliability to hit and cause chill on priority target.

Vuh.1328:

Most of the stuff i suggest shouldn’t be way to unrealistic or hard to change.

Necro:

• Greater marks as default or atleast bigger than currently
• Merge the unblockable marks+cd reduction trait
• No/Reduced CD on shroud
• Signet of the locust being a stunbreaker
• Speed up Staff 1/Completly redesign it

UI:

• Able to move and scale the ui elements to my likeing
• Being able to click through the ui with ground targeted spells
• less skill queue
• FPS and Latency meter as an option
• Change the colours/scale of your team mates on the minimap in pvp

Good to know that people you talk to actually listen to what you have to say. Since the developers are already aware of the state of the necromancer i am not going into details about the things you mention other than the No/Reduced CD on shroud.

Several threads on the necromancer forum are mentioning and wanting accessibility to boons of different sorts since that is what the necromancer really lacks compared to other professions. A Death Shroud without a CD and some traits that would give boons while entering Death Shroud would bring boon accessibility to the table, while making the skill cap for Death Shroud play higher since you would have to manage your life force more efficiently. An example would be how the Engineer traits like Speedy Kits and Invigorating Speed work together = STRONG.

And for the User Interface, i really like your ideas.

Rerroll.9083:

No skill in the game should be unblockable. It was not a nerf but a fix. Deal with it.

Oh you disappoint me friend! I truly and deeply agree with Duke on this subject.
Necromancers are just not viable in current ELE meta and are not going to be even if they make certain utilities unblockable. If you want to bring conditions in a team you dont want a necromancer but an engineer and we all know why. The current meta just has way too much cleansing (1-3 elementalists on a team + a bunker guardian etc.) for condition necromancers to be useful. I will have to play something else until something changes to not kitten my team too much.

When we are talking about auto attack on axe anyway I would like to hear a developers opinion about the state of it and if there is anything in the plans for the future. I would love to play a power axe build in tpvp but unfortunately it is not viable because of the auto attack being mediocre at best as a sustained dps attack. The axe works well as a “switch-to” weapon for the aoe crip and retal + ghastly claws burst but that is about it.

[/quote]

“…you would never use it without greater marks…” – that’s exactly what I said. My point was, that a by-default-greater-mark would free up 10 trait points to spend in a different traitline… that would give you a huge boost, hence overpowering the option to go with the staff compared to other builds.
I don’t quite understand what you mean by making them hit more easily. Like an auto-aim?
I agree that greater marks don’t necessarily improve your aim. But that’s not the point, I think. It’s more about the aoe-benefits of the bigger surface area.[/quote]

It would free up 10 trait points – and that might become a little too viable for many other things but all i am saying is that default staff marks if not placed 100% accurately wont hit and unactivated marks in pvp are useless because enemy players as you know can see them. I would like seeing the marks made a tad bigger so the staff becomes viable without being traited like all weapons should be.

flow.6043:

Well… as everyone here stated allready: If you use the staff you trait for greater marks (which also makes them unblockable). It’s just a standard thing to do.
As to the question, why it isn’t standard in the first place: balance. Freeing up a trait slot would be an incredible power boost. You could have greater marks and staff mastery (-20% cd) by only investing 10 points in death magic. So unless you are a minion master, it’s like giving you a total of 80 trait points instead of 70.
In my opinion the staff is allready the most powerful weapon of the necromancer (if traited), buffing it with an extra free 10 trait points would tip the scale in its favor even further.

I kinda disagree! Sure the staff is a powerful weapon but you would never use it without greater marks because it becomes almost useless without it. I am not saying that they should make greater marks a default but Anet should atleast consider making the marks easier to hit by default. As a necro player with above 1200 tournament matches with most of them won i can easily say that missing marks without greater marks has nothing to do with being a bad aim.

The staff is basically kitten without this trait and because of that greater marks is a must with any build that utilizes staff, especially in pvp scenarios. I would love to see Anet either making staff marks be like greater marks as a standard, or atleast buffing them to half of what the greater marks trait does. This would make room and make many more builds viable in terms of competetive pvp.