Guild Wars 2

I do have to agree with you that Reaper and Reaper Shroud look awesome. There’s great synergy between the traits and skills, including some shouts. There are already a few different builds that I’m running through my head, and I already know it’s going to be difficult to decide just what traits to take when they come out. Because they all look so good! And honestly this is a good problem to have, it means they’ve done something right

Sometimes you don’t want to talk about how good something is too early on, as it simply gives fuel for other classes to whine and possibly the devs giving in to their whines.

After viewing the stream I already had a few skill combos in my head that I’ll use out in WvW. I didn’t bother posting it because 1) I have no idea if things will change or not, and 2) I don’t want to reveal just how powerful something could be just yet, as it’s still too early to tell and we don’t need to give fuel for other classes to whine about it.

I see quite a few solid build choices as-is. Deciding on what to take when these come out will be difficult. Good stuff Robert Gee, good stuff.

Thank you dulfy, as usual.

Tossing in my thanks and love for Robert. The guy heard us and made lots of boosts all around.

It’s on the 3rd swing of auto, and the swings are slow. So no, it’s not as bad as you think.

Shifu.4321:

Do you think this could be viable for frontline WvW? All sustain and mobility is in DS mode though, so it will be very dependent on that.

You can flash DS and activate stab, then go out of it, stab will stay. He confirmed it. I’d say it’ll be good since some of the shouts are very powerful.

THANK YOU ROBERT, THANK YOU ANET, YOU DELIVERED!

Reaper hype, I LOVE IT!

BrickFurious.7169:

Engineers also happen to be the best profession at dealing with immobilized:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Immobilized

Look at the “skills that removed immobilized” section, engi skills make up nearly half of them. Plus engi’s have access to leg mods and cloaking device which are also immob counters. So unless the counter you’re suggesting is “roll an engi”, why are you talking about rocket boots? Most professions do not have easy on-demand access to immob-specific condi clear.

As for blocking/reflecting, wells are unblockable and un-reflectable. And you can only dodge through a well that’s already on the ground before you get there; if it gets dropped on top of you you’re gonna get hit by it. And once you’re immobilized, you can’t dodge.

Which leaves general condi clear as the only reliable counter, and if you have other conditions on you it’s not guaranteed you’ll be able to remove the immobilize. If the enemy team has a lot of necros spamming immobilizing venom wells, you have to understand how it can be extraordinarily hard for professions other than engi to counter them.

+1, nicely said.

Listening to them, you can tell Guardian is their baby. These guys know the Guardian class inside out, and Guardians have been and probably always will be the most important class in this game. Ridiculous.

HeadCrowned.6834:

I never managed to find an axe build that was more effective than a dagger build. The small range increase compared to the dagger just isn’t enough to compensate. It would need the same range as a mesmer GS for example.

600 range in WvW often effectively allows you to burst someone down without stepping into the red circles of death. It makes a pretty big difference. Also one of the duties for ranged is to finish downies so they don’t rally, and I find axe a pretty effective weapon for that.

Dagger is definitely superior if you’re solo roaming or expecting to do 1 v 1’s. But axe do a good job in group/zerg gameplay in WvW, along with staff. Since you have to be within 900 range to drop wells, you really aren’t that far from 600 range. But that’s a huge difference from being within melee range, where you’ll likely be stepping in some really nasty stuff.

Tman.6349:

When you build a game around active combat/defense and twitch reflexes with the philosophy of removing the classic Trinity model, a red flag should go off in the balance teams’ mind when some Dev has the great idea that a profession should “soak up hits”. Especially with the stat/trait system we have. You’re, pretty much, bound to end up with something that is going to be nearly god-like or nearly useless, w/o much room for error in between.

Yup, this is a game of active dodge, twitch reflex combat. Yet they designed a class that lacks mobility/escapes, and they want this class to get hit. The design philosophy of the class simply does not fit the gameplay design. It’s the root of issues with necros, and why they have a hard time finding that balance as it always swings from either overpowered or underpowered.

Same difficulties are seen with conditions vs cleanses. You either end up with a game with too much conditions, and everybody stacks conditions everywhere. Or you end up with a game with too much cleanses, and conditions mean little to nothing. In WvW, there’s too much cleanse for condi necros to function properly. However, in solo situations, condi necros do better but not still not well enough.

Yup if they don’t make unyielding blast baseline I’ll be taking something else when the revamp occurs. We have better ways to stack vuln and piercing mechanic is a pain in the rear to execute in the fluid WvW. Not worthy of a trait now that there are newly combined soul marks & speed of shadows, both of which would be more useful than unyielding blast at its current form.

Axe/focus or Axe/warhorn are great for group/zerg WvW gameplay. You pick axe over dagger because of the range issue. Dagger is great when you can get within melee range and have a nice 1 vs 1. But in group/zerg WvW gameplay, you aren’t going to find many 1 vs 1, and you definitely won’t find too many melee range opportunities.

People always compare dagger to axe, and it’s like no duh, dagger does better auto attack damage. If I was solo roaming on a power build, I would definitely take dagger over axe. But in group/zerg gameplay, axe is simply the better choice for the extra range, the aoe (axe 3), and small ranged burst (axe 2).

As for focus or warhorn, take focus if you want a slight dps increase and be a tad more offensive. Take warhorn for more defensive gameplay, and reliable swiftness + life force regen.

But as noted above you’ll be using staff a lot in WvW due to 1200 range aoe. So make sure you have staff as a swap.

Excellent article, one that The Gates Assassin should link to the necro devs.

Tainted Shackles could be a decent skill if the immob on it lasted longer. Compare it to any other classes with access to immob, the duration is a joke that merely pauses someone for a fraction of a second when it hits. I use Tainted Shackles in WvW for the aoe exploding damage but it’s not reliable as people have to stay within 600 range of me for 4 seconds. On top of it all, this weak skill has way too long of a refresh timer for something that binds for a second and deals little damage.

Comparing all that to other classes and the kind of immob and aoe damage/conditions other classes could apply, you see how weak the skill really is.

The writer is also correct in that lifetransfer really should add more life force than it does. If it’s utilized for both a defensive and offensive aoe spike skill when we’re in nose deep, since the devs want us to get hit by design, then it should replenish more life force.

L Step.8659:

People who think venomshare in wvw is fine as it is clearly just have not played any competent groups. And yes it’s the immobilize venom that’s the problem, but it doesn’t have to be tied with just wells. The thief will share it with 5 others, and that’s 25 attacks that will cause immobilize, you clear one and it’s another immediately reapplied, you’re going to get caught, there’s no way to possibly out cleanse it. It can be a boring pirate fight and will never evolve to a fun strategic fight because the guild getting immob spammed will never push. It’s just suicide.

So no, it needs fixed. Unless people think 20-40 pulsing immobilizes is fine. I’ve literally seen a guild group run 3 venomshare thieves before, who thinks that’s fun to play or fight? There’s a reason GvG is dying, and it’s a lot more of the player’s fault than ANET’s.

+1, my personal views are no cc should be so easily spammed, stacked, and reapplied. It’s not good for the health of the game. Other MMO’s deal with these easy to apply and spammed cc’s with diminishing returns, where the effects on you last shorter and shorter until you gain a temporary immunity to said cc’s. This game does it the other way around, there’s no diminishing returns, you don’t gain immunity to immob, it is simply not as fun.

I’m a necro, I’ll continue to play WvW and do the best I can. I’ll live with it if things are left as-is. But understand people complaining about it are not just classes this affects the most. Most Commanders I know are very vocal about it, they despise this. Is this considered “tactic” just as pin sniping is considered a “tactic”? Sure. But these things break up fights, they don’t encourage them. Sometimes there are things not healthy for the game, and we as players have to be honest with ourselves and admit to it first before devs will even take a look at it. It may be fun to cheese a win sometimes, but I think most people would rather have a good, long, hard fight without the cheese. It’s afterall how WvW have survived this long, because most of us want good fights, not cheese victories.

I would be fine with life blast as-is if they simply take away the damage reduction based on range. That’s just a dumb restriction on a slow, easy to dodge/interrupt cast.

Biggest problem with Death Shroud is that we start with no life force. If they want to make such a big deal about this 2 health pool thing, then they need to give us a full bar to start the fight with. Seriously, marks need to regen life force as baseline already. And some other life force regen methods need to not be so easily evaded.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Raising the cap for the home BL isn’t fair for the other 2 servers.

Since when is 2v1 or fake queues fair? Let’s be real they aren’t going to go through all that just to check if someone’s afk or have multiple accounts. No MMO’s hire GM’s to do that. If someone isn’t hacking or cheating, don’t expect them to get banned or removed.

This was bound to happen sooner or later, cheap sales just made it easier & cheaper to do it. Too often there’s a fake queue, we all see it, and it’s very annoying. A lot of the times the commander would rally most everybody up and have only 25-30 players on pin. This is without any other guilds running tagless on the map. You can’t really defend a garrison against 2 map blobs with that number. It’s also impossible to get guilds willing to port in to help because they know 80% of their guild won’t get in.

One solution I can think of is since you’re always facing 2v1 on home BL, I think the home server should get an advantage in map cap. So let’s just assume map cap is at 85 right now, on your home BL the home server should have a map cap of 110. So it would essentially be 110 vs 85 vs 85. In any 2v1 situation you’ll still be outnumbered, but the extra map slots should help the home server get some guilds in to help. You would leave EBG at 85v85v85 of course.

I don’t think there’s a way to stop people from doing what they’re doing, nor is Anet going to go ban people for it. So raising the home BL map cap for the home server is about the only solution I can think of.

Power builds suck at condi removal. What kills me more than anything in WvW is perma immob spam. Seriously, if there’s ever a need for diminishing returns in this game, or “resistance”, immob is it. With the new revamp, there will be massive amounts of venomshare. Immob will get worse for everybody, and it won’t be fun. And I don’t care how many hp pools Anet thinks we have, nothing saves us when we can’t move on a class that has bad mobility & escapes in the first place.

I mean really, for a class that doesn’t get escapes and lack mobility, Death Shroud should by all means be immune to immob.

Sorry, I just really hate immob spam in WvW.

The new proposed trait just makes no sense. The mastery should’ve increased axe range to 900, and made axe 1 cleave.

Gryph.8237:

Do you think we will receive some dev comments and or interaction? It would be nice to assuage some of our concerns with some interaction. I mean it just would be nice to have the devs discuss some of the great ideas mentioned in these forums directly with the community.

Totally agree. I mean we’re all tossing out ideas, suggestions, talking about our dislikes and such. But truth is, we have no idea what the dev’s vision about this class is. I would like to find out from Robert, just exactly how he thinks this class should perform. What specs he thinks we should be running and how well we should expect to perform in PvE, sPvP, and WvW.

It’s one thing for someone to say yeah, they’re reading and listening. It’s another to actually know what the dev in charge of this class is thinking, what his visions for necromancers are, and where he thinks we should fit in.

From the live stream it’s clear Robert knows mesmers inside out. It was quite impressive actually listening him talk about mesmers, because mesmers are one of the more complicated class to master & play well. I didn’t get the same vibe when listening to him talk about necros. I do believe he’s the right guy for the job, necromancers are also one of the more interesting classes to play. If he can get mesmers right, he can probably get necros right. But would be nice to get interaction from him to find out what he thinks about some of the ideas being tossed around.

I mean I’m not even reading this thread anymore because ideas are aplenty, some of these ideas aren’t even new, they’ve been tossed around before. What we really need is to find out what the devs want from this class and how they think this class should perform.

As a power necro who plays strictly WvW group/zerg gameplay, I’ll give my feedback with regards to WvW gameplay with power necros only. First, thank you for the subtle but nice boosts.

-Spite minors are an across the line boosts to power necros. They’re small but nice changes.
-Old spiteful talisman becoming baseline is awesome, since I already use axe/focus in large scale WvW combat, increased range on focus is a nice change.
-The merged Vital Persistence is also nice, it’ll help necros that utilize death shrouds often.
-Wells use ground targeting by default, frees up yet another trait I had to take being a power necro in WvW. Thank you.

Now, some power necros are disappointed because we’ll essentially be taking the same traits after the revamp. Here are what I currently take:

Reaper’s Might
Chill of Death
Close to Death
Vital Persistence
Unyielding Blast
Death Perception

These 6 traits taking up 2 trait lines are essentially the same aside from Vital Persistence, and most power necros in WvW will be taking these before and after the revamp. It’s kind of boring to be taking the same things, so it doesn’t feel like we’re getting as big of a boost as some other classes. Some classes are getting some totally new, cool, powerful skills. But to be fair, we get to pick a new grandmaster after the revamp. So no matter how people spin it, power necros are definitely going to get stronger.

My criticism/suggestions:

-Soul Marks, you’ve taken staff recharge reduction out of death magic (the trait I likely will take after revamp), and put it in Soul Reaping. Soul Reaping is too overloaded, it contains too many essentials to power necros in WvW. I would like Soul Marks merged with Greater Marks. There’s no reason they should be separated for a weapon enhancing trait. There’s also no reason why marks shouldn’t generate lifeforce by default anyway.

-Shrouded Removal, if you want to make necros more useful in groups (and this is one of the weaknesses to necros), make Shrouded Removal remove a condition on the necro and 5 allies. This will make necros more group friendly all around. That or if stuck as a solo, selfish trait, it should remove at least 2 conditions.

-One of the common complaints is the lack of a good Grandmaster choices for power necros outside of Spite and Soul Reaping. If you take Spiteful Spirit and swap it to another trait line (like death magic for an example), I would gladly take that as a grandmaster. Unholy Feast is useful in WvW, and it’s a trait that works directly with death shroud. But outside of that, there’s really no good power necro grandmaster choices since you overloaded spite & soul reaping.

-I keep waiting for Axe Training to get better so I would take it. You’ve not made it better, but nerfed it. Please rethink this one. You know what would make Axe Training sexy? Give it 15-20% axe damage boost, and make axe 1 cleave.

-I think Unyielding Blast should shorten the cast time of life blast. Life blast cast time is just too long. To easily dodged in PvP/WvW, and too easily affected by terrain.

I think it’d be fair and not overpowering. It would be like how they made pew pew rangers baseline (which is ridiculous imo), then on top of it gave them a trait that reduce skill recharge by 66% upon weapon swap (which just means more rapid fire bs). Those are some darn earth shattering changes and good trait synergy. Necros got nothing close to it.

Making terror baseline would be nice. This way it would have good trait synergy with master of terror. It’d then come close to what they did for other classes.

Pirate ship meta is fun and all, but most successful zergs still have a strong melee train. One of the weaknesses to the pirate ship is facing multiple drivers. Pirate ships are best when they can focus aoe & cc in one spot, such as a choke point or the spot where melee train pushes through. When you have more than 1 driver, and you see melee trains coming at you from different directions, that’s when the ship tends to sink.

A strong melee train with a competent driver, and good ranged support, are still the best way to fight in WvW. Pirate ship is fun and works when you lack meat, they’re also fun when you’re running a chill raid where people just kinda yolo around. But let’s not kid ourselves, pirate ship meta isn’t always the best way or the only way to run your zerg/groups out there. It’s merely one out of many options, and certainly not the best option now that most people have gotten used to the new stab changes.

Today is reset day, most people won’t be playing until reset comes in a couple of hours. But if you’re on JQ, yes there are tons of WvW activity. Today is just a bad day to judge.

Generally Thursday nights and Friday before reset time have the lowest WvW activities. People tend to rest up for Friday evening reset. You’ll see tons of WvW activities starting from Friday reset, throughout weekends, and last usually until Tuesday or Wednesday.

I like what I saw, but then I’m a power necro.

Totally agree that all classes should be made viable and valuable in PvE. I don’t do PvE, but it is their money maker and there’s a large population that enjoys PvE aspect of the game. No class should be bad in PvE period. It’s one thing for a particular spec to be lackluster in PvE, it’s quite another in necro’s case where all specs are pretty much bad all around.

Open field siege is like bringing a gun to a knife fight, that’s kind of how people view it and feel about it. Now of course, if you’re being greatly outnumbered, and fighting a constant 2 servers vs 1 scenario, then hey I think anything goes. But if it’s a 1 server vs 1 server open field, fairly even numbered zergs, or maybe even if you’re slightly outnumbered, then people expect a good fight without having to deal with siege. It’s common courtesy, you give it your best, win or lose, at least you know you fought without using open field siege. When people siege a keep/tower, they expect to see siege. But when people fight in the open, they expect a fight without siege.

If we can just encourage more people to do the same, it can be really fun when you duke it out in the open with a fairly even numbered group. Some open field fights are really intense without siege involved, try it sometime.

The fact that you can double dodge out of most circles make it fairly balanced. Without them, there would be no way to hold a choke. I mean how exactly do you propose to stop or hinder a solid melee train?

The pirate ship meta is fun to play around in sometimes, it’s fun to joke about it, but truth is a solid melee train is still hard to stop. It’s even worse when a pirate ship meta raid goes up against 2 drivers with melee trains, coming at you from different locations. The red circles that really hurt you have timers & cooldowns, they aren’t up all the time. They’re also most effective when concentrated. But that’s part of the game, the whole timing thing, making your enemies burn their cooldowns, flanking tactics, know when to commit, etc..

It’s good to know there are some basics to WvW that separates players. If you aren’t on your toes and stand in the red stuff too long, you’ll pay for it. It’s really WvW 101, don’t stand in red circles…something new WvW players learn quickly.

spoj.9672:

But if i was to handpick every class in my zerg i would have no problem excluding necros in favour of more eles. GWE meta. :>

That would be a mistake honestly. Eles aoe damage takes a long time to wind up, they don’t have the pop that power necros do when you need the well bombs. They are best at playing support, which is what they’re needed for in GWEN meta. Their cc and water are very much essential to any ZvZ. Where as necros are needed for their WoC and aoe spike damage. Don’t get me wrong, ele is my 2nd fav class, they add a good amount of damage out there. But their role is playing support first, damage second.

You really aren’t supposed to compare eles to necros as they serve different roles, and both are very much needed in WvW large scale combat. But really, given similar size zergs, the side that doesn’t utilize a good amount of power necros will have a very hard time busting the melee train.

spoj.9672:

Its not because they are too good so they get focused. Its because they are too easy to focus and lock down and not good enough to do anything about it themselves.

That’s a classic glass half-empty thinking. Yes it’s true necros get focused on because they lack mobility and escapes. Nobody disagrees with this point, I think we all know that’s one of the biggest issues with necros in PvP. But we all know what power necros are capable of if left unchecked.

It’s one of the reasons even in ZvZ I look for necros to down, because I know what they can do to my zerg if left unchecked. The current meta calls for at least 5-6 necros in a zerg/group fight or there’s little chance you’ll win an open field battle.

Unfortunately in smaller scale organized PvP, you have more chance to prioritize your targets (you have to pretty much). You don’t want to leave necros alone, and yes they are an easy target to focus down due to lack of escapes, so they make prime targets.

Problem with power necros in pvp is that we are too good, so we get focused on in any organized guild vs guild. And unfortunately the lack of mobility & escapes is killing us here. Too good being the same reason why we’re in the current GWEN meta, except in WvW zergs & blobs it’s harder to get singled out.

Necros are full of irony, which I find it funny.

Power necros are a part of the current meta and very much needed in any group or large scale WvW combat. That alone makes them not the worst class ingame, because there are other classes that get shunned more in WvW.

Now if you’re talking solo roaming or spvp, that’s something different entirely. And the problem with condi builds have to do with the way the game is designed. It’s kind of a game-wide problem, condi necros just have it worse due to the lack of mobility. Condis are too easily spread, and they’re therefore too easily cleansed. Tip the scale one way, you would have nothing but condi builds. Tip the scale the other way, you have what it is right now.

One thing I’ve learned from GW2 is that classes are their own design, they don’t go by traditional rules or what so & so class “should” be. When I first started I played ele, and I initially thought it was going to be played like wizards & mages from other MMO’s. Not the case, eles in GW2 are very unique and plays nothing like any wizards or mages from other games. The same goes for necros really. Conditions as a whole are quite weak in this game, it isn’t just a necro problem though, it’s the design path they’ve chosen. Necros can definitely use some boosts, but they aren’t the worst class unless you play PvE.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

JQ runs a lot of open field siege tactics. They have large numbers of coordinated zergs that take the frontlines, while Ballista and AC cover their flanks.

The server that uses most open field siege is TC, by far. Their nickname is Arrowcart Coast for a reason. I think players always think their servers are perfect angels but truth is all 3 servers in T1 use siege when they don’t need to. Unfortunately a lot of times it’s random pugs that drop these siege and random pugs that waste supplies building them up. Most commanders on JQ absolutely hate open field siege. They yell at people for dropping them, but random pugs do anyway.

For OP, you really won’t find honest recommendations on these forums because people always praise the server they play on. Look at the server rankings and pick from a server in T1/T2 to be safe (safe as in making sure WvW activities are high). There are sites you can go on that shows you up to date maps so you can observe during NA or whatever your timezone is, and see who’s doing well and who isn’t.

Things that’ll help with tower defense:

-Good scouting
-Siege disablers
-Door trebs
-Arrow carts
-Ballista to destroy enemy siege
-Knowing who to contact and having commanders willing to respond to calls

There are plenty of options for you when it comes to tower defense. But sometimes if you’ve got a paper tower, no siege up, and lacking players to respond to rallying calls, your server may decide it’s best to just let it go. It’s a valid tactic because their time may be better spent taking something else that’s worth more.

T1 EBG 3-way didn’t have skill lag today. So far it has been enjoyable. Too bad the map cap has been lowered, but hopefully you guys can come up with a solution and raise the cap once again.

Double teaming is an unfortunate, unavoidable side effect to the tri-realm setup, dating back to when DAOC invented RvR. The design was always to allow the 2 lesser realms to band temporary alliance to fight back the dominant realm. But as DAOC (and GW2) have shown us, that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes you have 2 realms/servers being competitive, while the 3rd simply play as opportunists and hit what would benefit them the most at the time. Other times you have 1 dominant server, and the 3rd place server would rather side with the dominant server to fight for 2nd place. Server politics and opportunities all play a part in this tri-realm design resulting into double teaming.

It works just like real life really. If you take 3 countries, tell them to war each other, you can just imagine the politics that play into who fights who, who advances where, who buttjams the other, etc.. There will undoubtedly be double teaming.

Hopefully OP hopped on JQ and saw we also had queues on all maps. This was a direct result of Anet tweaking the map cap down. It was rather annoying because we only had 2 active commanders working 2 maps, 1 had a map blob, the other had only 20’ish. This was around 6pm pst.

How many commanders did you have, how many map blobs were you running?

Coldtart.4785:

I’ve been directly focused by multiple spite signet necros in a single fight before and barely even noticed it. Condi is absolutely useless.

+1, had necros target me with spite, often I don’t even bother to cleanse/transfer it. I do love it though when I need a heal and some necro tag me with signet of spite…oh look, consume conditions, extra heals, thank you!

Condis are pathetically weak for ZvZ. There are cleanses everywhere, cleanses where you don’t even want to be cleansed. I understand condis can be useful in smaller scale fights, GvG for an example, or solo roaming. But ZvZ it’s very much useless.

I used to be condi quite awhile back, thought I was useful and all. But after switching to power, I never looked back. I was ashamed actually once I realized how much I was not helping in ZvZ fights as condi. Bottom line is necros fit the meta for their spike aoe damage, boon stripping, and fear wall. Blobs need us for spike damage. The zerg that often loses are the side that either don’t have many necros, or have too many condi necros as opposed to power.

If you want to be useful in a zerg, play power necro. If you want to pretend to be useful for a zerg, go ahead and roll condi

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

Yo – turns out I can temp move myself into Blackgate and experience the lag level for myself! Don’t worry – I won’t actually play for points. I’m “Asuradly So”, a little Asura engi in-game hanging at Blackgate Hill, if you want to say “hi”.

Of course, now I have forums, graphs, and actual game to watch at the same time. Should be interesting! I think I need more monitors.

Sweet. Everybody, time to all crash BGBL. Let’s give this cool tech guy a heck of a lag experience.

By the way, thanks for spending the time to dig into this problem. I’m glad for one, we no longer have to argue about whether there is skill lag issues or not, the tech guy admit to it. Forum posters sure wasted a lot of time arguing about it. Secondly, finally someone explaining what happened, admit to a patch that fixed something but broke it for WvW.

Acknowledgement and communication is the first step to getting something resolved. Now that Anet admit to it, explained a bit about what happened, I think we can all breath better and let them work on it. Hopefully you can find out the root of problems soon! Thanks again for spending the time on the weekend to check this out.

I usually play long hours on reset nights. But I called it early tonight because the lag made the game simply unplayable. As a caster the skill lag makes the game simply not fun at all.

Had large 2-way blob fight between JQ & TC in EBG, everything was fine. Then as soon as BG joined in, characters started to warp, skills would lag by 5-10 seconds. It was ridiculous, made it totally not fun. Something’s really wrong with the game and Anet needs to do whatever they can to fix it.

I have friends that aren’t logging in anymore because they don’t want to deal with it. Large scale battles is an important part of GW2’s WvW. It’s not fun having to take your whole zerg and run away from a 3-way because you can’t use your skills properly.

A lot depends on whether you want solo roam WvW, small group GvG, or large scale zerg/blob combat. Which are you looking to do?

If you’re shooting for a hybrid support build where you focus on being pesky by applying chill, weakness, etc.. then the build works. But you do lose out on raw damage, such as dropping wells, going into DS and having 100% crit chance, watching your wells, marks, and any aoe you do crit like mother. Marks really don’t do good damage, it’s used mostly for utility.

My recommendation is if you want to be condi, go full on condi. Or if you want to be power, go full on power. Being half/half makes it so you don’t bomb as hard as full power necros do, and you aren’t as adequate at condi pressure as a full condimancer.

Because you went with Death Magic rather than Soul Reaping, you’re stacking precision and crit chance. This means you’re losing out on very useful weapon sigils such as fire, force, and air. You also lose out on +5% damage when above 50% lifeforce that Soul Reaping offers. In my opinion you lose out too much and didn’t gain enough to make you as useful as a full powermancer, or a full condimancer.

Good patch, I’m sure this helps those doing sPvP. Unfortunately losing 50% crit chance is too much for this to be useful for WvW, where our lack of mobility continues to be the core of our problems. That and how immob/snare spam still kills me more than anything else in the world.

If you are on JQBL right now, go to Hills, tell me you don’t experience at least 3-5 second skill lag. Just had a 3-way and there was little we could do when sandwiched. Skill lag was pretty darn bad.

This is after we just had a massive JQ vs TC blobs in EBG and there was zero skill lag. Of course BG wasn’t involved in the fights. So there’s something that triggers server side lag when 3 server blobs get in close vicinity. Worst when 3 clash together at the same time.

dancingmonkey.4902:

What server are you guys on?

I was just asking in TS on JQ and everyone is telling me they are having no lag issues this evening.

There was definitely skill lag on JQ this evening. It only happens when you get into blobby situations. Two server blobs going at it would give you 1-2 sec skill lag. When you have 3 server blobs in close vicinity, you would start getting 5-10 second skill lag. If people didn’t experience it, it’s because they weren’t near the blobs.

Note that we’re talking skill lag, not just ordinary ISP, video driver, memory, computer issues lag. Skill lag are when you press your abilities, they flash, they queue, but they don’t fire off like they’re supposed to. This is all server-side, started happening when they did the stability patch.

People are suspecting it’s due to the amount of computing required with the new stab changes because this skill lag started happening with the stab patch. Anet would know, and apparently they do know and have been trying to fix it but haven’t been able to. They really need to fix this before HoT comes out. With new influx of returning players, and even more polygons and art assets from the newly designed borderlands & maps, it’s bound to get even laggier upon HoT release. So the skill lag issues really need to get fixed before HoT.

fps drop isn’t the same as skill lag. Skill lag is server-side. Always have been, and always will be.