Guild Wars 2

Allie Murdock.8152:

[…]
The sPvP forums are specifically to discuss sPvP changes, or things that affect sPvP. If you would like to discuss PvE, please use the appropriate sub-forums.

Thanks!

Just stopping by to point this out. I’m not addressing you alone, but I definitely address you along with the few ignorant and arrogant (if the cap fits…) sPvP players, who often comes up with the “sPvP forum” trump card.
About shooting the messenger…yep, it’s generally considered to be undeserved, unless that very messenger provokes the crowd. This quote here is your own statement, not others’ opinion that you simply forward to us. This is the reason why I call you personally out – while I respect your work and effort you put into keeping in touch with the sPvP community.
You guys generally make changes balance-wise based on sPvP…changes that affect the two other game modes too, namely PvE and WvW.

One of these changes (Dhuumfire) buffed the class in sPvP significantly, while it did close to nothing in WvW and PvE. I’m not gonna give a fully detailed argument here as why it is the way, it is – several arguments can be found on the Necromancer forum with all the raw data and math involved. The same can be said about Torment and in general about all the damaging conditions – while it’s most likely a significant buff to sPvP, it does close to nothing in PvE and WvW. Again, I won’t make any argument to back this up as I’d like to keep this post short – others have already done it, check out those posts.

The other sPvP change, the last one (23rd July), destroyed the sole escape mechanic that necromancers had in WvW thus making the class severely handicapped in WvW.
Anyone who says that the Spectral Armor/Walk is buffed in general is just plain wrong and refuses to see the forest from the sPvP trees. The 1s CD is a huge nerf in WvW (and I assume in PvE too – no idea, never been really into it). Again, long and detailed argument could be made, but it’s already been, no point to copy-paste them.

To stress out my original point:
Dear Allie and anyone else who shares her idea,
if you want to keep sPvP forums clean from PvE’ers and WvW’ers, make topics concerning a whole class balancing issue in the respective class’ forum (or move them there after it’s been created on the wrong subforum like you pretty much do with other classes /cough/ thief nerfs).
If it’s not possible to do, at least stop complaining about actual Necromancers taking part in the conversation rather than only those who play a few hours just to get some kind of justification to cry out for a nerf hammer.
The quote above is just simply disgustful in the current state of the events.

ps: more players play on a single Borderland from all 3 realms on a given day than playing on the tourney, that takes several days to be done with. Bear this in mind.

Kilger.5490:

glorius.1235:

Kilger.5490:

I dont want to sound like Im trolling but I thought we were fine before the patch and now I think we’re OP. But the complaints really confuse me, so maybe theres something I’m not understanding. What ev.

How much do you play WvW?

Thats all I play. I run power spec, which works really well. I’ve played half the classes and none can pressure an enemy zerg like the necro can. Perhaps it just works better for my playstyle than for other people.

When we talk about large scale WvW (~30vs30), nothing can be compared to Shroud + Walk pre-patch as in terms of survivability during an engagement.
As you mentioned, WvW necros are mostly Powermancers.

With this patch, necros lost the only appealing aspect they had: being extremely tanky in large fights
Sure, when we talk about 1-2 hits, this Armor change is a huge buff but not when it comes to AoE-rich environment and being focused fired by multiple opponents.

If we compare necros to other light classes:
- Eles are far more mobile and outdps necros on any given day. They do well at group cleansing and healing too with the water fields, that they provide on command
- Mesmers just bring way more useful utilities than a Necro will ever: portals, veils, Timewarp, Null Field

Kilger.5490:

I dont want to sound like Im trolling but I thought we were fine before the patch and now I think we’re OP. But the complaints really confuse me, so maybe theres something I’m not understanding. What ev.

How much do you play WvW?

it’s been like this for quite long now.
didn’t start on necro at release so can’t give you much info about that but been playing the class for months now.

just stopping by to say…
It’s awesome that for a tPvP tourney you actually kitten over 95% of the gaming community of the class, that is just…woah.
It’s not even sad anymore.

I’d highly suggest any mods to check the Necromancer forum too as there are some pretty detailed description about how this patch made Necros trash in a blink apart from your precious 1o1’s.

Rigel.3092:

glorius.1235:

Coming from a WvWer’s perspective…
2. “Zergers”
Death Shroud itself melts in zerg fights.

Anyone who was using DS to tank in zerg fights was not using DS correctly.

let me get this straight…
Are you saying that when a character has an entire defense mechanic based on a particular resource (Life Force), utilizing that to the fullest is actually bad defensive playstyle?
Sounds legit…

Tenderly.7019:

The amount of buffs received by Necro in the last two patches far outweighs any nerf by an immeasurable amount. And this last patch was an overall huge buff in my opinion.

So adding a completely irrelevant condition to a class thus buffing condition damage (which is capped btw – has a limit, while direct damage does not) is considered to be such a boost that anything could happen, it still wouldn’t outweigh it? Woah…

as for the damage mitigation:
Let’s not talk about the jumpy thing, I don’t feel like going into it, explained in several posts in other topics (for example here)
But let me talk about damage mitigation in general in DS

Death Shroud itself melts in zerg fights. It did pre-patch, it does now. I don’t care if you’ve fixed a bug and tanks to that we have more effective HP in DS. Extra HP is only extra HP in the end of the day, not a mitigating/evading mechanic like channeled blocks/aegis/invuln./mist form/etc.
The only valid way for a necro to get his own invuln. or at least something close to that was Spectral Armor/Walk combined with DS.
It still heavily limited our skill cap, since we were stuck in Death Shroud, but at least we could maintain our LF pool, which was decent enough. Bear in mind though, that we had no access to any kind of buff/heal/regen. in this form which made it a bad alternative compared to the aforementioned mitigation methods. But still, an alternative…
Now you even took that away with the implemented internal cooldown on Walk/Armor. The maximum amount of Life Force gaining is 48% with Armor (68% if traited for longer duration). That’s without calculating in the damage taken in Death Shroud.

Now, let’s do a little bit of math here…
(I’ll call LF “effective HP” from now on, it pretty much works that way)

Based on this post, I’ll calculate with 50k effective HP in DS assuming the necro has 25k normally, which is an average value.
In this case 48% LF gain (let’s round it up to 50 for the sake of simplicity) means ~25k effective HP. That is ~25k in 6 seconds >> ~4.2k per second.
Now, add natural degeneration (that’s ~2k effective HP if not traited) which makes it only 2.2k effective HP gain per second.
What it means is, that the moment you take more than 2.2k damage per second this kind of effective HP regen. is as good as nothing and you will keep melting since HP -like I said above- is only HP.

This is the very reason why we don’t see many sPvPers/1v1ers complaining and they don’t get how big this nerf really is. While this scenario in sPvP/1o1 is not likely, it happens quite often in WvW/PvE.

And for those who get stuck at the argument that says “DS’s just got recently buffed by fixing the damage bug, it is OP now” I could only give a bitter laugh.
Try it against multiple opponents under focused fire…

I just don’t understand why it couldn’t stay the way it was before. Pre-patch I was perfectly satisfied with this kind of escape mechanic, talking about WvW (as I’m mainly focused on that).
Sure, jumping off cliffs and thus escaping from enemy zergs may seem a radical solution, but all it did that made us possible to jump out from cheesy situations.
Every other class has not just one, but several valid way when it comes to escaping.
- Thieves have stealth, several gap closers that can be used as openers as well (dagger, sword, shortbow, shadow step) and general high mobility. I might even say it’s ok, it comes with the nature of the class.
- Mesmers have blink as gap opener, portal, invis-mass invis and invuln. via Distortion. I might say ok for that too, for a squishy class like mesmer, it’s needed to have such escape abilities.
- Eles have mist form and generally are one of the most mobile characters. Perma swiftness + dagger offhand = perfect roamer.
- Warriors have several sources of stability, condition cleanse, perma swiftness and greatsword. Needless to explain further.
- Engies have perma swiftness, massive amount of protection, mini
- Rangers have stability, swiftness, leap, generally considered a quite mobile class
- Guardians have stability, block/aegis, leaps. But yeah, Guardians are maybe the least mobile classes amongst the ones I named. They balance it with extreme tank abilities.

Necros had only one way and now it’s taken away from them. Simply because people refused to think and kept repeating the “mantra” that if a character falls from a certain height it should always take damage, no matter what. Just because other classes couldn’t do it, necros shouldn’t either.
Based on the same logic, the whole necro community could start heavily arguing about stealth, blocks, etc. I could keep going on.
Just because something was unique for a class, the rest of the community and thus ANet considered it to be not legit.

Heck, if something, this escape mechanic, we used to have gave even less choice for us. It was only about jumping and that’s it, end of story. No chance to re-engage, to reposition or to shadow enemy zergs, you took the jump and that put an end to the situation.
Compared to this, stealth itself has the opportunity of re-engaging just like the basic high mobility of certain classes and these mechanics have several other advantages compared to that “Kamikaze jump”.

The jump is one nerf, one can get over it.
But then comes the Spectral Armor/Walk + DS combination nerf, which cuts the rope in my case.
Pre-patch it was possible for a necro to mimic some kind of invulnerability with this combination, thus giving us a semi-real damage mitigating method. It was still not perfect – for example against high damage one-hit skills (i.e backstab) it was still not that good (you lost severe amount of LF >> effective HP and you had to rebuild it), but under focused fire from multiple opponents, it did the job.
I don’t even know why thieves in the first place was mad and considered this mechanic to be OP. Just because one-shot stabbers couldn’t shine anymore?
If I may, I’d point out that it required extreme knowledge and situational awareness to use DS for the aforementioned purpose. You had to be perfectly aware of your environment and what your opponent was about to do to catch that second where the Thief couldn’t anymore modify his attack thus resulting in a failed stab. This was not an easy move to pull off.
If this one-hit engagement was “unsuccessful” for the thief, he could still re-engage whenever he felt it safe. LF is burnt, steal the fear from the necro, use it while revealed ends, start from the beginning with now having a serious advantage (no LF on the necro).

But to answer the OP; the fix about the increased damage taken in DS is good when it comes to high damage one-hit skills. Give us back our “homemade” invuln. (i.e. remove the icd from Spectral Walk/Armor) so Death Shroud could once again function as a real defensive mechanic.

(just a short note to “offensive mitigations”: it’s one thing that they could be completely neglected by defensive mitigation skills, but hell, they could even convert them to their advantage, while there is no such thing possible backwards – you can convert a condition to a boon, but you can’t do anything with block/invuln./reflect/aegis/etc.)

Edit: Ah, War pretty much said the same

cause I’ll be saving my Walk for this specific moment, right?
A skill with 48s cd (if traited), our basic Speed buff and stun break.
Sure…

Thedenofsin.7340:

For the first time I feel like I can use the staff without having to trait it.

You do realize that from now on you have to spend 20 points to get the “unblockable” trait that actually made staff cool, right?
Guess you haven’t come across many heavy trains in WvW so far.

Dand.8231:

Well I did preface it with saying I dont main necro ^^

I know, that’s why I explained it further. I didn’t mean to be offensive in any way, sorry if I was.

Ciborio.1864:

You don’t play WvW, right?
You can’t use marks without “unblockable” trait and now you have to spend 20 points instead of 10 just for that, which is a pretty big deal for me.

^This

Coming from a WvWer’s perspective…

The end of the Kamikaze era is just one thing. Let’s bring up some pre-staged situations…

1. Roamers
You like small groups and small fights where skill lag does not interfere and you can bring it all on. You even have your 5-10 man group, everything is perfect. But then the zerg is coming…
What kind of tools do the professions have to make an escape attempt?
- thief: stealth + shadow step + shortbow
- guardian: stability + line of warding + block + aegis
- warrior: excellent mobility + stability + block
- ranger: stability + swiftness + leaps
- mesmer: invis + clones + portal + blink
- elementalist: extremely good mobility + static field + stunning aura + mist form
- engineer: mini + heavy CC + perma swiftness

…just a few ways to bring up. Now what did necro have pre-patch?
Erm…pop Walk/Armor, try to survive, find a cliff and jump. We had no real source of stability, no leap at all and we are the least mobile class in the game. No vigor, nor increased endurance regen.
With the recent patch, it means a guaranteed wipe for a roaming necro if he meets the enemy zerg.

2. “Zergers”
Death Shroud itself melts in zerg fights. It did pre-patch, it does now. I don’t care if you’ve fixed a bug and thanks to that we have more effective HP in DS. Extra HP is only extra HP in the end of the day, not a mitigating/evading mechanic like channeled blocks/aegis/invuln./mist form/etc.
The only valid way for a necro to get his own invuln. or at least something close to that was Spectral Armor/Walk combined with DS.
It still heavily limited our skill cap, since we were stuck in Death Shroud, but at least we could maintain our LF pool, which was decent enough. Bear in mind though, that we had no access to any kind of buff/heal/regen. No weapon swaps, therefore no on-swap sigils either in this form, which made it a bad alternative compared to the aforementioned mitigation methods. But still, an alternative…
Now you even took that away with the implemented internal cooldown on Walk/Armor. The maximum amount of Life Force gaining is 48% with Armor (68% if traited for longer duration). That’s without calculating in the damage taken in Death Shroud.

Now, let’s do a little bit of math here…
(I’ll call LF “effective HP” from now on, it pretty much works that way)

Based on this post, I’ll calculate with 50k effective HP in DS assuming the necro has 25k normally, which is an average value.
In this case 48% LF gain (let’s round it up to 50 for the sake of simplicity) means ~25k effective HP. That is ~25k in 6 seconds >> ~4.2k per second.
Now, add natural degeneration (that’s ~2k effective HP if not traited) which makes it only 2.2k effective HP gain per second.
What it means is, that the moment you take more than 2.2k damage per second this kind of effective HP regen. is as good as nothing and you will keep melting since HP -like I said above- is only HP.

This is the very reason why we don’t see many sPvPers/1v1ers complaining and they don’t get how big this nerf really is. While this scenario in sPvP/1o1 is not likely, it happens quite often in WvW/PvE.

I’ve accepted a long time ago, that necro is not and most likely will not be on pair with the “big guns”. Fine by me – I said – at least I’m tanky and can survive most of the crap you throw at me. I may not be strong in terms of damage dealing but I can be hell of an annoyance and you won’t get rid of me (at least not by killing me).

And for those who say Necros should focus on condition damage: ever tried running condition build against an organized group on large scale WvW? Conditions need time to kick in and that’s exactly what they don’t have. They get flipped/stripped in seconds and thus countered and ripped from their full potential. Not to mntion the whole “capped-part” that makes condition damage a limited source of damage.
Any decent WvW guild/group runs a decent condition cleanse composition, anyone who plays WvW competitively knows that. Arguments that claims that Necro should be all about condition damage only shows that the person have minimal on no knowledge at all about the WvW meta.

Of course, if sPvP players can’t realize the fact (or rather couldn’t – past tense), that it is (was) the necro’s own invuln. mechanic and don’t (didn’t) do the same what any competent player would do with any other invuln. skill (i.e. let it run out and try to keep the player out of game or focus on others), it’s understandable that they consider (or rather considered) it OP.

Dand.8231:

I dont main a necro but the problem as I see it, is that if DS is buffed for WvW/PvE it becomes OP in sPvP.

With all due respect, this is a false logic.
The aforementioned method is only viable under heavy fire and is only good for surviving, nothing else. The necro sitting in DS can’t do much anyway – no utilities, no weapon sets therefore no on-swap sigils, etc.
This is an entirely defensive mechanic and if the necro is not under heavy fire, natural degen. will eat his LF up anyway.

Of course, if sPvP players can’t realize the fact (or rather couldn’t – past tense), that it is (was) the necro’s own invuln. mechanic and don’t (didn’t) do the same what they would do with any other invuln. skill (i.e. let it run out and try to keep the player out of game via heavy CCs), it’s understandable that they consider (or rather considered) it OP.

Coming from a WvWer’s perspective…

The end of the Kamikaze era is just one thing. Let’s bring up some pre-staged situations…

1. Roamers
You like small groups and small fights where skill lag does not interfere and you can bring it all on. You even have your 5-10 man group, everything is perfect. But then the zerg is coming…
What kind of tools do the professions have to make an escape attempt?
- thief: stealth + shadow step + shortbow
- guardian: stability + line of warding + block + aegis
- warrior: excellent mobility + stability + block
- ranger: stability + swiftness + leaps
- mesmer: invis + clones + portal + blink
- elementalist: extremely good mobility + static field + stunning aura + mist form
- engineer: mini + heavy CC

…just a few ways to bring up. Now what did necro have pre-patch?
Erm…pop Walk/Armor, try to survive, find a cliff and jump. We had no real source of stability, no leap at all and we are the least mobile class in the game. No vigor, nor increased endurance regen.
With the recent patch, it means a guaranteed wipe for a roaming necro if he meets the enemy zerg.

2. “Zergers”
Death Shroud itself melts in zerg fights. It did pre-patch, it does now. I don’t care if you’ve fixed a bug and tanks to that we have more effective HP in DS. Extra HP is only extra HP in the end of the day, not a mitigating/evading mechanic like channeled blocks/aegis/invuln./mist form/etc.
The only valid way for a necro to get his own invuln. or at least something close to that was Spectral Armor/Walk combined with DS.
It still heavily limited our skill cap, since we were stuck in Death Shroud, but at least we could maintain our LF pool, which was decent enough. Bear in mind though, that we had no access to any kind of buff/heal/regen. in this form which made it a bad alternative compared to the aforementioned mitigation methods. But still, an alternative…
Now you even took that away with the implemented internal cooldown on Walk/Armor. The maximum amount of Life Force gaining is 48% with Armor (68% if traited for longer duration). That’s without calculating in the damage taken in Death Shroud.

Now, let’s do a little bit of math here…
(I’ll call LF “effective HP” from now on, it pretty much works that way)

Based on this post, I’ll calculate with 50k effective HP in DS assuming the necro has 25k normally, which is an average value.
In this case 48% LF gain (let’s round it up to 50 for the sake of simplicity) means ~25k effective HP. That is ~25k in 6 seconds >> ~4.2k per second.
Now, add natural degeneration (that’s ~2k effective HP if not traited) which makes it only 2.2k effective HP gain per second.
What it means is, that the moment you take more than 2.2k damage per second this kind of effective HP regen. is as good as nothing and you will keep melting since HP -like I said above- is only HP.

This is the very reason why we don’t see many sPvPers/1v1ers complaining and they don’t get how big this nerf really is. While this scenario in sPvP/1o1 is not likely, it happens quite often in WvW/PvE.

I’ve accepted a long time ago, that necro is not and most likely will not be part of the “big guns”. Fine by me – I said – at least, I’m tanky and can survive most of the crap you throw at me. I may not be strong in terms of damage dealing but I can be hell of an annoyance and you won’t get rid of me (at least not by killing me).

And for those who say Necros should focus on condition damage: ever tried running condition build against an organized group on large scale WvW? Conditions need time to kick in and that’s exactly what they don’t have. They get flipped/stripped in seconds and thus countered and ripped from their full potential.
Any decent WvW guild/group runs a decent condition cleanse composition, anyone who plays WvW competitively knows that. Arguments that claims that Necro should be all about condition damage only shows that the person have minimal on no knowledge at all about the WvW meta.