Really constructive discussion. Did you think that just seeing a bunch of qq threads will convince ANet to completely nerf necros?
This was done with no other conditions applied correct? So with other conditions applied, it would still be possible to get 3 ticks if the fear is above 2s, right?
What I’m really curious about with the burning trait is if it applies like the Water Ele 30 trait where it can happen for a single skill then goes on ICD or whether it applies to a single target and goes on ICD.
Example: If you aren’t on burn ICD and you use Putrid Mark and it crits on 4 enemies in the AOE, do each get the burn and then it goes on ICD after that skill? Or does only 1 of the 4 at random get the burn and then it goes on ICD? This is kind of make or break for how valuable it is.
Ah that’s true. I was thinking the ICD would apply on a per-player basis, but I guess it would not. So you could apply burning to only 1 enemy every 10 seconds (unless you epidemic it). Definitely has a huge impact on whether it is worth it to go for this trait.
So the burning says it applies for 4 seconds, but to get it, you have to have 30 trait points in the Spite line. Does that mean that the base amount will be 5.2 seconds? Also, do crits from life transfer apply burning?
Oh kitten they actually implemented this!
I’ll believe it when I see it.
I actually have been meaning to try and test this, but haven’t had a moment. I will try and find some friends in SPVP to try.
My feeling with 90% certainty is that you cannot avoid the spread if the target hit by epidemic is successfully hit and you are in range. Unless you are INVULNERABLE (going into downed state).
Will get back with you
Yeah I’m pretty sure that it is just the targeted player that can dodge, not the players that would become afflicted. But I’m not positive.
Guess what? This is fixed. I’m not sure what release it’ll make it into since I just fixed it today. Its a pretty risky change, but I’ll do what I can to get it out asap.
[snip]
Thank you, Bill. Could you elaborate on why you call this a “risky change”?
It probably wasn’t a simple fix and involved code changes that affected a lot of other areas of code. So they need to do thorough testing before they are confident enough to release the fix, and it would be risky to try to push it out too quickly.
I agree with the spying thing. Why should a dead person be able to sit there and see everything else you are doing? Everything else can be pretty much summed up in one word – ZERG. That is the big problem.
I play on JQ and it is just so depressing when we work so hard to fully upgrade one of our keeps, and then SoR does one of their timed late-night 80-man zerg pushes and it’s like, what can you possibly do to not allow them to just roll over everything on the map and turn everything back to paper? All it takes is for one server to get everybody together on one map at one time of day to completely trash the entire map.
It can be even worse when they bring along their 10 alpha seige golems they’ve been hording. Golem rushes are something I just really hate because even if you are completely on top of your scouting, if they show up with 5 or more golems, your fully upgraded keep is going to fall so quickly your server will never have a chance to respond. I wouldn’t mind if golems were just taken out of the game.
Not advertised to the enemy that is. Only way to make being outmanned worse is to tell it to the enemy. It’s like telling them “Hey come roll over us”, and their reaction becomes “Let’s go take Hills/Bay/Garri!”
I’ll look at spiteful talisman first thing tomorrow morning. Can’t say much more than that.
I don’t understand this at all… This bug has been around for months….. I can’t be upset for the attention but how is it logical to look into something just because people on the forums happen to post about it, and you happen to read and respond.
I think the reason so many people, as I mentioned in a post just a moment ago, get irritated, is because of the apparent lack of planning involved with how bugs are squashed. I guess I should just stop, as any attention beats no attention at all.
Thanks for the assistance in bug resolution.
Aren’t you aware? The forums are ANet’s official bug tracking system.
This clearly not a bug but intended with the last update. They saw that conditions made him too vulnarable and easy to kill (and he is very easy in my opinion). This doesnt mean you are wrong in your opinion. Just stating that this thread belongs in the southsun cove discussion section and not in the bug section.
Maybe change your role in the party as a condition-orientated player. Pick up one of those rifles and and lure him to mines and use skill 4 to CC him
No that is not what they meant in the update – here is their statement:
Fixed a bug where Canach was able to take condition damage while temporarily immune to players.
This means you are wrong in your opinion. The devs patched to fix condition damage being applied WHILE the shield was up. Unfortunately they then broke it far far worse than it already was. Once the initial shield comes down, no one is able to use conditions for the rest of the fight.I’m really surprised there is no official response in this thread.
Probably because almost nobody is taking this ‘explorable dungeon’ seriously so ANet isn’t making it a priority.
Just played him for the first time, and as a Necromancer I was getting really angry that the guy wouldn’t take any conditions. How could ANet design a boss that was so blatantly anti-condition necro? But I see videos where the guy took conditions the entire fight so I guess it must be a bug.
I see in the patch notes it says “Fixed a bug where Canach was able to take condition damage while temporarily immune to players”. I bet the ‘fix’ got applied to Subdirector NULL as well.
Incinerator
Special Changes for Necromancers:
Necrotic Bite loses the Bite animation.
Life Blast throws Incinerator instead of the regular model
Deathly Swarm throws Incinerator instead of an insect swarm that bounces between foesWAIT A MINUTE. We throw FIRE? Crap, now I have to start farming.
yes My Necro throws the incinerator with dagger 4
Video please, showing as many animations using it as possible.
Yes, please! I’ve been wanting to see what an off-hand incinerator would look like.
I see this issue every now and then and its extremely annoying, especially when I’m on a wvw map with a long queue.
Yeah this was incredibly annoying for me in WvW. I have sigils of corruption on both weapon sets, but noticed I had zero stacks after getting about 5 kills. Glad you pointed this one out.
It will land in high levels of tpvp because good necros know when to use it after dodges, etc. Try landing a good epidemic in wvw in the top tiers against an organized guild and get back to me with your results. When two organized, top tier guilds/zergs/blobs collide, take a guess at all the aoe condition removal that goes off in that 1 second cast time. This doesn’t even account for all the dodge rolling, los issues, and all the guardian walls/static fields/earthshakers dropped everywhere to stun and interrupt our cast (We have no stability)… Its getting old seeing the same few posters come in and talk about skills when they have no clue how they work at higher level WvW.. And before you come in saying you have played wvw, i will be the first to tell you i have played tpvp. I can run an axe/dagger 15/15/15/15/10 build and stomp people in hotjoins and soloque but that doesn’t make it viable in high level tpvp… I still have yet to see a necro running epi in GvG videos or WvW zergs landing these nasty epidemics against top tier guilds/zergs.. There is a reason for this and its because the aoe condition removal and long cast time make the opportunity cost too high.
I think you are on the money here. I WvW in Jade Quarry (T1), and when I am with a zerg, the amount of condition removal is absolutely ridiculous. I generally can’t keep a condition applied more than a couple seconds (meaning I can’t stack and then epidemic). And on some players, I can apply condition after condition after condition and nothing stays applied for even a full second. I think some of the people that think condition removal is not a problem simply don’t play on higher tiered servers. The occassion where I am able to get off a really decent epidemic on a non-downed player is very very rare since the March patch. It really is a skill you use on downed players or NPCs now.
@Skyro, I’m still waiting for a team of 2 well coordinated Terror necros with Epidemic completely destroy team fights by having Epidemic’d fears every 10 seconds.
Not even that, there are tons of things you can do with Epidemic in a coordinated, team environment, due to the fact that conditions spread via Epidemic take into account the caster’s condition damage (which for a condition Necro will obviously be high).
For example, Cry of Frustration is fairly useless for glass cannon shatter Mesmers, but 8 stack of confusion in a 600 radius with Necro’s 1300 condition damage? Or how about those long duration burns from Engineers or Guards? The fact of the matter is that even at the highest levels of tPvP, Epidemic is STILL not being used to its fullest potential, and yet it is still incredibly powerful.
Which highlights another issue on player’s view of Epidemic, in that everybody looks at it from what the Necro can do with it alone (which they can still do a lot with if you know how to time large bleed stacks correctly), but in reality its strength lies in its ability to leverage your team’s conditions.
On theory yes Epidemic is useful. But in WvW you got to deal with skill lags. You got to deal with game lags. In the middle of 60 enemies you got to find that one guy with tons of conditions, all the while dealing with the lag and moving to stack on your commander. So all that together makes Epidemic useless in WvW.
Plus you have to deal with zerg condition removals, zerg stuns and interrupts on your cast, and there is a really good chance that when you find the guy that is getting all of the conditions stacked on him, he is going to go down very quickly because he is the one being focused.
…
Wells are no more difficult to dodge roll out of (and render absolutely useless) than Epidemic is, except one has 3x the CD of the other. It’s 15s CD is reason enough for it to not be a guaranteed hit every time, even one decent Epidemic will apply huge pressure.
If you don’t like it, feel free to not like it, but don’t pretend that it is the sole ability out there that is a low CD high damage ceiling but requires a lot of setup to pull off.
Yes, but the well stays around for 5 seconds, and can hit other players that are nearby, so that even if one or two get out, the other guy downed has to eat the well one way or the other. Not to mention they can be used to zone people out of ressing, force them into a corner, etc.
And more importantly, if the guy i cast a well on dodge rolls, the well doesn’t just fail and do nothing, it still casts and does its job, even if no one is there to take the damage.
Epi is also the ONLY skill that does zero damage to a target, but has the potential to do near tons of damage to everything around it. It is unique in this respect to any other skill. I hate the argument that the short cooldown makes it okay that it fails all the time now.
Spending 1 second every 15 second casts epidemic, means that is 7% of my combat time spent on using that skill, when I could have gotten off an extra mark, or two sceptor attacks, or whatever. There is opportunity cost in casting, it isn’t just free-time.
It is a unique skill, and if it had a cast time of 1/2 second, I might agree with the changes, but as it stands it is hardly worth taking in WvW under the current circumstances compared to a wells build.
I am not just talking out my back side here. I ran epidemic for months in WvW straight. The change was too painful, which is why they partially reverted it. They need to revert it all the way back.
I am totally with you. I have run with epidemic in my WvW skill bar since launch, and I am still running with it. But at this point, I’m not sure if it is worth it. With all the condition removal and the nerf, it is just about impossible to get epidemic off on a walking target. I think when balancing, ANet needs to look at how often players are able to successfully transfer conditions from normal players vs downed players and NPCs. In WvW, I would bet that since they instated the nerf, 90+% of the successful condition transfers are from the latter, and it has totally taken the fun out of it.
http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2guru/b/396007412
Edit: Necro discussion starts at 54:00.
(edited by krippler.9826)
Rallying off NPCs is a must go, it is out-and-out stupid in WvW. Only ones that can be argued are guards, but mob NPCs shouldn’t rally in WvW.
But it adds to the strategy!! (sarcasm)
You guys are missing the point. A lot of you are saying to JUST KILL THE ONE PERSON. But it’s not one person. It’s one person, then another person, then another person, then another person. That’s the strategy. And each of these person’s can put up their invulnurability skills or whatever other type of delay tactics that they have simply to stall because their own server was too busy not paying attention and allowed our group to bust through two walls of a keep. It isn’t that we can’t kill each of these people, it just takes time to do so. And by perpetually sending in one or two people at a time, they can effectively deny the cap. I have been in groups where we’ve had this go on for 20 minutes before the other server’s main zerg finally showed up to start picking us off. I just think it’s a really dumb mechanic. Why should one person, especially a downed person, be able to deny a cap to 20-30 people?
This is one mechanic that I think is pretty silly. If we have a circle up, I don’t think a single player should be able to run into the circle and deny the cap. Even after the one player is downed, the ca kitten till prevented. You end up with the server that holds the point just sending one or two players at a time into the circle to deny and stall for time. Meanwhile, the invading server might have 30 people in the circle doing nothing but searching for one person at a time that is denying the cap. I think there should be a threshold. Maybe if your team outnumbers the other within the circle 3 to 1, then you control the circle.
It can be rather annoying but I’ve learned to deal with it. However… if I see a chest on the ground instead of a loot bag watch out because I’m on a mission.
And then after fighting through half the zerg and almost getting spiked, you pick up the chest only to realize you just got trolled by a dolyak.
Yeah, what the hell is up with that? Wooden chest shows up and all I get is either a slab of red meat or some hooves. I thought ANet said they fixed this.
We have 3 methods to stability on our own, Plague form, Lich Form, and 30 Soul Reaping.
We don’t get it because stuns have a smaller effect on us because regardless of CC we can go into Death Shroud to absorb the damage. Is it perfect? No, but it’s the main reason we don’t have access to those abilities.
We might be able to soak up the damage from one stun, but once the chain stuns start comin, it’s over. I try to be patient so I can dodge out at the first opportunity, but sometimes I can literally count to 10 while all I can do is sit and watch myself get destroyed.
There are a lot of things, including WvW, that can be affected by a sudden update. An ANet poster has mentioned in the past that we would be giving about an hours notice before an update suddenly so that we can plan for it, but I have never seen them actually have the patience to do that. It is really irritating when they do it this way.
For me, Epidemic was my play style. I would dive in, load up some conditions on somebody, maybe corrupt boon and pray that it works, and then epidemic. But playing this way requires balancing a bunch of variables and having a number of things occur for the strike to be successful. First, I have to be aware of player positioning as I am inherently diving into a dangerous area with multiple enemies. I have to load up the conditions and then start the LONG epidemic cast while 1) staying in range 2) target does not go down 3) one of the zillion condition removals doesn’t cleeanse everything off 4) I do not get interrupted. Now we have to add target stays within LOS, does not dodge, and does not block to the list. And the LOS thing is completely wonky with seemingly stumps in the ground preventing it from being successful even though 90% of the target is visible.
So, while I do get a successful cast off every now and then, ANet has indeed completely nerfed my play style. It just isn’t reliable enough to be much fun anymore. So I’m just hoping that they realize how profound the impact of this nerf has been and find some way to make it viable again.
Disallowing reviving while in combat isn’t enough. It still ends up being whichever group wins the battle comes out unharmed, and that will usually be the bigger group. If you are successful in taking out a few members of a zerg, that zerg should be damaged even if they still win the battle.
If you are in group that is faced with a significantly larger force and you are able to kill a few of them, that should count for something. The large zerg force shouldn’t be able to just revive everyone and continue on like nothing ever happened. It is just further empowering the zerg mentality in that as long as your zerg is always bigger, you will always win, and you will always get back to full strength when the battle is over. That is just a ridiculous bonus given to zergs when most people want (and ANet has said they want to encourage) smaller skirmishes in WvW.
I completely agree that dead should be dead with a respawn required. If ANet wants to alleviate zerging, why do they let the winning zerg completely heal themselves before they move on?
But something else that really bugs me is that in the middle of battle, you can revive a defeated player little by little, and the opposing players can do nothing about it. If I see a half-revived player laying there, why can’t I smack the —-- out of them and put them back down?
It certainly is based on luck whether you go down at the right or wrong time in relation to when an NPC dies. My AoEs are going to be hitting both of you, so it isn’t all in your control.
But whatever the case, it is still a stupid mechanic where you can be downed by a human player and then rally off of killing a firefly. Does that really make logical sense to you? It may be strategic, but that doesn’t make it a good mechanic.
I hate the downed mechanics in this game. In PVE and PVP so much depends on going down at the wrong time. Like if I am fighting some mobs and kill one right before I go down, I am screwed. Being punished for killing something too quickly isn’t a mechanic I care for.
In WvW it’s the same thing. If I am in a fight with somebody, why should I be punished for being the one that got the other player downed first just because a wolf or moa happened to be in the area for them to rally off of? The “dimension” it adds to the game is just one of randomness and luckiness to be downed at the right time. It’s a dumb one.
I just lol at people that are trying to say that the zerg must be protected from AoE. They have huge numbers, so they SHOULD be invincible! And then we complain that WvW is actually ZvZ.
As somebody who applies AoE, the problem is that when there is a target limit, I can throw down 4 of my AoE skills and end up hitting 20 individual people and do hardly any damage to any one of them. So, the effectiveness of my AoE skills become MUCH MUCH less if I throw it down on a big stack of people than if I threw them down on a single target standing alone. That is exactly opposite of what it should be.
Can’t believe any necromancer, regardless of build, thinks DS is worthless.
Edit:
Oh, just realized that was the same guy that said Epidemic was worthless too. Nuff said.
(edited by krippler.9826)
I can hold my own most of the time, but the problem is that they tend to get away a lot of the time. And soloing with a class that has no escape is just asking to get ganked, so I try to at least stick with a couple allies or use allied NPCs to my advantage.
Just make successful casting of CB not based on RNG and I will be happy.
Of course its viable. You may have some trouble with a few 1v1 scenarios, but if you stick to what you are good at (group fights and defense), you will excel. Use the lopezirl guide to get you started http://lopezirl.com/2012/12/30/a-condition-necromancers-guide-to-world-vs-world/. I urge you to experiment and try to tinker with the build, though.
Btw, last night with full rabid gear, maxed sigil of corruption stacks (which actually isn’t uncommon for me), and BiP might, I was getting 162 bleed ticks.
As for the patch, really loving the new DS. I also love that they fixed the scythe on my Final Rest.
Epidemic is now “useless” in tower siege and tower defence. Epidemic’s major selling point there was that it doesn’t need a line of sight. Now it will miss all the time. Specially for tower defence, where your line of sight would “randomly” gets blocked by your own wall.
Yeah and I just tried using epidemic in an open area on a downed player and it was obstructed by a tiny stump in the ground. sigh This is gonna get really frustrating guessing when its actually going to hit or miss.
I tested on golems in the mists. I BiP then epidemic and 6 golems are afflicted. So the epidemic did spread to 5 others in addition to the target.
Wait… epidemic originally worked without LoS?
It was great in PVE to be able to kite a bunch of mobs into a tight circle, BiP one and then Epidemic them on the run without facing the mobs.
Ahhhh….those were the days….
The nerf only affects your ability to activate epidemic through walls and objects. You can still cast it while running away. I tested it.
Yeah I don’t follow the whole reaper mark not working. Just throw it down as soon as the ress-er comes into range. Even if it was worthwhile to throw down the reaper mark beforehand, I don’t see how anybody could find that to be an acceptable trade-off to not being able to apply bleeds, poison, or transfer conditions with the other marks. It is really frustrating when the enemy is obstructed (e.g. such as up on a wall) that I am able to bring them down but then unable to finish the job because there is nobody else in the area to trigger my marks. And there are countless other scenarios where it is a major hindrance.
Regardless of personal preference, it has no bearing on whether or not the mark should trigger or not. The person is alive, can attack me and can be affected by mark effects IF they are triggered, so why can they not trigger it themselves?
It seems like a bug to me. After all, if I have a mark on top of a downed player and somebody else triggers it, the effects get applied to the downed player. So why wouldn’t the downed player trigger it in the first place? People seem to accept this as an expected mechanic but I don’t know why.
I remember seeing a post about wooden chests only showing up when a rare or exotic type of item is waiting. However, I still have them pop up for things like a “slab of red meat”. I am seeing this in WvW if that makes any difference.
Never played engi but AoEs with necro can be hella fun. Especially epicdemics.
AoE #2 would be really nice. Stealth finishers really kitten me off.
Main defensive issue is when I get focused by a crowd, I have zero stun breakers. When I get stunned, I try to be patient and wait for my chance to dodge roll away. Many times, I remain stunned endlessly, and that chance never comes.
Is it by design that marks don’t trigger on downed opponents? I don’t see a reason why they shouldn’t when you can target downed players with other skills, including AoEs.
(edited by krippler.9826)
This must have been posted before, but it has been around forever without a fix. When I open the items I’m buying/selling/bought/sold lists, the time that the event occurred says “Seconds ago” for events that happened hours ago. I think it is some kind of timezone mismatch, so it says “seconds ago” for hours, and then once it finally starts ticking, time ticks normally.
Condition removal is definitely our biggest problem and what makes the class difficult to play in WvW a lot of the time. Against small groups, I tend to do pretty well because I just need to fight through a small amount of condition removal before my conditions start to stick. However, when fighting against larger groups, the aoe condition removals can make it difficult to every get any condition to apply more than a few seconds. Another issue is that when the opponent stacks everybody together, the AoEs I apply can get distributed and watered down amongst a bunch of different people, so I can never get a large number on any specific individual, and if I am trying to target a specific player, they often end up not even being hit.
In PVE, our big problems could be removed simply by removing the bleed cap. I’ve never seen a real explanation as to what the purpose of this cap is.