Guild Wars 2

Necro is taken to tPvP for two reasons – support AoE and Rezz Signet.

It’s just a tooltip error. They admitted they were tinkering with the GS burst (hence the might), but no changes made it into live yet

I always liked your videos, they are very well structurized and explained thoroughly.

As to the build itself, it is good for PvE, but lacks in some parts if PvP is concerned for couple of reasons:

1. I never liked spammy builds and this is a spammy build.
2. Spectral Wall isn’t viable vs good players, because they won’t go through it unless totally forced to.
3. Spectral Grab doesn’t help much in a teamfight situations because it’s a projectile.
4. You get kicked out of DS very fast in close range combat as a necro in PvP.
5. You will have exceptionally hard time against most 1v1 match-ups, especially good thieves (stealth), mesmers (blocks/reflections + confusion counters spammy builds).

There is also one important thing I don’t think you emphasized enough – in this type of build you should always aim at spamming Life Blast from 100% to 50% Life Force – it has a higher damage in that stage.

So the final rotation should be like: load 100% life force with your attacks (Axe ‘2’ or Dagger auto or Spectrals) using utilities at the same time, pop into DS, 11111111 until 50%, at this point you can use Life Transfer or get out of the DS and ride on the stacked might to regenerate LF to 100% again with Axe ‘2’ and/or Dagger auto to repeat the rotation.

Overall, a great build and even greater tutorial and video.

Defektive.7283:

Akame.1073:

Or maybe the class is fine & its a L2P ?

I’ve been hoping that was just the case for 5 months.

Doesn’t change the fact that changes proposed by the OP seem much over the top.

I’ve been playing warrior in tournies lately and I must agree that it feels down in many ways.

What I think warriors need most at the moment is some work with traits (big mess there, too much %‘s for my taste) and more build diversity which can be achieved only if warriors can get some reliable defense against ranged (mostly condition) builds and CC. It’s already very hard to pull off plays with greatsword and it’s inherent mobility with an enemy necro nearby.

Things get even more complicated with other weapons which forces you to get your warrior a condition cleansing, diaper changing nanny.

Guys, I’m somehow economics freak so let me just say one thing many people seem to forget or don’t consider out of simple lack of economic insight.

If you allow to get gold in PvP you must consider its deep consequences.

1. First of all it creates an incentive to farm PvP. No matter how’d you get the gold. People would farm glory/match wins or whatever to get their share of gold.

2. With this incentive additional people jump into PvP. Not to compete though, but to get the gold.

3. Bots join PvP and farm nodes day and night in empty servers.

4. Gems and gold markets are connected. People buy gems with RL money and sell them to players. The more gold exists in the game the more you have to pay for the gems. Gems become expensive and markets suffers from inflation (gold price/value drops).

5. Not only gems but also PvE items become more expensive (inflation, again).

6. Guys can buy gems and sell them for more gold, leaving the game more vulnerable to RL money financing.

Is it what you want? I do not.

This reward you lack is supposed to be gems you get for participating in Paid Tournaments. We know there is a problem with that right now.

As I mentioned before, the only way possible to introduce some more interesting and useful rewards is to give PvPers unsellable things that can be used in PvE/WvW.

Account-bound – dye packs, armour/weapon skins (not items!), WvW badges, minipets, etc.
Now, these things would cause a drop in prices of some items of PvE origin (minis, dyes, possibly some rare skin exotics, because you could just craft an exotic cheaply and then apply a skin from PvP). It would just cause a shift in demand for these PvE items. BUT it would keep bots and farmers out of the circuit, at the same time providing PvPers with items they could use outside of PvP.

PvP Team and Jonathan – only one thing I can say regarding future map developments from the competitive perspective.

More Kyhlo, less Foefire.

wiazabi.2549:

Find it abit hard to read this, would be better if it was more clear if the weapon/skill you talked about was more highlighted and the suggestion for it.

Sorry for that. I had no time earlier to format the post properly. I did some formatting now.

wiazabi.2549:

Disagree completely on Death Shroud being best designed class mechanic.

What I mean by saying that DS is well-designed is it has the great depth and offers a lot of possibilities. I think it is what class mechanics should be about.

Warrior’s or Guardian’s mechanics for example are also strong but have a rather narrow usage. For me it makes DS better than these sample mechanics.

Draehl.2681:

I very much agree that Necro needs more depth. In particular, as you state, the weapon skills mostly feel stale and uninspired. It’s not an issue of effectiveness, but rather it lacks interaction and often comes down to watching yourself auto-attack. Death Shroud is great for survivability, but also suffers from the boring factor.

That’s the biggest problem, I don’t know why they were designed in this way. Possibly the DS + health pool design was creating lots of balancing difficulties so developers had to cut something off. I can only guess.

I still believe necro deserves more depth and fun factor in both weapon and DS divisions. This game is all about working with your teammates supporting each other. For me, necro lacks this feel of contribution and accomplishment on his weapon sets.

Knowing any rework is extremely unlikely saddens me.

So many wonderful ideas to making a bad skill awesome!

Guys, I also had some nice ideas so take a look

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necro-overhaul

Torch makes sense for a necro wandering through old catacombs or graveyards.

Would be nice to have that.

Also guys, I posted my ideas for making necro fun. Take a look.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necro-overhaul

Ad. 3.
Necro utility and elite skills are very strong. I can see no major problems with them with few exceptions.

• Pets are weak and boring, the only pets I find use of are bone minions, because there is a minimal AI involved – you just summon them and make them explode few seconds later.
• Signets are either very bad overall (Signet of Spite), have stupidly weak active effect (Signet of the Locust), are broken (Plague Signet) or ridiculously strong (Signet of Undeath). Signet traits are bad.
• Wells are strong and have a great traits attached. They are just very boring.
• Corruption skills are very nice and powerful.
• Spectral skills are rather underwhelming and not worth taking over other skills. They provide some fun and utility in WvW though.
• Elites are good, the Plague is great, Lich Form is amazing under Time Warp, the minion is as dumb as other minions and doesn’t always KD because it likes to block on vertical routes. I don’t find it a big problem though since most classes have useless elites.

Ad. 4.
The Death Shroud is very strong, I mean, VERY. It has many great traits available. I think it’s one of the best designed profession mechanics. The only problem I seem to have is that the auto-attack is rather useless even if traited. Death Shroud’s strongest usage comes from DS in&out jumping for various effects and for utility from Dark Path, Doom and Life Transfer. I rarely find the auto-attack worth staying in the Death Shroud. But overall, DS is strong and fun.

Ad. 5.
Many people complain that the necromancer doesn’t feel like one. They don’t like poor minion design, they would like more dynamic gameplay. They would love some more survivability outside of DS. While I agree to some of the countless issues people seem to have, I’d like to propose some changes that would in my view make necro amazing. I have put a lot of thought into necromancer and have spent a long time thinking about suggestions.

1. Weapon sets: there are two things I had an idea about: necro isn’t too dynamic and it doesn’t feel as a true minion master profession.

• Firstly, I thought that Lich Form skills should be given to the staff. Just think of how more interesting would it be to have the quick Lich attack on your staff. You would have a knockback with chill under ‘2’, the vulnerability mark, this great ‘4’ that summons short-living bone minions or jagged horrors that you could explode for some burst damage and a great support/offensive ‘5’. I think this skillset would be just super fun for the staff. It gives great utility and support, allows people to feel like a minion master and summon those little horrors, then explode them to poison everyone around on the second trigger sequence.
• Secondly, I’d add some flavor to other weapon sets. Axe comes to mind, being the 600 range weapon. It could get a leap skill allowing you to close the gap and switch to dagger or staff to bomb the opponent. It could use cleave damage and get weakness instead of vulnerability. What about a block skill that provides Life Force for example?
• Daggers are okay, but I’d see Life Siphon more interesting if it provided smaller but AoE leech or was faster so the weapon feels more coherent.
• Other offhands could get some changes. Mainly warhorn to provide some party-wide buff (swiftness for everyone, locust swarm for the necro) and possibly a short AoE fear on ‘5’ (like Fear Me! Or Steal) instead of the daze to make it more necro and make the class the real king of fear.

2. Death Shroud auto-attack (Life Blast) could be changed to make it a cond/power hybrid nuke. The idea I have is pretty simple – Life Blast is supposed to be used when Life Force pool is higher than 50%. What about making it a channeled skill (like the ele scepter lighting auto-attack) that drains your Life Force or a skill that gathers it in front of the necromancer so he can release it at the target providing a burst + few stacks of bleeding. It solves something I always feel when I play Death Shroud builds – running around spamming auto-attacks continuously just isn’t fun.

3. Necro’s weakest in the beginning of a match when necro has no Life Force. LF generation could get some number shift from deaths around to utilities and weapon sets to make it so necro can reliably get the resource while fighting so it becomes more of an attrition fight. I don’t have much problem with it as it is now though.

I’d love to find out what you guys think about these ideas. Now I know that with their small balance team, possibility of such an overhaul is probably null. With that in mind, I really tried to propose changes that do not require much additional design/art work. Sad thing is, these are things that seem so natural to have for other professions, while necro just doesn’t seem to get this much attention. I only hope someone at Anet reads it and realizes that it really could work and make necro so awesome.

Anet asks for constructive feedback, so here we go!

It is going to be a long post.

1) Intro.
2) Necro weapon sets.
3) Necro utilities & elites.
4) Necro class mechanic.
5) Suggestions.

Ad. 1.
I’ve sticked to the necro since the second BWE. I’ve played it through everything in PvE and played hundreds of tPvP games with it. Necro used to be the king of terrible. After the nerfs from BWE2 it suffered from numerous bugs, very bad traits and overall felt like a dump-class with things thrown into it without any greater thought.
It was said by Jon Peters to be the hardest profession. Starting to learn the game as a necro was definitely very difficult, but I sticked to it. After some time, I learned the tricks necro has as well as enjoyed fixes and buffs from Anet.

I really loved the challenge playing the necro offered and I loved the playstyle. All until I tried other professions extensively. I’ve played a warrior, an ele, a ranger, tried some engineer and guardian. Every single class (with maybe an exception for ranger) felt so much fun compared to necro. At first, I thought, well maybe it’s just the way it is, it is how necro was designed and it reaches different playstyle preferences. Then I started to see the bigger picture and I want to share my ideas and how to fix things with everyone here and now.

Ad. 2.
With no further ado I’d like to talk about necro weapon sets. I decided to talk about it shortly because I believe it to be the basic reason that necromancers aren’t as awesome as they could be.

In general I believe weapon sets are all this ‘fire-and-forget’ type with very little synergy. They of course are designed to somehow work together but they lack the flow.

To explain what I mean let’s take a look at every set:

• MH dagger has: tri-stage auto-attack, a stale channeled life siphon and immobilize.
• Axe is similar with: two-stage auto-attack, a stale channeled claws skill and a PBAoE skill.
• Scepter isn’t much different: tri-stage auto-attack, an AoE, and a single hit skill.
• Off-hands are just as boring: focus has a 2 skills, one to provide vulnerability and regen, second chilling the target and rending boons. The warhorn has caster-exclusive swiftness and an AoE daze. Dagger has 2 condition AoE’s.
• We’re left with a staff that has 4 marks providing various effects and a very bad auto-attack. Boring!

Now, to somehow summarize it all – necro weapon sets are all designed to provide 3 things: boons/conditions, damage and life force. Necro has little to none access to control effects (dazes, stuns, knockbacks, launches, knockdowns, you get the meaning) as well as no block, no evades, no invulnerabilities, no movement skills (necro is the only profession without a leap), sequence skills outside auto-attack (every other profession has them).

I want everyone to understand one thing – necro weapon sets aren’t weak, on the contrary, they are very strong. They are just very boring, simplistic. What’s even worse, they do not provide possibilities for fun and deep combinations (anyone who played an ele or some of the well-designed classes knows what I mean). They lack combo effects. There is a fun fact related to this – necro sets have almost no projectiles, what counters many defensive reflection/block abilities, but at the same time gives no finishers so that playing a necro doesn’t feel cohesive and adds to many design flaws necro has.

wiazabi.2549:

Well other classes werent suppose to have fear, just saying.

Win, win, win. I hope someone from anet reads it and realises how (imo) they failed with necro design.

Okay, I have a secret to share – necro isn’t weak, on the contrary – it is one of the strongest teamfight professions. I’ve played pretty much any build you can imagine as a necro and I can say the only field necro really lacks buildwise is support.

Necro is great at condition damage, has some very powerful power builds, is great at control, counters warriors and thieves like a boss.

Support is the only problems, because it is pigeonholed into wells and a mark on two from the staff.

With that said…
Still doesn’t change the fact necro is a fail compared to an ele or engie.

Just super boring.

Happily ditched it some time ago.

Story:
Charr have the best (I heard so, only played one human and stopped playing)
In higher levels all racial stories converge into one which is, as everyone knows, rather superbad.

Classes:
I can only discourage you from playing necro. I’ve chosen it as my main at the release and have been disappointed numerous times by its design. Necro is utterly boring and very poorly designed. It is far from the enjoyability ele, thief or warrior can give. Necro kit just feels like some random things mixed up and supposed to be whole. Eles have full skill combos available in their weapon sets and some really cool mechanics. Necro weapon sets all are ‘hit and forget’ style. Don’t play necro. It’s a fail design.
I encourage you to go with an ele or a warrior or engie. They are more playable.
Ranger – boring and also fail design with the pet.
Starting tournies with the rest of the professions so can’t contribute much.

butch.8136:

I find Kyhlo the most ‘complex’ one to play, foefire most ‘boring/easy’ one.

That’s accurate. I agree.

Good I posted the question and that I have created that question and it was me that put an effort to create it and post it.

Jokes aside, I’m really happy with what we’ve heard. PvP is in right hands, maybe a bit slow sometimes, but still the right hands.

Overall Balance Question
Do you find any professions to be out of balance in certain aspects of the game?
Ele bunker/roamer Fotm build, Portal Mesmer, Thief ‘One-shot’ Combo, are these things okay for you or can we see changes to this stuff in the future?

Nier.2478:

^
Just another low skill casual who doesn’t know what Long Bow (Berserker Amulet) has over Axe. Get some QPs or play some paids and tell me if going “full melee” with a Warrior is actually THAT forgiving.

You are so low to be writing this…

Let everyone have their own opinion. I’ve seen amazing warriors playing various weapon sets. Just because you disagree doesn’t mean your point of view is the only right one.

And jumping on a completely anonymous player on the forums numerous times, calling him lowskill and asking to get QPs as if they were the only indicator of skill is just pathetic.

Who cares about titles? I mean, really, it’s quite obvious there is no way for anyone to be PvP Ascendant right now.

thegrumbliestpuppy.5628:

Seriously? I go away to play other games a week and the Devs are basically revealed to be liars. Either that or Peters is in some deep kitten for promising us an update before he checked with Sharpe.

Not really, since this update you mention has been ready for months now and copy-pasted on every occasion.

Some random keywords describing the update: soon, exciting, we’re listening, custom arenas, soon, exciting, matchmaking, leaderboards, very soon, can’t post because of meetings…

I’m against allowing gold buyout with glory.

Some random guys would just start farming glory in empty servers (welcome bots) and stop to pvp at all just to get thier gold which would mess up the game economy and gem prices in the player market.

The thing that could be implemented is more rewards, for example account bound dye packs that could be bought with glory. They could even allow karma or WvW badge purchases with glory and it still wouldn’t affect the economy, taken you can’t sell karma gear or badges.

“Wow, he’s still being pet rezzed, WHAT THE F<beep>K! "

I loved it, need more this stuff.

Great entertainment. Thanks!

I couldn’t found another topic about the incoming stream, so here it is.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Twitch-Livestream-with-Jonathan-Sharp-Matt-Witter-and-Mike-Zadorojny

Should we prepare questions directed to the devs participating and Jonathan Sharp in particular?

I can’t find the dedicated topic the announcement mentions, but I think it’s still a good idea to gather sPvP questions here and post them aggregately when the right topic is created.

I for instance want to ask if devs are satisfied with somehow boring metas evolving around ele bunker/roamers. There wasn’t really and info from the devs describing their opinion on where the meta stands.

Hi,

the idea is pretty simple and is connected to the well-know situation.

Many people have left the game, took a break or just can’t play now. With guesting coming in January, world switching becomes payable.

I believe that every player should get one free transfer before the system goes live (it is free I know) and this one transfer should stay free if the player doesn’t use it.

It allows players that won’t transfer to catch up their friends after they log in some day in the future.

What do others think?

John Smith.4610:

Lets not turn this thread into a discussion of one specific exploit.

I have to say, however, that you have a perfect name for an economist.

Coming from an economist.

I noticed there are no rangers in the EU section.

You can add me there as well, since it’s my second most played profession and I’ve seen mostly terrible rangers around

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

KITTENTHEKITTENKITTY KIT

This is exactly what I feel about all these pop-ups!

Thanks for taking care of it, Evan.

I’ve been running various power necro build for a long time now.

It definitely is viable, I won’t even say how many Champion Paragons felt with ‘kitten, what killed me’ to some power builds I ran.

Most recently I’ve been running D/D bone minion bomber with poison clouds popping all around. We were happy with the results.

Probably the most important thing necro and this build lack is mobility which you just need to roam and stay in the fight.

Add me for everything except for paids in EU.

Necro.

I will refrain from posting in this thread. OP is just a guy who seems to have no life outside of the game and is ready to fight any argument put in front of him with unbelievable ferocity and without even at least trying to understand other points of view.

The manner in which you answer and the way you organise your posts shows your lack of respect to other posters.

Sataarcoeny, I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.

This definitely isn’t a person I enjoy talking to.

Fuzion.7613:

Turn time warp into a signet
Signet of Time

• Passive Movement Speed (20%?) Would have with mesmers lack of mobility.
• Apply 4 seconds of Quickness to Yourself and Ally’s within 600 range
• 140 Second Cool Down

I like.

SAtaarcoeny.8476:

so by my definition of L2P telling new players to ask for advice you say that is hilarious? i dont understand your point there.

i would think a new player asking advice and learnig to play better would be a great idea?

your saying you would rather just keep nerfing everything until a new player can come into the game and on his first day when a paid tournament?

again im staying away from insults here but serious please read the thread befor you comment other wise i think your in here to just troll and thats silly. even if you dont play the game dont say stuff to hurt helping ppl.

You are misinterpreting my words. I still play the game, I just don’t care about it.

Secondly, I never asked for nerfs, you put these words in my mouth as they were mine. I just said Stealth is cheap, because it is. It doesn’t concern me personally, because I learned to counter it (as well as many other poop skills/builds like HS or these fotm eles), but I played hundreds of hours of PvP. Casuals will never do it.

I don’t know what Anet does with this problem, most probably nothing.
What I do know is there is never going to be a big casual/pro community with these things in their current state.

Draygo.9473:

pmnt, how long did it take league of legends to get a spectator mode?
how about replays?

I think you are mistaken in your belief that spectator is important to make a game an esport.

This argument has been brought so many times and it is grossly invalid.

LoL has been a successful game from the very beginning, so was Starcraft. They didn’t need those features, because people were just playing these games. Additional and more robust features came later and just improved the already great experience.

This is not the case of Guild Wars 2. SPvP isn’t successful and it needs features or it hemorrhages to death.

I come in peace since all my friends left and I just don’t give a kitten about this game anymore. Anyways, the problem with this game is gimmicky mechanics that are hard for new players to counter.

Stealth is the major problem. I have learned to dodge warrior skillshots almost immediately during BWE, while learning to counter thieves and mesmers took me much, much longer.
New casual players joining hotjoin games and being stabbed by two stealthed thieves will more probably just “Alt+F4, Control Panel, Uninstall a program, Delete (+ utilise box + CDs in the proper trashcan)” than stay and sacrifice hours of gameplay to counter these things, unless they’re dedicated PvPers.

We all know that dedicated PvPers won’t make a successful e-sport.

And Sataar coming after having played 3000 games and saying L2P to the new players is just hilarious, I’ll gladly take the popcorn offered by Fuzion.

I like how mesmer players who learned the game playing this gimmicky class with all its broken over-the-top skills complain and qq.

Fact is, mesmer has abilities that are game changing. They are mandatory in the competitive environment, which makes them, say OP.

No one denies you skill, but you are playing a profession that is just cheap.

Pyrial.2917:

Followed by the “yeah this build is wicked strong” comment

Hahahaha, I can’t stop laughing! You are a king!

Rezz.8019:

<-R13 HA in GW1, champ range gvg, never used voice chat. I definitely don’t need it in this cookie cutter game. I am strongly against it, simply because it will be harder for me to control teams no one should be allowed to talk in my teams.

And yes that’s my own selfish point of view.

And I thought me and my scarce remaining friends were the only former GW1 PvPers left in the game.

On topic, I disagree about the voice chat, for the very simple reason. There are at least five things that could bring back or attract more players than in-game VoIP. If the game is successful with those priority features in place, no one will ever think about the voice comm.

NaturalPortman.9562:

When you smell Helseth’s hair

Idk what to think about this one. :>

uhm…

I believe in Jonathan Sharp. One day he will become Tyria’s Phreak.

I volunteer to be the object of celebration.

Even pet can’t help when you get stomped with arguments like OP was.

SAtaarcoeny.8476:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Natural-Zoo-Keeper-proof-that-QP

Well… some parts of this topic are very serious and not troll at all, especially the part about one guy being the best necro.

How are you rank 4x? Duuude…

NaturalPortman.9562:

I made a fan art of slick shoes

This is a true artwork. I think the skill icon should be replaced now.

Football meaning the real football or this American stuff with a stolen name?

I feel that in the last week, these forums have become something special.

Something they should have been from the very beginning.

Topics are getting so interesting, so exciting! I can’t wait to read all the juicy posts!
So fabulous! I even made a picture to express how happy I am!

Guys, please stop bashing this PvE guys for stating that guardian’s burst is stronger than mesmer’s. I mean… he obviously has no idea about PvP and just came here to complain about his hard time as a mesmer in PvE.

@ that guy:
guardian is the n1 PvE profession. It is the easiest, the strongest, and most faceroll, but with that said, I’d take a good mesmer over guardian anytime in PvE just for his Time Warp utility and clones kittenting on PvE AI.

NaturalPortman.9562:

He should also notice that the ranger has a trait that gives his pet 5 seconds of quickness when he is downed. Clearly this is a intentional mechanic of the ranger class.

Making it a thing one has to take into account when fighting a ranger same as remembering about thief’s stealth when fighting one.

Simple as that.

Have you ever thought that this particular situation is a part of ranger design?

Maybe ranger lacks damage himself and the pet is just some part of a ranger?

Really, just let go, ranger and especially his downed state isn’t a problem…

Nord.5360:

Nord.5360:

snip

Here’s my post on the subject from about a month ago. I don’t care who gets credit as long as it’s taken into consideration.

The first part is a must if we want to create a natural rating system. The tournament system got to be used only, I emphasize, ONLY for dATs or mATs. This system of 3 round tournaments is not only too short and boring, but also doesn’t fit traditional matchmaking.

What they simply need to do is scrap it, let us play solo queue ranked matches (with duos possibly allowed) and team queue ranked matches like in LoL or GW2. Tournament system should be reserved for more important events like aforementioned dATs.

What I’m afraid about is – what I could understand from Jonathan Sharp’s statements during the first SOTG – they aren’t going to listen us and they will just revamp the matchmaking for the tournaments, so it somehow protects PUGs taking ranks into account. He said something like ‘a PUG of highly ranked players can still win with some premade teams’, which is horribly wrong direction.