Guild Wars 2

Teutos.8620:

3.) There are better ways to increase pvp population.
-> More gold; if tpvp would become the best place for farming gold, more people would join pvp on all skill levels.
-> Seasons with rewards; Currently I’m missing any objective in playing tpvp;
-> more game modes
-> more maps
-> stronger punishment for flamers, leavers and afkers
-> better balancing
-> feel free to continue this list

I agree with everything except your first suggestion. If people came in just to farm gold it would clog up every match with people capping a single point just to get 10 points on their score and then spending the rest of the match afk. More gold would only work if:
a. the difference in rewards for winning and losing a match was significantly wider, to discourage afking
b. the additional gold was just for tournaments, and
c. harsher penalties for griefers, leavers, and afkers were introduced BEFORE the rewards were increased.

@Henry, I think we are actually viable now. The celestial sustain meta means a lot of teams are running full burst to counter it, and those burst builds usually have terrible condition cleanses. That brought necro back into the meta, at least for now. I do agree with you that we need more mobility options though, and it doesn’t seem like they want to give them to us.

Also DS is a balancing nightmare and they need to finally bite the bullet and change it.

Distaste.4801:

wasted.6817:

xDudisx.5914:

Long fights with combo field, finishers, group support and class sinergy are much for fun than watch enemys that drop in less than 10s to a thief or shatter mesmer.

Imo, it’s more like opposite. Long fights = stale match. It just drags on and on, no big plays, no big moves, nothing changes. Plus it’s in general more primitive and easier to execute tactic, to bunker up here and there and get your long, stale fights, doesn’t require that much coordination as (i.e.) mesmer and thief do.

Long fights require more skilled play for longer periods of time, you have to constantly be making good decisions for the duration or you’re going to lose. It also gives a lot of time for counterplay, a concept that GW2 has forgotten. That makes fights fun for a lot of people. I think we can both agree that SPvP is by no means a success, the question is why? I think it’s purely because the style of combat is simply not appealing. Unless you bunker up, run cheese, or are super skilled, you die in seconds; it isn’t fun. While I will say it does take certain skills to play GW2 at high level, it’s definitely heavily based on fast reaction time. The problem is that fast reaction based combat cuts out a big portion of players and makes seeing “the big moves” very hard.

Well, fast reaction time IS skilled play, but I agree that it’s not the only kind of skills a player needs, and GW2’s combat system devalues other types of skilled play, such as positioning, kiting, peeling, and team coordination. And I TOTALLY agree that excessively fast-paced, twitch-heavy play isn’t as much fun, and doesn’t make for a good spectator sport.

Are the trick or treat bags awarded by the Halloween reward track affected by magic find?

Look, I know they originally promised that everything in pvp would be unlocked from the get-go, but tbh, while I admire the sentiment, I really don’t think it worked. Having unlocks gives players something to work towards, and I wouldn’t be opposed to there being more stuff for us to unlock. And, at the end of the day, let’s not lose sight of how generous the system is – there’s a lot fewer stuff we need to unlock than in most other games (except DOTA2, but that’s a game that costs a fraction to maintain and has an order of magnitude more players), and even GW1 wasn’t at all generous with its unlocks when it first launched – I don’t think we even had Balthazar faction in the beginning, iirc everything had to be unlocked through pve, and we couldn’t even change our attribute spread for free to try a different pvp build!

In a game with hundreds of skills and thousands of skill/trait combos, players will discover a lot of unintended functionality. It’s called emergent gameplay and it’s what keeps the game interesting. In GW1 it was the whole point of the metagame, and anet didn’t nerf builds that relied on weird, unintended interactions unless they got completely out of control. But in GW2, it feels like we get slapped on the wrist whenever we try to colour outside the lines. Developers understand “build variety” to only mean “the builds we want you to run” and don’t suffer any originality on behalf of the players.

I definitely preferred GW1 minionmancers in terms of flavour, it felt good reanimating corpses or blowing them up, stealing health from your minions to heal yourself, or putting death nova on them and watching them take out half the health of everyone around them when they died! But, realistically, I never expected them to be implemented the same way in GW2, as it was a playstyle full of extremes and impossible to balance: you were dead weight until you got your minions up, and an unstoppable avalanche of damage if you managed to hit your limit – until the enemy managed to get all your pets in a big aoe and then you were naked and useless again. That made them hugely OP in pve, where damage was predictable and corpses easy to come by, and borderline useless in pvp, where only gimmick builds focussing on having teammates provide corpses for you ever used them (whether pre-match by sacrificing themselves to death, or through dead pets, IWAY-style), and never to consistent success at a high level.

So yeah, minions were NEVER gonna work the wya they did in GW1, and, much as I miss it, because it could be fun, it’s probably a good thing. However, that’s not to say that I think the way they work now is perfect: I would have liked to have more short-lived, disposable minions like jagged horrors, creating the ability to summon little hordes of weedy little dead critters that only last a few seconds. This could be done with the introduction of low-recharge utility skills that cause short-lived minoins to spawn, or traits which modify weapon skills (or DS skills) to spawn minions when used.

I realise that this would mean that some traits that are balanced around us having only a handful of big minions would need a slight rework. Otherwise a d/d ele could kill themselves if they do some pbaoe damage with 5 little critters surrounding them :P

The thing I REALLY miss from GW1 though, and which doesn’t exist in any form, is the shutdown/attrition necro, mostly specialising in Curses, and most perfectly exemplified by a single skill: http://guildwiki.gamepedia.com/Spiteful_Spirit
The mechanic to punish someone’s aggression doesn’t exist at all in GW2 – the only condition that does it, Confusion, has been nerfed to oblivion, and has been mostly replaced with Torment in the mesmer builds that used to be able to cause it. Now you can only deal direct, unconditional damage, that ticks whether your opponent wises up and stops attacking you or whether they keep barrelling into you like an idiot. And that’s because ANet balances for the low-end, not the high end, so skill plays actually get punished, and professions get dumbed down so that any idiot can learn the basics in 5 minutes. And when emergent tactics are discovered by players (like the fact that if you trick your idiot opponent into backing up against a wall, you can use your charge-type skills like FGS Rush to hit them multiple times, or that you can stay in DS and regenerate your health), they decide it’s an exploit and remove the mechanic making it possible, rather than actually balancing the skills involved. So I don’t think we’ll ever see a control/attrition necro in GW2: the playerbase is too stupid, and the devs too concerned with making sure they don’t have to be forced to think.

MonMalthias.4763:

In addition, corrupting the Might is hardly guaranteed given Elemental Attunement/Elemental Fury’s sheer boon variety of output: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Necro-Boon-Removal-Priorities

Necro would win because of counterbuilding, but not 100%, and not without taking significant damage as the Might is not guaranteed to be corrupted. And for Elementalists like Phantaram (he duels Condi necro and wins 4:1) it isn’t even a full counter.

The boons from attunement swaps aren’t really the problem: it’s more about the constant, passive, and frequent boon procs from the most popular runesets and sigils that were boosted in April (mostly Strength and Pirate). Combined with the hidden priority list for corruptions it means that you hardly ever get to remove the most powerful boons like stability (they’re just buried too deep), and whatever you do remove will get reapplied within seconds!

I honestly think that d/d ele is ok – it’s the runes that need rebalancing.

Any idea when the changes mentioned tonight are happening?

MethaneGas.8357:

If they want us to go 30 points (or 6 points by the new system) into Death Magic just so our DS can be somewhat like it was before…. no thanks. Even if DS remained the same, and a Necro specced 100% into Spectrals and went 30 into Death, you would probably still be balanced. The DS change is still not justified. It’s quite simply…. bad. And it was an unwise step. I can’t wrap my head around it, really.

Yeah it was completely unnecessary, and unfair. I mean, the spectral power necro is such a niche build in pvp already! The only time DS is hilariously OP is in wvw zerg fights, where you can keep it up almost permanently.

Oh excellent news!

Bhawb.7408:

Death Shroud is an absolutely vital part of Necromancer at this point. To remove it or change it in any heavy way would require the full rework of the entire profession.

I think it’s getting to that time tbh.

So basically you’re going for a slightly tankier condition build (using the extra defensive attributes the celestial amulet gives you over rabid or carrion)? I take it the extra Fury uptime from the runes is to ensure Life Blast does semi-decent damage while you’re stuck in DS?

Conncept.7638:

How on earth did this baseless nonsense get a red post?

Because, sadly, people on these forums are so angry and rude that the developers have to spend more time patrolling the hallways and putting out flame wars than reading good, constructive discussions.

Terror was the best mechanic that they ever came up with for necros: the problem is with its long duration passive procs!

To be fair, even in GW1 things weren’t that rosy for pvpers. You got the Hall of Heroes chests, but GvG players were poor. It was ages before they introduced Zaishen keys etc.

That sounds logical tbh. The projectile just spawns an aoe where it lands. If the projectile hits a reflecting surface or player it gets reflected, but if it just hits the ground next to you, then you’re not getting hit by the projectile, but by the explosion it created where it landed. When the hero has grenades thrown at him in war movies, he has to grab the little meatball and throw it back, not sweep up the individual bits of shrapnel and throw them back after it exploded.

Dustin.2793:

Bros, no lie those games today were so fun, and exciting to play in. The lag was on EU was kittening me off a little but that’s to be expected : D. Hope we can do more soon, well played both teams.

I’m surprised it felt laggy for you – all of NCSoft’s servers are in Texas afaik, so it shouldn’t make a difference for you playing on EU servers.

Unless ANet have some sort of peering deal happening meaning your data has to get bounced across the Atlantic and back…

Quincy.2198:

Well, look at the gemprice please. It takes forever to get a single gemstore item.

Yeah the inflation is worrying, but the solution there is curbing dungeon rewards rather than boosting other rewards! That would just increase inflation more.

Shockwave.1230:

manveruppd.7601:

I mean, if we got more gold from pvp, what would you do with it? Unlock Magi’s amulet? :p

I’d increase my Fabulousness attribute +1000

But you’re already at max Fabulousness in our eyes!

I’d be happy for axe 1 to get LF generation, but only if it’s only a small amount (1% or less), and if the LF generation was removed from Ghastly Claws (2). That would open the way for Ghastly Claws to be buffed so it actually hits occasionally. Either make it like dagger 2, which continues to damage if it initially connects even if the enemy goes outside line of sight or even stealths, or make it a cone-shaped aoe attack like Dragon’s Breath.

The reason it needs a buff is because, when you lock the whole of a weapon’s burst behind a channelled skill, you need to give the user a chance to land it. Minionmancers can use the bone fiend’s immobilise, but if you’re running a non-minion build your only option is fear, which has a long recharge and is locked behind DS.

Anchoku.8142:

manveruppd.7601:

Yeah the healing power is a real problem, and it’s also hard to make a build that leverages both power and condition damage. If you try to go for bleeds you’re stuck on scepter, which has terrible power scaling. It makes more sense to go for burning and/or terror, and use a power weapon, but those conditions are locked behind Master and Grandmaster traits, so it’s impossible to get them without gimping your build in some other way. (eg you might have to sacrifice Deathly Perception, which tbh is way more raw DPS than Dhuumfire, or go without Spectral Attunement, which you really need for LF generation)

I played around with this extensively, I just don’t think there’s any good way to do it.

Necro only has one weapon really designed for bleeds. That is why I have been promoting a 2h power weapon like a land spear for use at short range. Most of Necro’s conditions benefit from duration. Ironic, right? There is no condition ‘resistance’ to differentiate between low condition damage stats and high.

That, I think, is a huge gap in game mechanics. Why would a berserker War’s condi damage matter if the player did not trait for it?

Yeah, agreed, every other profession has weapons which cause both conditions AND do decent physical damage. Warriors are the best example (longbow’s burst especially, but also sword), but mesmers, engis, and rangers too to an extent. The only skill with good power scaling on scepter is FoC and even that is sub-par on either rabid or carrion gear. Even if you cast it right after SoS it’ll crit for under 2k. I personally only use it for the life force.

Staff’s autoattack actually scales pretty well. That’s what I think they intended to be our “hybrid” weapon. But Mark of Blood got nerfed to make up for Dhuumfire, and the nerf never got reverted, and the projectile speed on the autoattack is so slow it NEVER hits unless your enemy is either downed or goes /sit.

I mean, if we got more gold from pvp, what would you do with it? Unlock Magi’s amulet? :p

Menzies The Heretic.3415:

Its a bug, just like you take falling damage while walking down a slope.

Yeah but the thing is you’#re WALKING. If you start taking falling damage, STOP!

I know a few places this happens in: the stairs behind the Temple bloodlust point in WvW, and a certain point on the slope outside red team’s base in Niflhel, just to name 2. Just stop, breathe, then keep walking along a slightly different path.

It was great to see them fight each other. Both teams were awesome! Was watching on Nos’s streams and he did some pretty mindbending juking with Wurm+SWalk. TCG’s map movement was lightning fast too, there seemed to be 3 Helseths on the map at times!

Well, I care about the reward chests I missed out on… :p

I just played a team arena game in which for some reason I was awarded a score of 0, and therefore didn’t get any rank gain or reward track progression. About 40-60" before the end of the match (when my team was at 420), I suffered a very sudden disconnect (they’re usually preceded by lag, but this one wasn’t, it was very weird), and I only managed to load back into the game about 10" before the match ended (my team was at 490).

I don’t know what my score was before the disconnect (because who checks those anyway?), but it definitely wasn’t 0, as I was in several team fights that went our way and capped a couple points too. So I’m assuming my score was reset to 0 when I disconnected. Is this intentional?

Sorry, I had stab up, makes me immune to sarcasm

I like how this thread started as a discussion of the two different metas in general, and the 2nd page has turned into a smack-talking sesh between TCG and Abj! :p

Parasitic Contagion sounds like a great trait on paper, until you realise that our 2 most damaging conditions are locked behind DS. OK except for Reaper’s Mark. Still though, even if you had burning and fear the healing you’d be getting would still be miniscule, so the way to make that trait work is to go for big aoe conditions. Meaning this wouldn’t really work in WvW, if that’s what you were going for, because damage tends to come in big bursts and we can’t mitigate it for long enough (with dodges, blocks, etc) for the kind of small, trickling healing-over-time this trait offers to make a difference. It works for guardians and eles because they have vigour, block skills, a lot of protection, and healing-over-time that doesn’t rely on constantly applying bleeds. The only real mitigation we have is DS and we can’t get healed while in it.

If you’re talking pve though this’ll work. You’ve already got your epidemic there, which is great. But for pve, well of corruption isn’t much good cause mobs don’t use boons much. Corrosive Poison Cloud might be a better choice. Maybe replace a sigil of accuracy for a sigil of tormenting, to spread the aoe love further? You’ve already got plenty of crit chance, barbed precision will only get you so far. Possibly get a flesh golem and get yourself some Superior Runes of the Krait for even more aoe.

Sors Immani.8429:

And to get a pre-emptive answer out there, the big joy I’ve gotten out of the GW franchise is being able to go against the meta and craft original builds, even if they are inherently flawed. It stems from teenage/college neckbeard years, with a similar concept applied to crafting decks in Magic: the Gathering: less concerned about winning at all costs, and more concerned with the theme/flavor/purpose of the creation.

Same here, buddy. GW1 was great for that, it’s a pity GW2 doesn’t let you do it to the same extent.

Poison stacks in duration (up to 5 times), so don’t worry, your poison won’t get replaced. More likely it’ll get reapplied because the enemy cleansed it right away :p

@OP it’s not that we think celestial amulet is bad, it’s that I don’t understand the equation between celestial and might stacking. Eles, engis and warriors love it not because it goes with might stacking, but because they use every single one of the attributes it offers effectively (near-constant healing-over-time, weapons that inflict both damaging conditions and which scale well with power, like warrior longbow, good fury uptime so they can use the extra critical damage, etc). Necros can’t use those stats as well, mostly because we can’t be healed while in DS (and it sounds like this build relies on DS a lot).

Now, I watched your video and I saw you got some decent bleed stacks going from Barbed Precision, but with those bleeds being only 2" long, I don’t think you realise HOW LITTLE damage the 432 condition damage celestial gave you added: bleeding scales quite badly, at 0.05 of condition damage according to the wiki. So, for 6 stacks of 2" bleeds (which seems to be the maximum you got), your amulet added 259 damage. Not per bleed, but for the whole 6-bleed stack, over its entire 2" duration. (For comparison, if you had 20 might stacks, the extra condition damage from those would have added nearly twice as much damage, 420.) So it’s clear that getting condition damage just for barbed precision procs isn’t a great use of your attributes. So that’s 2 attributes you’re not using. If you were using Dhuumfire, or Terror, that might be a different deal, cause those scale with condition damage much better, at 0.25 in fact, and have a much higher base (at 0 condition damage you need about 10 stacks of bleed to do the damage of 1 burn). But you’re not, which is my point.

We therefore see that the main benefits you’re getting from that ammy is power, precision, ferocity, toughness, vitality. At that level, you’re gaining benefit from 2190 attribute points. (Yes, I know not all attributes are equally valuable, but for the sake of argument). Well, the normal 3-point stat distribution amulets already give you slightly more than that, so, while celestial is still a decent deal, I’m not sure it’s worth sacrificing the extra Power you’d get with another amulet. For instance, you already have Deathly Perception, and a lot of points invested in Curses, so, if you went for a Carrion amulet instead of celestial you’d still have a 98% crit chance with Fury (which you’ve traited) in DS. The extra power would more than make up for the reduced Ferocity (I did the maths, life blast would hit for about the same), but here’s the bonus: 932 points of condition damage. If you swapped out the warhorn trait for Terror, like some people have been doing, then with 20 stacks of Might your fears would tick for 1200 dps, and that’s in addition to the extra damage your Barbed Precision procs and your Torment stacks would do. Alternatively, you could go for a Soldier’s or Barbarian’s amule, still have 98% crit chance in DS, and be A LOT tankier. You coudl even (Grenth help me) get a Rampager’s amulet (urgh!) and drop Deathly Perception for 2 points in another traitline, since you won’t need the extra crit chance from DP. You could even drop another 2 points from Curses and get Dhuumfire – with the extra might, your burns will be proccing for as much as rabid or carrion amulets would. Though I get that’s a different build entirely

In short, no, nobody has a problem with Celestial per se. It’s just that might stacking builds don’t HAVE to use celestial, not if they’re not getting the full benefit from it, and with this build (with you spending so much time in DS and barbed precision being your only condi damage) you’re not. It’s more like celestial builds HAVE to use might stacking, because celestial’s damage is so sub-par without 15+ might stacks…

NeXeD.3042:

I agree taking signet of the locust is a very good idea especially on a buile that uses banshees wail and pretty much has 100% swiftness so signet of the locust is very useful for more speed above the 33% yesyesyesyesyesyes

I’m pretty sure you can’t go above 133% base speed, it’s capped. So you won’t be running at 158% base if you have both SoL and swiftness, only 33%.

Actually wiki says that in-combat speed is actually capped at 25%, which I didn’t know! So even with swiftness you’ll only be moving 125% base.

Ehecatl.9172:

Do any of us really know if anyone else exists?

:o

Mind = blown!

Blast finisher in philosophy field causes 3 stacks of existential angst. I curl up in a ball and cry.

No I’m not really frustrated, like I pointed out conditionmancer is also hard for other builds. It feels like I’m either dominating or getting rolled, with very little middle ground in between. Which is why it feels like there are more builds in the game that are hard counters to other builds. Maybe “hard” counter isn’t exactly right, maybe they’re extremely strong soft counters. But it really does feel like the rock<paper<scissors effect is stronger nowadays than it used to be. Does nobody else think so?

Is it just me, or are hard counters a lot, well, harder than they were back when the game was released? I confess I don’t have huge amounts of experience with all sorts of different builds, but back in the early days the only opponents I found insanely hard to defeat were s/d elementalists. They just had too much condi cleansing for me as a condition Necro, I had to outplay them till my fingers bled to stand a chance. Nowadays, though, there’s all sorts of builds I just don’t stand a chance against (power rangers, for instance), no matter how well I play, and, conversely, builds that just can’t touch me, however much they can outplay me (like rabid engis).

Clearly not every matchup falls into the “eat or be eaten” categories. A few matchups are fairly even, others one side has an advantage, but not an insuperable one. But it’s my impression that the number of builds that are absolute hard counters to others has increased, and I don’t like it. The causes of this aren’t hard to figure out: some questionable design decisions (like Diamond Skin, though thankfully I don’t see many people running it), and slow but steady power creep in most other areas (like ever so slightly decreasing the cast time of high damage channelled skills for most professions).

Do people agree that there are more hard counters in the game nowadays? Or is that just a misleading impression I’ve formed because of the builds people run at around my MMR? Can anyone come up with an argument why that could be a good thing, or do people mostly agree with me that it sucks?

SupahSpankeh.8452:

We’re not mobile and we’re not stable.

In a game where you must be one or the other to survive spikes and trains, this sort of sucks.

Yeah agreed. Even our best escapes are totally flakey. The number of times I pushed Necrotic Traversal only to be teleported about 2cm to the left because of some weird pathing issue to my Flesh Wurm is beyond reckoning.

Mind you, we wouldn’t HAVE to be either mobile or stable if every single profession in the game hadn’t been boosted to the point of absurdity by relentless power creep.

Yeah the healing power is a real problem, and it’s also hard to make a build that leverages both power and condition damage. If you try to go for bleeds you’re stuck on scepter, which has terrible power scaling. It makes more sense to go for burning and/or terror, and use a power weapon, but those conditions are locked behind Master and Grandmaster traits, so it’s impossible to get them without gimping your build in some other way. (eg you might have to sacrifice Deathly Perception, which tbh is way more raw DPS than Dhuumfire, or go without Spectral Attunement, which you really need for LF generation)

I played around with this extensively, I just don’t think there’s any good way to do it.

Quincy.2198:

Indeed, the ladder in GW1 kept it fun and serious. Smurf guilds, loved this…

I agree with you, but I didn’t want to take GvG as example… We already know that GvG was the best thing ever. So I tried to do it in a different way. Also, didn’t had much time.

OMG following smurf guilds was hilarious! For anyone who doesn’t know, those are guilds the top teams represented when they wanted to try out some new build, whether to see if it worked, or because it was some sort of insane hilarious gimmick build they were trying just for fun (such as double Curse of Rodgort + Greater Conflagration + a minionmancer for insane aoe burning!) It was really hard to identify them because most people used 2nd accounts to smurf on, but sometimes there’d be a couple of people playing on their primary account so you could spot them.

Of course, you wouldn’t need second accounts to do it in GW2 cause people could just represent a different guild. So if Cheese Mode wanted to play 5xThief just for a laugh, they could tag up to Smurf Wars [tag] and play without affecting their team rating. Or if you and 4 pvper friends are in a big PvE guild, you can get together and form a separate guild of your own, so that when your casual guildies play they won’t have to face top-100 teams cause you dragged up their rating. And you can compete seriously without leaving the pve guild you met in, just change tags when you’re competing seriously. The multiple guild system is PERFECT for the guild ladder system we had in GW1! It solves all the problems that we had in GW1 in fact!

Oh and yeah, I agree that gvg was the best thing ever, but this system would work perfectly well with conquest too

Sounds fun, Bhawb. And shorter podcasts are just fine!

Quincy.2198:

The reason I am not playing with a team anymore for nearly a year, is because we can TPvP but not play the tournies like TOG, ESL etc. We should create more opportunities to play (and gamemodes, but that’s coming I heard) to create the enthusiasm that we had in GW1 PvP. It had two essential things; different modes and different play times (pointing out to GvG) so a team can choose on what days they regularly play.

The reason you had more opportunities to play in GW1 was because the tournaments were not open enrolment: your guild could only get an invitation by getting to the top of the ladder. Therefore, every single GvG you played mattered because it got you points and helped you improve your rating. It mattered whether you played on a Monday or a Thursday or a Sunday, and it mattered whether you played at 4am or in prime time.

In GW2, otoh, only the Thursday tournaments, and the qualifiers for WTS feel like they “matter”. You could be slumming it on the 50% of the leaderboards by tanking your rank, and you’ll still go to Beijing if you play well at the qualifiers. So the way you play day in day out doesn’t feel like it matters, it just feels like practice. And there’s only so much practice you can do without an immediate sense of reward and achievement before burning out. Sure, you can climb up the leaderboard, but, unlike GW1, the leaderboard doesn’t matter for tournament purposes, so people who aspire to tournament-level competition don’t feel like they’re rewarded. And if they have to play several lengthy rounds of qualifiers, and they get knocked out because one of their members couldn’t make one day of qualifiers, or any other reason, I think that’s so disheartening it would make a lot of people quit, as happened with CM.

If guild-based rankings/leaderboards were introduced, and the format for big tournaments was changed from open enrolment to invitation according to ladder rank, I think it would do a lot to build up people’s incentives to play more on a daily basis. It would help prevent burnout and make daily matches matter more to people.

I’d be happy with a cd increase, or a range reduction to 900, if it became a targeted teleport.

It was good to see it on the site, but the average player DOESN’T VISIT THE WEBSITE! Grouch kinda half-said that the TOG finals would receive in-game advertisement, and I didn’t see anything today, except for the magic find buff on my stat bar. My guildies were asking what it was!
Just have an in-game message flash across the screen, or an in-game mail or something! Come on!

Plexxing.2978:

manveruppd.7601:

I wish they’d gone a similar route for Unholy Martyr: making Life Transfer transfer conditions from allies to you with each pulse, so you could control exactly when it happened and cleanse your allies by a meaningful amount when you used it.

Or, expanding on that idea, making it a channeled consume conditions for DS.

Yeah that would also be a great idea! Basically I want underwater DS skills tbh, draw conditions from allies and then transfer them to enemies! :p

At everyone erplying to Tao: STOP FEEDING THE TROLLS.

nekretaal.6485:

The fear kinda makes the bind useless

Yeah exactly, that’s why I didn’t like it. Blinds are weak enough, such a trait would mean people would only take blinding skills for the fear.

I could see a point to the opposite though: a trait that goes “apply 5” of blind whenever you fear a target". Has to be a long duration blind to outlast the fear, otherwise it’s pointless, but it means fears apply a very mild damage debuff even after the CC duration expires, making them into a more useful defensive tool as well, gives the necro another half a second to get out of a bad situation. Not to mention that it would synergise great with Chilling Darkness.

Actually, on second thoughts, I wouldn’t make it “whenever you fear a target” but “on any target hit by Doom, Reaper’s Mark, or Spectral Wall”. That way it won’t proc on passive fears and could be a minor trait, but on the upside it would also proc even if they have stability and you don’t actuyally fear them, making it more useful defensively.

Err, just stick a 15" ICD on the trait and Plague isn’t a problem. Signet of Spite otoh…

However, while I think this is a cool idea thematically, I don’t see the point of it: you’re already debuffing them on blind, slapping a hard CC on top of that is overkill.

Generally, in this game, soft CC and debuffs are VASTLY underpowered. Cripples and Chills expire almost instantly on warriors, and hardly affect thieves at all cause they have shadowsteps and no cooldowns; weakness is very short duration and high priority on most cleanses; and blinds only block a single attack, and are short duration. That’s why everyone relies on hard CC like fears, immobs, KD and stuns instead. If you introduced a trait like this, it would just devalue soft CC even more, because necros would only take blinds to get extra fears.

Instead, I’d love to see soft CC boosted, with duration buffs to weakening shroud and chilling darkness, a MASSIVE buff to withering precision, and nerfs to cheesy stuff like Dogged March. Possibly even a change to how Blind works (something like “50% chance to miss while blinded”, rather than just missing wiht the next attack). That way we can play condi the way we were intended to: slowly whittling them down and making it hard for them to catch us, rather than bursting them down with chain-fears!

HOWEVER, this would inevitably have to come accompanied with a brand new pvp gamemode where it doesn’t matter as much how fast you kill people, because, let’s face it, if you take 2 minutes to kill anything while the node is ticking points for htem you haven’t done your team any favours! :p

I agree with most of what’s been said, but I’m surprised no-one’s mentioned transfusion. It’s a great example of how traits should work: ie. not just making skills hit harder or reducing their recharge, but completely transforming their functionality. I wish they’d gone a similar route for Unholy Martyr: making Life Transfer transfer conditions from allies to you with each pulse, so you could control exactly when it happened and cleanse your allies by a meaningful amount when you used it.

Also (and this is a bit of a back-handed compliment, I know), I loved the functionality of PRE-NERF Putrid Mark! #RESTOREALLYCLEANSINGKKTHKSBYE

That’s how it used to work in betas and I really think thjey should revert it to that! It’s not a very good gap closer because of the slow projectile speed: it’s so slow that if you cast it from 900-1200 range the target can literally outrun the projectile till they’re out of range! Therefore, it’s only good for using while actually in combat, and while it’s a pretty good in-combat ability, what the necro needs is more mobility, both offensively and defensively.

Bhawb.7408:

If boons were cut back Necromancer would have even less viability because our only niche now is to remove the boons.

I disagree, our boon removals were more powerful and meaningful before April, when the current boon stack meta became the new norm. There are SO MANY passive procs of might, swiftness, protection, regen etc that it’s hard to corrupt the boons that REALLY hurt like stability! Even with the new Path of Corruption trait we can’t keep up as well as we used to be able to! So many times I used Dark Path on a warrior that had stab and vigor on him, only for him to get a passive proc of Might IN THE TIME IT TOOK FOR THE PROJECTILE TO LAND! And those few seconds of weakness he got instead of being feared aren’t worth anything, particularly since they’ll get removed by a Cleansing Burst 3" later.

Bhawb.7408:

A successful team beating other highly skilled teams with a Necromancer where the Necromancer is actually a vital member to their composition would be far better evidence.

Sadly I don’t think we’ll ever see this with a necromancer at all, even if they buff us to the sky, because necromancer skills have very little synergy with those of other professions. It’s not like we provide pbaoe support and healing like Guardians or some ele builds can. Or that we can give party-wide might by blasting our own and others’ fire fields like the current celestial meta builds do. It’s just an inherently selfish profession the way it was designed, and I think whether they buff us or nerf us it’ll stay pretty selfish in overall approach.

TBH I think this is the major weakness with this game: that no matter how much you try to customise your build through traits and gear, a profession can’t stray too far from what the designers intended it to be like. And that’s diametrically opposite to what they promised us pre-release, when they were saying that you can choose your own playstyle no matter which class you played. What we need is a bigger variety of traits, which don’t just enhance skills or give passive buffs, but which fundamentally alter the way skills work.

Doesn’t Vee Wee normally post as ArrDee.2573? Is this a second account or something?

zaced.7948:

something that was never alive can not be dead. – some uberwise long dead chinese dude (probably)

The Ironborn were Chinese? :o

/What is dead may never die.