Guild Wars 2

I would happily take lower damage for condi transfer and slightly faster activation time. Then again I play condi, so current life blast doesn’t do too much for me… :p

I would also happily use a trait that TURNED life blast into plague blast! Have they ever done that? A trait that also has a negative effect on the skill it affects (reduced damage in this case)? Also, what would happen to plague blast if you had that trait equipped?

Speed up the pace of engagements? Weird you should say that, I and a lot of people actually think the speed of the combat should go WAY down instead to be followable! Autoattack damage needs to be drastically decreased, and the casting times of other abilities (except stunbreaks obviously) needs to go up, as well as their casting animations made more visually distinct, so that they are easily telegraphed, both to players and to audiences, allowing for meaningful dodges, interrupts, and other clutch moves.

Damage should be better balanced too. I have no problem with zerker thieves being able to burst someone down from 100-0 on their own, but it should have a significant cost to them, forcing them to blow all their cooldowns. Currently initiative regenerates so quickly that if it didn’t work the first time htey’re able to come back and try it again 5" later! That’s way too soon for their target to have gotten back any of their defensive cooldowns, and way too soon for a teammate to have come to help.

CC also needs to be reduced. It shouldn’t be possible for a single player to chain-CC someone until they have completely burst them down. If 2 people team up and alternate their CC, that’s fine, but if a single character has that amount of CC, their damage should also be appropriately low.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I consider this a different problem than the readability of Asura animations. Yes, they could be fixed in the same way with many of the solutions the players have suggested. However, all melee attacks hit outside the visible animation for all races. That specific problem is not easy to solve because it is a product of us trying to create fluid combat.

A. Do you not agree that the degree of the problem much smaller for the melee animations of other races than it is for those of Asuras?
B. Do you believe that the design decisions that led to this problem fulfil the objective of creating fluid combat?

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

Increasing streak effects contradicts a previously made statement about reducing particle in WvW and Pvp to clear up screen pollution. If I understand the built focus, it was to be a highly animated game. The effects are not important, being able to recognize which attack is which should be, and understandably so, be the main concern.

Well the main problem with “screen pollution” isn’t so much the size of the particle effects, but their density, opacity (they obscure character models), and bloom and glowy effects (hey I’m not a graphics engineer! :p ). Big explosions occlude everything around them because they’re just too bright and beautiful. What you want is less three-dimensional effects that mostly occur along the surface of the ground rather than having big blooming 3D effects. You want them to come up to the knee of in-game characters, not be big enough that some Asuras can hide inside them! You also want them to be sparser, more transparent, and less bright. The last three probably don’t even require a redesign of the effects: they’re sliders an artist can adjust in their graphics software! You can make particle effects bigger (or, in the case of Asuras, THE RIGHT SIZE) without making them give people epileptic seizures.

I can respect the asura were built with a design concept in mind. The swagger, topsy turvy effect to them is implemented well, but this only adds to the confusion of what they are doing. When this is paired that they also have unique animations quite different from the other cultures (See guardian staff channels. Human male crouches and pulses, female human levitates and pulses etc) Asura climb and swirl. It is this swirling that they also use on things like guardian hammer skills, evading and simply coming to a stop after running. The cue’s that start/finish a lot of their animations are the same.

Agreed, but that’s not necessarily a problem: casting animations doesn’t need to mean a character waving their arms around. You can have different decals and particle effects appearing around them or above their heads, and they normally do a MUCH better job of telegraphing a skill activation. Examples include the pulses around a Guardian when they use Empower, the Signet of Spite decal appearing over a necro’s head when they use the signet’s active, the little reaper thing showing up over a necro’s head when they use their downed #2 skill (or their DS3 skill, although ironically it’s an instant cast skill so having an easy to see animation doesn’t make it easier to dodge…).

These are things which the artists who worked on GW1 had MASTERED, and I have no idea why they didn’t carry that design style over. GW1 had casting bars, but honestly, you didn’t need them. The casting animations were so distinct, and so easy to see floating over the caster’s (or, in some cases, the target’s) heads, or swirling around their feet, that after a few weeks of pvping you would learn 90% of the most commonly used skills by heart without making an effort. Just watch this and I guarantee you will be able to recognise the animation for Protective Spirit within 60 seconds effortlessly.

Well the thing is, the more mechanically complex a game is, the less scope for team co-ordination there is. I don’t mean teamwork in terms of map movement (although that too, to an extent, as fights are usually quick and painful unless one side is a bunker, so it’s not like a teammate can move from another point to reinforce in time), but mostly in terms of in-combat coordination.

Match history would be nice, but I actually think match recordings would be better. I would happily pay gems for Spectator Mode-style replays of my games that I could download to a “Replays” folder to rewatch at my leisure. Not all of us record all our games after all, and an in-engine replay would take up a lot less HDD space than a video. Plus, an in-engine replay would allow me to go check out what my teammates or opponents were doing, and therefore learn and improve as a player a lot more.

Not to mention how much it would help pro teams review their matches and make multi-camera, multi-pov video replays of their games to upload to Youtube for publicity purposes, or to make tutorials for crappier players like me!

I’m really hyped that you’ll be doing balance previews again! The long silence preceding the big Feature Patch was maddening, and it’s a relief that you’ll be including us in the process again!

On the downside, the timing of your previews gives me some scope for concern: Ready Up is once every 2 weeks. If you continue previewing 2 professions per episode, that means that the next balance patch is AT A MINIMUM 8 and a half weeks away! That’s way too long guys! Bimonthly is ok for a major rebalancing, but I would like to see smaller balance tweaks on AT LEAST a monthly basis!

Apolo.5942:

Fights are simply too fast paced, too boiled down to who gets the most APM, tactics get way to much of a second seat, the only time you see tactics is in WvW ironically because its the one time you might run into 1v1 or 2v1 situations, the rest is a mess of flying colors. Take lol, it has 4 character skills and it has become the most played game in the world. GW1 had 8 and was one of the most successful pvp mmos of its time. GW2 has 16 minimum and has failed miserably, notice a trend there?.

I’m sadly coming to the conclusion that you’re right. In making GW2 a “real MMO”, where your character could wander around in the world and deal with most content solo, they gave us too many abilities and lost that simple elegance and dependence on teamplay that GW1 had.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I can’t think of a way to fix this off the top of my head without plastering ground decals all over the place or somehow making streak effects better show the attack arc. Any other ideas?

Either:
a. Make spell animations not scale with character size (it won’t look pretty, but it’ll be accurate), or
b. scale all characters of all races to the same size in pvp and wvw, and retain spell effect scaling. I know you have the technology to do that due to the shrink/enlarge potions.

You pretty much covered all the Conquest-specific roles, but I for one would love to see ANet enable classes to fulfil more than one role. Currently, as you point out, Warriors, Engis, and eles are the ones best able to do this. They’ve also made it easier for Guardians to play more offensive roles with the April patch, though they’re still not as flexible as the other 3. I’d like to see the other classes gain that sort of flexibility too. Within reason of course: I don’t expect to ever be able to play a Thief as a mid-bunker, obviously!

I don’t own a custom arena, so it’s possible that some of these options are already in there. Nonetheless, these are the kind of options I would like to see custom arenas get to make me want to own one of my own:
1. Ability to set the points awarded for kills. Range 0-100.
2. Ability to set the points awarded and the intervals for point gain for owning capture nodes, individually for each node. For instance maybe I want node A to award 0 points, B to award 1 point/5 seconds, and C to award 3 points/1 second. Range 0-100 points per 1-60 seconds, per point individually.
3. Ability to control time required to cap and decap a node, on a per-node basis individually. Range 1-30".
4. Ability to switch off individual features of the map, and/or control their recurrence intervals. For instance maybe I want Tranquility to appear only once on Temple, or the trebs to be disabled on Kyhlo, or for the trebs to be enabled but the repair kit to not appear when they’re destroyed, or even for the trebs to start off destroyed, or for there to be fewer NPCs in each base on Legacy, or for the NPCs in Forest to award less or more points, or spawn at longer or shorter intervals.
4. Ability to add secondary effects to owning capture points. Such as, for instance, stat buffs. Maybe you could have a King of the Hill gamemode, where only the central point awarded points, but the other 2 gave significant stat buffs. Or maybe capturing the enemy’s home point on Kyhlo automatically repaired your treb. etc.
5. Ability to add communable points (like those in Temple) to various pre-set points on the map.
6. Ability to force all player models to a certain preset and/or size.

I realise some of these are pretty blue-skies and would need a lot of work, but I believe points 1-3 would actually be fairly easy to implement, as they add nothing new to the maps, merely change parameters which you guys had already programmed into your maps. One gameplay programmer could have it ready in a month, and it would allow us to do so much more with our arenas! Please consider implementing these extra options. I for one pledge that if parameters 1-3 were configurable in custom arenas, I would buy one and run it until the heat death of the universe.

I’ve been thinking there should be a “cancel action” button too. It allows players to do so much more. I remember once I was watching a GW1 tournament match (don’t remember which guilds, I think one was [Evil]), and a ranger had been sent to kill the other team’s flag runner, who was a warrior. The warrior was really low, but if he could cast his healing signet he would make it back to the flagstand. The warrior player knew that the ranger had two interrupts on his skillbar, and knew that if his signet got interrupted he would die. What followed was probably the most intense few seconds of e-sports I ever saw, as the two faced each other in a standoff, the warrior repeatedly casting and cancelling the cast on his signet, trying to draw the ranger’s interrupt, until eventually, he saw it happen, cancelled just in time for his signet not to be caught by it, and immediately recast with no fear of being interrupted.

Poplolita.2638:

I think the first step to achieve this is by making our debuff harder to remove. Wouldn’t making some skills work like impale be the answer? I gave an example with dark path.

Yep, that’s one way to do it: have a debuff that “marks” an opponent and applies conditions gradually over time, rather than stacking them all immediately for easy removal.

The other way would be lower cooldowns on some of our direct applications, whether these are skills or trait procs (with lower durations to compensate). Withering Precision is the perfect candidate for this: 3" duration/10"cd would make it reasonable. Combined with Weakening Shroud that would give reasonable uptime.

Another way would be skills (or traits) that applied an “aura” to the necromancer which applied debuffs to enemies either around the necro or hitting the necro. We already have stuff like this, think of stuff like Locust Swarm or Reaper’s Protection. But imagine if we had a trait that modified Spectral skills so that they also blinded anyone hitting the necro during their duration? Or something like the mesmer’s Chaos Armor?
Obviously, the more “active” the conditions for the proc, the more severe the condition would be. THAT’S what “attrition” is, stuff that punishes you for hitting me!

2. I think AA is already strong as it is. Puting 1 stack of torment every 2 sec just by spamming AA will make it over the top imo. If I recall, arenaNet already removed 1 stack of bleed on #2, so why not add 1-2 stack(s) of torment in #3 scepter to balance it out? The 10 sec cooldown will balance it out, and avoid some spam. Make it require bleed and poison on the target in order to put torment (See fire grab with elementalist), thus people can predict #3, and cleanse/dodge before it lands in order to counter it.

I agree, sceptre AA is pretty sick already. What we need is different conditions on the rest of the skills. How about 1 stack of Torment on Grasping Dead rather than 2 stacks of bleed? And something else on 3 (Feast of Corruption), cause atm it’s useless. As it is it’s trying to do 2 things: it wants to be both a “finisher” skill that gives the necro some direct damage to burst their target down with after they’ve loaded them up with conditions, and it’s a life force-building skill, which means you have to use it during the fight as well, because death shroud is your only defence and a big source of damaging conditions. But currently it fulfils neither of those roles well: the physical damage isn’t enough to act as a finisher (I’d much prefer SoS→fear lock), and trying to use it to build life force results in a huge drop in DPS because you’re not autoattacking.
They should instead give it some conditional functionality that does something different to a target without any conditions (possibly gain additional life force – A LOT of it), and change the bonus damage so it’s a flat amount that doesn’t scale with your power rather than +8% of the base damage.

Darnis.4056:

My main is a power necro and find this misleading. We start out with 0 LF

By freecasting Minions prematch and switching back to normal utilities you start out with a whole lot more then 0 LF.

Lol, that reminds me of teams in Tombs in GW1 who would bring a Blood is Power necro to life-sacrifice himself to death pre-match so their MM could summon minions :p

Sors Immani.8429:

Siphoned Power
You and nearby allies gain Might (2x – 4 sec) and Vigor (4 sec) when you apply Weakness to your target.
(passive cooldown: 10 sec)
You and nearby allies gain Protection (1 sec) when you apply Vulnerability to your target.
Radius: 600
Targets: 5

I actually like this.

Bhawb.7408:

Oh okay, my bad then.

No man, that was his bad. His bad entirely.

@Bhawb, to be fair to Peters, the “Putrid Mark going on full CD when it’s interrupted is intentional” statement was Tyler Chapman. And yes, it was a shameless lie right to our faces and it still irks me. Up until then I had so much trust in ANet!

I remember John Peters or someone talking about this trait and saying they can’t buff it because of the fact that it triggers while in DS. So in his imagination I can just sit there at <25% HP while in DS and get hit until I get to 25 might stacks. DS won’t run out, cause it infinitely recharges, and obviously if I’m at <25% HP with only DS to protect me I’m still fighting, NOT running away so I can heal up.
Warning: above paragraph may contain sarcasm.

We’ve heard the “can’t give you that because DS would make it too powerful” argument so much in the last 2 years it’s beyond comical. DS is not a cool mechanic, it’s difficult to balance, and it’s ruining the game for us. It’s time to change it already!
Not to mention that since the feature patch thre’s so much burst damage in the game that you can be literally 1-shot from >25% health quite easily, so you won’t even have time to jump into DS and build might stacks!

If they’re concerned about us being able to gain infinite might stacks, remove the HP threshold completely, and give it an ICD. So “gain X Might when struck (10” CD)" I mean kitten already!

CntrlAltDefeat.1465:

ele/engi..especially the turret boon spam has negated necro. Whatever you corrupt will be stacked again in a jiffy.

That is true, boon removal/corruption isn’t about debuffing the enemy anymore. They just get reapplied SO QUICKLY. But it’s still useful for spiking down an opponent when they’re low. 5 new condis on them overwhelm their cleansing, and if you corrupt stability can make it easier to stun-lock them while bursting them down.

ANet have gone overboard, imho, with the boon spam they’ve given to players. The frequency of boon application (especially passive boon procs from runesets and turrets) have made boons less meaningful. I would rather the procs were less frequent, but applied deeper stacks of boons (eg 2 stacks of might with a 10" ICD instead of 1 stack with 5"). And I think they need to introduce some counterplay as well, in the form of something like Well of the Profane from GW1

Also, I really think Corrupt Boon needs to be re-examined. It’s not a weak skill by any means, but the arbitrary priority list it uses to remove boons in makes it extremely situational in the current meta. There’s just so many boons, that it becomes pretty much compulsory to combine it with a Path of Corruption or a Chill of Death proc to get anything important off them. That’s why so many necros prefer Signet of Spite: you’re just guaranteed certain pretty damaging conditions, no matter what boons your target has. It’s also the reason SoS is so hated: it’s unconditional, idiot-proof damage. I don’t agree that it’s overpowered, not in itself anyway (only when combined with a Corrupt Boon and some Terror-backed chain-fearing). But the condis from SoS themselves don’t do that much damage, there IS counterplay to it (though maybe the cast time should be slightly longer), and the reason people aren’t packing more cleansing is precisely because there’s so few necros in the game right now!

Tage.7045:

-If necro is bad in 1v1 situations that doesnt mean its useless class or bad. Its same like with mesmer its really bad and basically useless to do things for solo roam etc but in team fights if u have good supp, teamwork, coordinate ur burst with ur allies than its op and one of the best dps class in the game. Sometimes things that looks like trash on paper can be actually really usefull if u have good teamwork, gw is a team game.

Agreed, it’s not useless, but it’s sub-optimal, and there’s only 5 slots on the team. Isn’t that why your team aren’t running one, Tage?

Necro is in a pretty bad place right now. It’s still competitive, even at high level, if the player is good enough, but there’s no real incentive for a team to bring one. The only thing they do well that’s important in the current metagame is boon stripping. But shatter mesmers do it almost as well, and they bring other kinds of utility for a team that necro doesn’t (mobility with Portal, burst damage, stomp prevention with Mass Invis, diversion stomping). It doesn’t matter if you can still win fights or output decent damage: if you don’t bring any unique tools that your team needs you fall out of the metagame, and necros have lost their niche.

I’d like to see a buff to the amount of debuffs, snares, and other disabling effects a necro can output. There’s so much burst damage flying around these days, and the only thing mitigating it is extremely bunkery builds that output lots of pbaoe healing. There’s not much in the way of “denial” strategies designed to nerf incoming damage rather than just force-heal through it. If necros got better weakness uptime, more blinds and chills, some sort of snare that can affect teleports/shadowsteps (which currently do not have their range decreased by snares like other gap closers do – this combined with the Initiative system makes Thieves practically immune to chill!), more frequent access to torment to provide deeper condi stacks and protect those bleeds from cleansing, and ideally even confusion (I know I’m not the only one who remembers Spiteful Spirit!).

Finally, a reworking of Death Shroud to turn it into a proper sustain mechanic. It’s currently a balancing nightmare: a necromancer is as vulnerable as a naked baby at the start of a match when he’s caught without life force, but a wall of HP if he has a full bar. And it makes necros extremely resilient 1v1, but barely helps at all in team fights! There’s got to be a better way to balance it!

I’ve been thinking about this, and experimented with a few different variations. After playing celestial d/d ele a lot as well, I’ve come to the conclusion that celestial only works if you bear the following in mind when you’re building:
1. you gotta exploit all the stats, otherwise it’s a sub-par set. That includes not only the obvious (condition damage), but also healing power, which is quite tough for us to manage effectively because healing doesn’t go through DS.
2. celestial damage is mediocre without lots of might stacks. Even if you’re exploiting the condition damage as well as the physical damage properly.

With that in mind, I started thinking about what weapons to use. We need both conditions and physical damage, and unfortunately none of our weapons do both: scepter does plenty of bleeds and poison, but it scales atrociously. Axe and Dagger do decent physical damage, but no conditions.

We’re therefore going to look elsewhere for our condition damage then. Luckily, the two conditions that scale best (+25% of condition damage), are both accessible from within death shroud: burning, and fear! That’s right, we’re going back to that old Terror/Dhuumfire well!

With that in mind, I settled on dagger as my MH weapon: it has the best single target physical damage, the best life force generation, and also a decent heal in skill 2, helping us exploit that healing power. Having settled on this concept, the rest of the build was easy to come up with:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAoYWjc0Ucb5N22whbCchC63MAi2I/gJgy4IMA-TpBGwABeAAKOCAh2fAwhAowJAgZZAA
You’ll see that I chose 2 spectral stunbreakers for my utilities (the third can be by Corrupt Boon or Signet of Spite). I know that Flesh Wurm is a better stunbreak, having 2 spectrals helps me massively in building life force. I tried a signet-based variant (Plague, Locust, Spite) with Signet Mastery to build Might, and it was absolutely awful, I got trashed every single fight.
Traits-wise, the main difference from the old standard Dhuumfire build is Close to Death instead of master of terror. I’ve found the terror damage lacklustre without master of terror, but with frequent flashign into DS to proc Dhuumfire a necessity, Close to Death is still better. The other important trait is Reaper’s Might. I know a single stack per life blast isn’t much, but with its long duration (amplified further by Strength Runes), it’ll normally persist long enough after a fight to give you a little bit of a head start for the next fight.
Sigils were a tough choice. You definitely need might-generation on both weapon sets. You’ll be usign runes of strength, so you have to maximise those duration bonuses. For the 2nd slot I went for Doom in the dagger slot (since my only source of poison is on staff), and Blood on the other, but these are not crucial to the build: as long as you’ve got some might generation the 2nd sigil slot is up to you: Energy or Generosity sigils also work.
Staff as my 2nd weapon set was the result of a lot of testing. I’ve also experimented with dagger/warhorn+axe/dagger, but I’ve found that Deathly Swarm alone did not provide enough cleansing. Moreover, staff is useful for chasing, standing on ledges, aoeing stealthed thieves, fearing stompers etc. I never did well with axe on my other set.

After playing with this extensively, I came up with a slight variant that ditches Terror and goes full-on on the burning: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAoYWjc0UcbjN22whbCchaqlA63MAiWqbjw4ZB-TZhAwAXeAAgOCAAOFA42fQcZAA
Using Runes of Fire and Sigils of Smoldering, I can get a whole extra second of burning for epic 5" burns on Dhuumfire, which actually almost equals the lost damage from Terror (since your fears without Master of Terror usually tick once). Additionally, you can grab Deathly Perception for extra physical damage on that life blast. The downside is it’s a more one-dimensional build, and it feels a bit like a normal zerker necro but with burning instead of Close to Death. I find I do better against some classes with this variant, but some others completely ruin me. The first build otoh is a better all-rounder, but not as much damage.

(Note, Runes of Fire are perfectly viable as an alternative to Strength for the first build as well. You actually generate more Might stacks with them because of the 6 bonus, but in my opinion the bonus damage from Strength’s 6 bonus is marginally better. )

So after 3 days of playing around with this stuff, is it viable? Well, yeah, just about. But it’s definitely not optimal. You’re a beast in team fights (and not just because of Lich), but in 1v1 you’re going to have problems against certain builds, meaning you’re not as flexible and able to fill every position as a d/d ele would be. So yeah, it works ok, but you’re definitely better off as a conditionmancer, as you don’t utilise celestial nearly as efficiently as other professions can.

Yeah, it’s stomp→shroud (I bound DS to G to make it easier to roll), but the other way round when plaguestomping.

NeXeD.3042:

It’s not unclear I’ve already stated it the way you just stated it to say my way of saying it is unclear =).

Recap. You have 3k hp and 2k lf attack hits you for 3k. Instead of you going to 2k hp you get insta downed.

Actually I wasn’t trolling, I just missed this post. I might’ve been writing my last one while you posted it. This pretty much explains it though, thanks.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Nothing prevents you from bringing your Level 78 into the new map and doing all the new events, though.

I’m not sure if your lower levels can party up and join the instances of others (who are 80). Or whether there is any XP to be had, in that case.

That;s actually something!

Still unclear as to how the overflow “bug” actually works (ie. what happens, why it’s a bug, what was supposed to happen)

Meh… unhappy about this. Means my lowbies will languish.

I feel bad complaining about free content, but I have to say that season 1 of the living story was, for me, a fun way to level up my alts without having to repeat content I’ve already played 2 or 3 times before. When I logged in to my level 78 mesmer to do Gates of Maguuma and saw in the journal that it will “unlock at level 80” I was therefore really disappointed.

I’m mainly a pvp and wvw player. I did enjoy previous installments of the living story, but getting to level up my lowbies was a little bonus, and an extra incentive for me to play them. I no longer feel I’m getting the same benefit by being forced to do them on an 80 character. Instead, my only incentive to do them is to catch the window in which they’re accessible for free, which makes it more of a chore than an incentive.

Please make future installments of season 2 accessible to uplevelled lowbies, like season 1 was.

Chilli.2976:

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions on how to play, the thing is I know what to do, even if I go off point to hide etc, me myself as a guardian can’t do crap if I’m a bunker, I’m not even standing in the wells. @manveruppd, I was actually soaking all those hits up and healing at the same time, now imagine me being a Thief or a Mesmer for example.

Yeah I get it, I wasn’t implying that you didn’t see the attacks coming or anything, just pointing out that sometimes you’ve got to do what all your instincts as a bunker guardian tell you not to do and give up the point! Not right away – by all means, heal through them as much as you can, dodge till your endurance is used up, but then run off, wait behind a pillar for a couple seconds to get some endurance back, then jump on the point again before he can decap it completely, rinse, repeat. If by that point your teammates haven’t come to help you (you’d be amazed how quickly a Lich goes down once their stability is gone!), then it’s they who killed you, not the necro.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Roe.3679:

Lordrosicky.5813:

I would nerf the damage on DS#1 to be honest (being serious). No build should be based around 1 spam, it is lame and boring. Lich form is lame too but its a 3 minute cooldown and its counter able to never mind.

I have a theory that power necro has so much 1 spam because you have to focus so much on positioning and life force to actually survive. Not like most other builds that have like, real active defenses.

Well yeh at least the 1 spam is gated behind life force. It is still lame though. And power necro dies really fast.

It is balanced. But I would rather see buffs to areas like regen working in death shroud and nerfs slightly to the life blast damage

You’re both right: it’s not unbalanced, but it’s still boring and should be changed. The whole thing power necros do is spam dagger 1 to build life force so they can spam DS1. Sure you have to watch your positioning and kite proactively (because it’s too late once you get trained, with no vigor, blocks, or invlunerabilities), but it’s still pretty boring gameplay. That’s what happens when you gate both defence and offence behind life force generation – power necros spend most of each match with access to only 5 skills!

Dude, do you call taking ELEVEN hits in the face getting 1-shot? :-D those attacks have absolutely no homing to them: dodge, get out of the way, hide behind a pillar or on any ledge and he can’t hit you.

Yeah switch force to Doom or Earth, leverage that condition damage. I’d also change the chilling sigils to Hydromancy sigils, as more chills are always better than longer chills (people in pvp have cleanses).

What do you mean “if it’s enough to kill you”? As in, you have 2k life force + 2k HP, and you take a 5k hit? If that’s the case then surely it’s meant to go through death shroud and down you, right? I’m unclear as to what the bug is, what situations it occurs in, and what was supposed to happen instead.

Kadj.6725:

Also, another criticism I thought of with regards to the original suggestion:

Colorblindness exists, and is more common than you might think.

It isn’t a matter of seeing things in black and white, but instead “Those two HP bars look exactly the same to me.” It’s a tricky thing to develop games around.

Yup! Red-Green colourblind person here too. When I see the DS double-healthbar in my target overlay, the only way I can tell which is HP and which is Life Force is because one is under the other – colour-wise they look exactly the same to me. Putting the double healthbar in the tiny, cramped, party UI would make my retinas bleed trying to squint to tell which is which. It’s an idea that’ll make things even worse than they are now.

Bhawb.7408:

One of the biggest issues is that Deathshroud is the only mechanic that can actively hurt your team by being used without them knowing. How many thousands of times have eles seen a Necros HP get low and panic water heal/peel for them? How many thousands of times has a guardian panicked and popped massive CDs to protect the Necromancer from… their own degeneration?

Exactly! I’ve had a mesmer teammate burn his portal to come help me AND pop his Mass Invisibility when he thought I was low! And I was at nearly-full health, my target was already going down! This is a daily occurence for me, happens in almost every match when I have decent teammates who look out for each other.

And please don’t tell me “oh, voice comms”. We use voice comms, but GW2 is a very fast-paced game and sometimes when you see someone’s health bar drop you react instinctively before he even shouts for help! Plus you can’t reliably know that he didn’t actually try to shout for help but the voice ducking cut it out, or, if they’re using push to talk, that they were dodging and mashing keys too frantically to hit the push2talk button.

If we could receive heals through Deathshroud and people only ever saw our HP, this wouldn’t be a particularly big deal. But Necromancer is the only profession with two HP bars, and one of them that completely prevents the other from working.

A debate for a different time, perhaps, but I agree with that too

tl;dr PLEASE change party window to only display HP for necros! No-one needs to know our DS.

flow.6043:

I was refering to this one:

And does the bug persist no matter how much your base HP is?

Oh yeah, good point, forgot I asked that So I assume you tested with both carrion and rabid gear and you take half damage regardless?

Not quite.
There’s no rumour. The damage reduction exists, it was tested right after the patch for the displayed lf number went live.
However, not everyone knows about it because the only way to confirm is checking your lf pool before and after you take damage. The numbers on screen and in the combat log tell a different story.

In regards to whether you take -50% damage or it’s actually just half the number of what should be displayed:
The devs said our lf pool was 60% of our regular hp. Plus, the overflow damage matches the displayed number of your remaining lf pool.
So you might as well say: the devs were never right about the lf pool, the number should be twice as high, and overflow damage doubles damage taken to life force.
The result is the same, but it appears more likely that there’s a damage reduction in DS instead.

OK, the question of whether it’s actually a x2 LF pool or a 50% damage reduction is an interesting one. It should be testable with falling damage, as that hits you for a proportion of your total HP rather than a fixed amount. So we need to choose a drop that’s just large enough to kill you: if you’re still in DS at the bottom, it’s damage reduction, if you’ve been knocked out then it’s x2 LF pool. I’ll try to log in and test it tonight or tomorrow night. Your own falling test is inconclusive, as you seem to take 25% damage to your health bar when you fall from not inside DS, but slightly LESS than 25% of your LF pool when you fall in DS. So I’m guessing you didn’t fall from/to the exact same spot, as you should’ve taken about 300ish more damage in DS.

So what about the overflow bug that NeXeD was talking about? As I understand it, if the received damage is enough to knock you out of DS, then you suffer damage equivalent to your entire remaining LF pool, plus the original damage again to your HP?

This stuff is utterly gamechanging! If I’d known about them I’d never jump into DS to soak up a backstab if I have only a little LF left (as I end up suffering the whole damage to my HP and putting DS on recharge for no reason). And if you really get twice as much LF (or 50% damage reduction, doesn’t make a difference except for falling damage ), then OF COURSE carrion>rabid, especially with the new Death adept minor trait! I actually switched over to rabid after the patch due to the burstier meta (so many thieves with fire+air sigils…), but if this stuff is true I’m switching back in a heartbeat!

PS. Oh, and another thing! How does putting points in SR affect this stuff?

It’s unacceptable. Solo queue is a cesspool of human behaviour right now. Does ANet not employ any GMs? I would happily volunteer 3 hours a week to go through reports for them for free if they can’t afford real GMs!

Kadj.6725:

I’m actually a little confused as to why the party shows it at all. It makes sense to see it if you’re fighting a necro, but… it is, ultimately, a profession mechanic – not critical information. I don’t see mesmer clones, ranger pet HP, warrior adrenaline, thief initiative, or engineer kits – and I only see ele attunements and guardian attunements in the expanded party UI because they function like buffs.

Why do I have to see death shroud? This is an inconsistency in game design, not just a little quirk.

Quite! Completely inconsistent with how the party window works for everyone else! My theory is it was an inadvertent change from when they made the target UI display the double health bar when the necro is in DS, and they never got round to fixing it.

And, let’s not forget, not just annoyingly inconsistent, but ACTIVELY MISLEADING TO YOUR TEAMMATES!

One world, One health bar! :p

flow.6043:

Your original question was regarding whether or not the base hp was affecting the damage reduction in DS. It doesn’t.

Not really, as I didn’t know there was such a thing as damage reduction in DS, so my question cannot possibly have been that specific! :p I just asked “is this a thing?”

So the way I understand it is: the rumour is that there’s a 50% damage reduction, while you, by contrast, are saying that there’s no damage reduction, we just have twice as much life force HP as the UI claims we do, so when you take a hit for X damage, the amount of life force HP lost is in fact X/2, half what the combat log states. Right?

flow.6043:

I’m not sure what “steady weapons” would change when testing this, or a hotjoin server for that matter.

Well they always output the exact same damage vs the same target, so it would be pretty obvious. Assuming you take screenshots of your LF bar before and after each hit so we can see exactly how much LF was deducted (and assuming we also account for degen of course.

And the amount of hp is of course irrelevant since life force is percentage based.

Well, life force gain from skills and loss from degen is percentage based, but incoming damage isn’t, it’ll be in HP.

Then again, I have a theory that not every character is affected by patches in the same way:

That’s actually a fascinating theory, with frightening connotations about the codebase of the game…

Or: you know how Reaper’s Mark has a different cast animation from the other marks? Yeah… mine doesn’t. It’s the exact same animation as all the other marks, except that it’s now twice as fast.

For me 4 and 5 have a different animation to 2 and 3.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I think the best option would be to replicate the targeting UI where you can see both health bars at once. Question is: will they fit? :P

Evan, I’ve been playing necro since release, and on nearly every other match one of my teammates will think I’m almost dead and start shouting in panic over voice comms. The opposite has also happened, where I get focussed, go into DS and shout for help, but my teammates see the full bar of DS on the party window and get confused.

The only sensible option is TO ONLY SHOW ACTUAL HP on the party window, whether you’re in DS or not! DS is not a sustainable state for a pvp necro, only a very few niche builds are designed to stay in it for long periods of time. Plus you have no stunbreaks, no escapes, no condi cleanses, and no heals while in DS, so if you’re at low health you’re still nearly dead even if you have a full LF bar. So if you’re nearly dead when you pop into DS, you’re still nearly dead while in it, and you’ll be as good as dead when you get out (especially with the current bug that damages you twice if you get knocked out by damage!!).

Please, please, please, just revert the party UI to show our actual HP.

Yasi.9065:

Btw, did you notice that bird and dog AI are way better and way more responsive than necro minion AI? Funny how you have to run pirate runes as MM to have at least one pet that attacks immediatly instead of standing around for 30+ seconds and then deciding to wander off after you get downed.

I did actually notice, and moreover it’s tankier than most necro minions except Golem! It’s always either Pirate or Grove runes for me when I MM.

Huh? I’d be doing backflips for joy! Are you being sarcastic? Cause you know we can’t hear the tone of your voice, right? :p

The entire design philosophy of this game was to allow you to get information just by looking at the environment and enemy characters instead of a UI (hence the various “no more healthbar wars!” quotes in pre-release publicity), hence the decision to indicate ownership using the colour of the capture point and surrounding ring.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work. By the time you’re actually close enough to the point to see who owns and who’s capping, you’ve probably lost the point. Or, you got there in time because you were watching the UI (ie. the minimap and the 3 icons on the score bar), which does a much better job at conveying information. Even when you are there the capture point ground colour and surrounding ring are mostly occluded by spell particle effects, so you still have to look at the UI to see if you still own it. So even when you’re there it’s useless. Moreover, not only does it not provide much useful information, but in some cases it actually provides additional distraction! The surrounding ring is my main beef here, which is high enough that a small Asura character can fit in it entirely, which obscures casting animations and skill activation telegraphing. In one particular case (mid point in Temple), the surrounding ring is enough to seriously obscure your view of incoming enemies, because of how the point is on lower ground and all approaches to it are elevated. I’m not at my gaming PC now or I’d post a screenie, but when you tilt the camera up to see who’s coming the bottom half of your screen is seen as if through thick gauze because of the stupid ring around the capture point!

Why couldn’t you make it a flat 2D decal rather than a thick 3D haze that’s b igger than some character models???

There’s 2 threads a week on this, and never any comments by a developer. Yet some random dude goes and starts a thread asking for a MOBA-like gamemode, and the thread gets 10 ANet replies…

Guys, I know the majority of you still at ANet never worked on GW1. Possibly never even played GW1. But there’s a substantial number of your customers that played that game and bought GW2 solely on the strength of GW1’s pvp.

Now, I’m not gonna say you’re obliged to cater to these people simply because they gave you money and are repeat customers. Nor am I gonna whine that you kittened these people over, as GW2 offers a lot more than spvp and in most of those other areas it’s vastly superior to what GW1 offered. You have to do what’s best for the game, even if a portion of the playerbase don’t like it.

But OMFG you guys: doesn’t the fact that YOU HAVE so many customers who bought GW2 on the strength of GW1’s pvp tell you that YOU HAD SOMETHING GOOD THERE? That copying some of GW1’s systems and gamemodes MIGHT BE GOOD FOR THE GAME? It’s 2 years after the release of GW2 and there’s still people coming on here reminiscing about Heroes’ Ascent and GvG. This should tell you something! Other than the fact that the internet is full of moaners that is

I know it’s not trivial to implement and you can’t just “give it a try” and see if it works, but the writing’s been on the wall for pvp for over a year now. Giving us better rewards was a great first step, but if the game is repetitive and unfun all the imaginary gold in the world isn’t enough to keep people going.

flow.6043:

Well yeah, of course it’s a bug.

Anyway, right after the patch went live people noticed that we’ve become a lot tankier in DS. They tested and arrived at the conclusion that you have about 120% of your regular hp in life force without any points in Soul Reaping.
Devs denied it, but 2 months later we could confirm our suspicion: the devs rightfully assumed it was 60% because the number said so, but it was really 120% because of the damage reduction. And the only evidence of a damage reduction rather than a wrongly displayed number is the overflow damage.

How on earth can this possibly be a thing? And how on earth am I only just hearing about it a year after? I remember I was one of the people who noticed we were tankier in DS, but not twice as much! Has anyone tested in an empty hotjoin server using steady weapons to confirm? And does the bug persist no matter how much your base HP is? And how are the devs still not on top of this?

NeXeD.3042:

Ahh nice, but it would still be nice if they fixed it so we couldnt get double damaged when both our ds and health are low.

Is THIS a thing too? I did notice that ever since the feature patch I would sometimes get knocked out of DS and straight to downed even though I had a few thousand HP of regular health left… Is that what you’re talking about?

RashanDale.3609:

You would think implementing a second/third healthbar into the game without kittening up almost everything about it shouldnt be that difficult…

You would think they’d know that giving one profession two healthbars would be a nightmare to balance in the first place, but there you go…

Rennoko.5731:

I think it is a shame incremental balance has all but vanished from the game. Quarterly, at best, balance adjustments to the game don’t work for me.

I completely agree with you that balance patches are far too far apart. They should be at least monthly, and preferably bi-weekly if it’s just minor tweaks.

However, to be fair, the meta was so shaken up by the big feature patch, that it really took a while for things to settle and for the real consequences of the changes they made to emerge, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that the Strength runes nerf took this long.

There are far too many overused and underused skills to pretend like content is really what the game needs.

I agree with you and it’s a shame they don’’t realise it: making a few balance changes to enable a brand new build is pretty much equivalent to releasing new content – it lets people go back and do old stuff in a brand new way, in a whole new playstyle. It’s the main reason people make alts after all!
However, the fact remains that at this point in GW1’s lifecycle we already had 2 standalone new campaigns plus a mini-expansion, and 3 new pvp gamemodes. GW2 is lagging way behind in content as MMOs go. This isn’t to justify their letting useless skills languish underused – I don’t know if they’ve got people from the skill balance team also working on content (maybe scripting mob ai and monster skills or whatever), but they really really shouldn’t be!

Yeah, you’d have to vet people by asking them on to BoC as guests before you let them into a panel discussion with a developer, obviously, but hey, that’s a bunch of more episode ideas sorted for you!

They might agree to it if you brought in some of the hosts from the other profession podcasts to act as a panel. Call it a “BoC roundtable” or something

I have only one request from you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLcKtVwF-A
:)
Seriously though, I know nobody from ANet would be interested to come on, but who knows, if your viewership numbers go up it could be possible, in the future.

Failing that, I’d like to see you bring in other people, like you used to. Not necessarily necro players, mind. Talking to, say, a high-ranked spvp player, about what he expects from a necro teammate during a match, what he’s most worried about when he’s facing a necro on the other team, things like that, would be interesting. Or even possibly talking to hosts of other podcasts – I think you once mentioned you wanted to do an “cross-class discussion” kind of thing where the hosts from each SOAC profession podcast would come on each other’s shows as guests? That would also be interesting. Basically anything that’ll provide an alternate perspective on things. I watched your Minions episode yesterday, and while it was an informative discussion and you both had some great ideas on how to improve things, the fact that you both agreed on most things made it, well, not very interesting… It would be more exciting listening if you were actually arguing the topic with someone who disagreed with you, or at least had alternative ideas on things.

I agree, and it’s not just people disconnecting, it’s people afking midway through the game or autorunning on the spot. Those people don’t get caught by the system and reporting them does nothing.

Really puzzled that the mods aren’t deleting messages of the “why do an invitational? this game sucks!” type. Do you people go and post on the forums of other games you don’t like too?

NevirSayDie.6235:

The main problem is that the map gets less fun when you build specifically for it, not more fun.

Quoted for emphasis.

There used to be a bug with mesmer’s Halting Strike that could instagib you, but I think they fixed that. Does it always happen when you’re duelling against the same class, or with all sorts of different ones? Could you post screenshots of your combat log after it happens? Or best of all, record a fight where it happens and upload the vid to Youtube so we can see?