Guild Wars 2

I think burn guardians are fine too tbh. But, admittedly, I main necro… Still, they only do ONE CONDITION, and the skills with which they can apply multiple stacks are on much higher cooldowns than the same skills on d/d ele.

These threads keep cropping up, and the Leshinator keeps turning up to shoot them down. People need to learn that having a kittenload of losses in a row doesn’t mean that The System is conspiring against you. It’s just the way the game goes: combination of teammates’ performance, opponents’ performance, matchmaking, and how you yourself did.

I agree with the OP, it’s specific skills that need to be rebalanced, not burning itself. IMHO where they went wrong is that when they were rebalancing all the burns, they rebalanced them by increasing durations rather than increasing stacks. The problem with that is that long durations benefit far more from duration-increasing bonuses, and it allows them to combo with other skills to easily achieve those fat stacks anyway. This is mostly in relation to elementalist skills tbh, and contrasting them with engineer’s burns (where they mostly rebalanced them to give short-duration fat stacks rather than long-duration single-stacks) is telling: celestial and rabid engis are nowhere to be found these days, whereas celestial eles are stronger than ever.

MithranArkanere.8957:

• First the health circle should show ‘prospective damage’. You can’t visually see how much you are being damage with little numbers in stacks. It should appear visually in the health circle. For example, the future damage will appear colored pink/magenta like degeneration from bleeding or hexes in GW1, replacing the red. If your whole health circle goes pink, that means the conditions you have on you will take you down if you don’t remove them.
• Then, condition removals should give priority to the condition that would have a bigger prospective damage. Not merely the one doing more DPS, not just the one that’s going to last more, the one that will color a bigger chunk of the health bar based on DPS and duration.
• Additionally, healing from regeneration and other heal over time effects would also colorize the bar, making the ‘prospective healing’ look yellow if the total net regen/degen is positive. So if your regeneration can outheal conditions on you, you’ll see yellow chunk in your HP circle, and if regeneration can’t cope with it (which will obviously be most of the time), you’ll see the pink chunk showing how much health you are going to lose.
  <snip>

I like these suggestions very much! The regen/degen pips on the GW1 health bar were very helpful, and colouring a section of the GW2 health orb by the amount you’re about to lose or gain on the next tick would do the same job. The only problem with it is the fact that conditions and heals don’t all tick simultaneously in GW2. They all tick in 1" increments, sure, but in 1" increments from the moment they were applied, not on the 1" mark. Each stack has its own internal clock, which doesn’t tick by the match clock or the server clock, but in 1" increments from the moment it was applied on, which could be at 0.5 or 0.25 or 0.965 seconds after the “whole” second by match clock.

Not sure how they would do the colouring so that it’s accurate, since those 10 stacks of bleed might tick on the whole second, those 9 stacks of burning might tick 0.25" after the bleeds. It would have to be an approximate instead: aggregate the damage of all conditions on on the whole second mark, and colour that much of the health bar pink, irrespective of the fact that part of that damage might tick before the next whole second mark.

Not sure I agree with the “remove the most damage” suggestion though. Imagine if you get jumped by a thief, who applies blind, immobilise, and 1 stack of poison on you. By your suggestion, every cleanse would remove the poison, but we know that the immobilise is the more important condition to remove here, right? I think that, instead, we should have more targeted, conditional cleanses, like the elementalist’s Stop, drop, and roll which targets specific conditions. I actually think that trait is a little narrow, what I’d rather see is something that targets a specific condition and also does something else (eg. “remove Immobilise and two other conditions”, so it basically prioritises a specific condition but can be use as a generic cleanse as well). Or maybe something that has a bonus effect if you use it at the right time. For example, “remove 3 conditions. If a damaging condition is removed, heal yourself for X.” Or maybe “remove burning and 1 other condition. If burning is removed, remove an additional condition” so it’s a 1-condi cleanse if you don’t have burning on you, but a 3-condi cleanse if you do. Obviously in cases like the last two examples, the targeted condition would need to be prioritised if it’s the precondition for the bonus effect.

They won’t do it but I agree it would be awesome!

I’m surprised the OP hasn’t been infracted for repeatedly bumping a dead thread. There’s so much negativity in here that it beggars belief! Even a cursory glance at the matchmaking page in the wiki would tell you that party size is accounted for not just in one but in TWO ways: not only does the game try to match you up with parties of similar size, but also your MMR is inflated when you’re in a party!

Why does everyone attribute their losses solely to the enemy team being a premade? There are an AWFUL lot of terrible premades around! So many pve-only guilds running their once-a-week pvp event, so many WvW players jumping in for a couple games because the queue to their borderland was too long to bother with. There’s even premades that form up right in HotM, as you’d know if you read map chat, from people who don’t know each other, rarely if ever played together before, and don’t have their own voice comms server. The majority of casuals prefer to team up because they don’t really enjoy pvp enough to do it on their own, or because they find it terrifying on their own. They’re not great players, and their MMR is low, but it gets inflated when they queue up together and they routinely get paired against much better players. If your MMR is as high as you seem to think it is, you really should have no trouble beating these people, team or no team.

Voice comms are a legit and real advantage that premades have. However, not all premades necesarilly have them, and the game can’t detect it so they can’t overcompensate by inflate their MMR even more! Moreover, an experienced pvper will have much better map awareness than a casual and would be able to rotate well without voice comms. Plus, casuals can’t really be trusted to use their voice comms effectively. Who here hasn’t been frustrated by a teammate who dies on a point even though they told you they were fine 2" ago? A casual won’t always know they’re in a bad matchup, or they’ll get tunnel vision and won’t notice the thief coming to +1 their fight, or they might not communicate accurately and know how early they need to ask for help for you to get there in time.

My tl;dr is: don’t assume you lost cause they were a premade. You might have lost just because they’re better. Considering the OP never made it onto the old pre-Dec16 solo queue leaderboards according to gw2score.com, I’m assuming he’s not a former solo queue pro whose MMR suffered when solo queue was removed. Maybe his MMR simply was never as high as he assumed?

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

things went backwards when it was decided that condition removal became RNG instead of “last in first out” when the game was released 3 years ago.

personally, i prefer to set my own condition removal priorities.
at the moment, i think burning needs to be the first to go every kitten time.
followed by immobilize i guess.

It was definitely never “last-in, first-out”. I wish it was, it’s a sensible and predictable system. Instead, each cleansing skill/trait worked differently. In my experience, most worked from an internal priority list (eg “Immobilise gets removed first, burning second” etc), but it’s possible that there were some that worked on last-in/first-out.

x indigo x.6981:

“For generic condition removal, the most recently applied condition or conditions will be removed first.”

Source: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Condition

I’m not sure the wiki is correct: I seem to remember when the devs were going through the specialisation changes a couple weeks before the big June patch they said that removal (as well as conversion) would be changed to be random, to make all cleansing skills consistent.

Bhawb.7408:

So yes, non AAs can be made to function as the source of LF generation, but they have to be low CD, high generation, reliable to land, and can’t be the main damage/utility focal point of that weapon.

Agreed, and that’s also the reason Scepter 3 is bad: it has a long-ish 10" cooldown, and it tries to be both a source of LF generation AND a big-damage skill.

Wow, I main necro and I had no idea about this bug! I did have a few recent instances of people mysteriously rallying as I was stomping them, but I always assumed that they just got a rally from someone they had fought before fighting me getting stomped elsewhere on the map.
Has this been tested? Is the bug reliably repeatable?

nearlight.3064:

@manveruppd, what do you think necros will run when ele gets nerfed? Also I heard from a popular streamer that the ele balance dev is on vacation right now so thats why it hasn’t been nerfed yet… but I guess it will be soon since vacations can’t last forever.

Well the people who jumped on the necro bandwagon will go back to playing whatever else is overpowered. As for the people who main necro and want to play necro regardless… well, it depends on how the ele nerfs happen (IF they happen). If they nerf ele directly, without touching celestial signet’s stats, the signet necro will probably still be around. But if they also take stats off celestial it might leave signet necro too weak to be worth it, depending on how much they shave off. I guess soldier’s amulet minionmancer would be the next most viable thing in this meta, it’s got no sustain to speak of because anyone with aoe can literally KILL YOUR HEALING SKILL (lol), but a lot of up-front durability since you’re basically at 60k HP with a full shroud. I don’t see zerker shroudmancer making a comeback since the nerfs to air/fire sigils 2 weeks ago – I can’t get those delicious 5k crits anymore. And terrormancer is really bad atm, even against mesmers who have zero cleansing.

Lily.1935:

manveruppd.7601:

Lily.1935:

Mine’s a Techno Necromancer so none. Though I take some inspiration from the film character Herbert West from Re-animator.

I have noticed that the name Herbert West is in use… was that you?

Nope. A fellow Fan I’m sure. They’re probably a minion master.

If they’re NOT a minionmancer they should forfeit the name! Kicking myself for not reserving it earlier! :p

Lily.1935:

Mine’s a Techno Necromancer so none. Though I take some inspiration from the film character Herbert West from Re-animator.

I have noticed that the name Herbert West is in use… was that you?

It’s a “celebrity effect”. The champions are using that build, so all the me-too leetkiddies decide that if they just imitate them they’ll automatically get good themselves.

I’ve been using that build about 60% of the time in pvp since 23/6 (the rest of the time I was trying out different variations of condition builds to see if I could still make it work, and a bit of mucking about with minions), and I admit that it’s the best necromancer build available right now. It’s definitely viable (even at high level, as Abjured have shown), but it’s certainly not what I’d call optimal (or “meta” as the kids are calling it these days).

The reason I don’t think it’s optimal is because of the role it fills in your team. As someone using celestial amulet, the role you need to play is definitely that of a bunkery brawler. You’re not expected to hold 2v1 for days, but you definitely need to survive long enough to get reinforced. You’re not expected to deliver the same kind of bursty punishment as a zerker thief, but you need to pack a solid enough punch to help the thief down an enemy holding a point fast enough that THEY don’t get reinforced.

Here’s why I think celestial necro is suboptimal for that role: in terms of survivability, if you have full DS and Plague off cooldown, you can actually stand on a point longer than even an elementalist. If you have neither of these conditions, you go down almost as fast as someone in zerker gear. Moreover, an elementalist may be squishier, but they have multiple defensive skills, all on staggered cooldowns, and much better healing-over-time than the necro. An elementalist holding 2v1 can run off the point, go behind a pillar, heal, then jump on the point again, and repeat that a few seconds later. The necromancer, while being able to stay on the point longer, only has active heals (except for SoV’s passive effect, which is small), and two of them rely on lifestealing at short range. You can’t duck in and out of a fight, coming back at nearly full health, keeping the enemy busy without them being able to down you for as long as an ele can. Water attumenent comes off cooldown much faster than an empty life force bar can be refilled, is my main point! And if you decide that a point is lost and you’re better off helping elsewhere, you can’t just use a Burning Speed to zoom away from the fight (while evading!), getting away safely even at low health the way an elementalist can. If a necro commits to a fight they’ll either win or they’ll die there.

Ditto in terms of damage: while a celestial necro can inflict much higher sustained damage than an elementalist, they need DS off cooldown, a bunch of might stacks, and life force>50% to do that. Between Reaper’s Might and Signets of Suffering, you’re gonna build up some serious might if the fight goes on awhile, but before that your damage will be mediocre. By contrast, an elementalist’s sustained damage is lower, but they have a lot of high damage skills with staggered cooldowns, letting a good elementalist choose between pressuring you hard enough to force you to retreat, or saving some cooldowns for when you’re just low enough that they can checkmate you.

So if you’re comparing 1v1 on who to include in your team, celestial necro or celestial ele, ele wins hands down: they can fulfil that role much better. However, there’s one thing that makes the signet necro relevant, and why it’s still a decent include in most teams in spite of this: all those boon corruptions you can do make you the only thing that can make a d/d elementalist sweat a little! Cele necro is one of the few things that can sit 1v1 on a point against an ele for a significant amount of time. It’s one of the few builds that can even kill an ele 1v1, although a good ele will stay alive so long that either you or they will get reinforced. With elementalists being the strongest class right now, and one of the most popular in pvp, this means that a cele necro will always have a decent matchup against nearly all enemy teams. You might be a suboptimal matchup against nearly every other class in the game, but against an ele, you’re, well, ok, they’re not exactly quaking in their boots, but you counter them better than anyone else does (to the extent where anything as overpowered as today’s d/d ele can be “countered”). You’re not exactly the ele’s natural predator, more like that prey that’s really annoying for them to kill. You’re not a fox to their sheep: they’re the fox to your hedgehog.

So until ele gets nerfed, cele necro will find a place on pvp teams as a situational meta choice. When that happens, I expect people will realise that it’s not really the optimal class to feel that bunkery brawler role that celestial signet fills, and go back to using other things.

ronpierce.2760:

Whatever you do, don’t use it with slow on you incombat or you will find yourself ending up a mile away.

That’s hilarious! So movement skills aren’t affected by chills and cripples, but for some reason they’re actually BUFFED by slow?

I haven’t played the beta yet, but I’m not surprised you’re all complaining about the same thing: having no movement skills on GS, only one snare that’s longer than melee range, and the only charge locked in DS, it was expected that Reaper would struggle with mobility.

I’m not sure makign it a targeted charge is the best idea though, I think having it work like Burning Speed might let you use it to move around the map quickly as well, or get out of a fight when you’re being focussed. But I’m not sure if that’s viable – are you really gonna jump into shroud in between fights just to move from point to point? And if you have lifeforce and your shroud isn’t on cooldown , would you really need to use Death’s Charge to get out of a fight? I dunno. Like I said, haven’t played the beta yet so I can’t really try out these things, but my guess is having something that allows for freeform movement rather than requiring a target would be better. The problem with making it work like warrior’s Savage Leap is that if you want to use it some other way (ie just for mobility instead of taking a target), you’ll need to clear your target first, which is tricky in a big fight with lots of bodies, too easy to accidentally click on someone else, and then you’ll be running towards the enemy instead of away from them.

From when they showed it, I also thought the charge speed was kinda slow, do you all find that to be the case?

NeXeD.3042:

just for clarification as far as i know staff 4 and dagger 4 will both transfer the blind… thought it had been like this for a very long time as well.

I’m not sure they do anymore: I think their changing it to a random priority broke it somehow. I need to test to confirm (if someone wants to jump into an empty custom arena and cast signet of spite at me a few times let me know), but I’ve had a lot of transfers simply not work without getting a “blocked”, “obstructed”, or “evaded” message. They just simply don’t work. This happens more often with Plague Sig than with deathly swarm and putrid mark, but it has happened with those too. The only explanation I can think of is that the transfer is prioritising conditions other than the blind, and the blind is causing it to miss.

I dunno, I’m still not happy with Chilling Darkness as it is. If the chill was upped to 3-4" MAYBE it’d be ok with the 5" icd. If it’s gonna stay at 2" they should lower the ICD to 3", so that at least WoD gets to proc twice.

@Roe.3679: Death Shroud isn’t just about the number of life blasts you can pump out, it’s how long you can afford to stay in the fight and keep pumping out life blasts. DS lasts a lot less than 26" if you’re getting wailed on , as you well know, which limits your ability to stay in the fight and keep putting out damage.

I actually think the OP’s suggestions were all pretty balanced actually! I’d be happy to see any of them implemented, even though my own ideas are slightly different on some of them. For instance, I think Rending Claws should just become a cone skill (like Drake’s Breath), but I’d be happy if it was a tracking channel (like Life Siphon) as the OP suggests.

Similarly, I think the solution to Signet of Undeath would be to turn it into an elite. That way you can keep its current functionality, but boost it to a decent level (increase the passive’s life force gain, decrease the casting time of the active down to 2", like War Banner), and not have it be overpowered because you’re giving up an elite to do it. Mind you, I don’t think my solution is perfect either: there’s so much Quickness-stomping around that even with 2" you’ll be hard pressed to rez someone in time – there’s a reason no warrior takes War Banner anymore, and that reason is, well, the reason is Rampage’s 3k autoattacks and endless cc, but also a little bit the Quickness-stomps! :p

The only thing I don’t think they could ever implement is your Dhuumfire suggestion. I like your solution, but I don’t know if they have the capability to make traits change functionality when you equip different specialisations. (Which really begs the question: what are they going to do with Unyielding Blast?) I think the only way to make Dhuumfire not suck for core necros is to decrease the casting time of Life Blast so it’s the same as Reaper’s Shroud’s autoattack. You’d have to decrease LB’s damage proportionately as well, obviously, but I really think having an autoattack chance casting times just cause you spec a traitline is just asking for trouble down the line, it’ll create a balancing nightmare!

Yeah, I think people are misunderstanding what the OP was saying.

OP said that having a resource that makes you a lot stronger but declines really fast and is slow to build back up, is the kind of resource that a burst profession should have. He(?) didn’t say that the necromancer IS a burst profession. I think his point was precisely that the necromancer is NOT a burst profession, but it should have been, because the profession mechanic is designed like that.

The reason DS is a “bursty” mechanic is because you spend it fairly quickly, but it’s hard to build back up once it’s out. It’s the same as having high-damage skills on very long cooldowns: once they’re spent, either you’ve won the fight or you’re a sitting duck and you’re about to lose.

Obviously the necro isn’t a great burst class, and the OP wasn’t saying that. You can land some huge damage with wells if your enemies stand in them, but they’re easy to get out of, so you mostly use them for control and area denial rather than burst. You can do some pretty hard-hitting life blasts, but they’re slow and easy to avoid, so hardly “burst” in the “take half your healthbar away before you know what’kitten you” burst. Most importantly, unlike the burst mechanics of other professions, DS doesn’t regenerate out of a fight. A thief can go into stealth and wait for their initiative to regenerate. A mesmer can hide behind scenery until their cooldowns come back. But a necromancer has to keep attacking to generate more life force. Since life force is also the necromancer’s only survivability mechanic, this is pretty counterintuitive. “Oh no, I’ve run out of my only means of protection! I must get in my enemy’s face and let them wail on me until it comes back!” It’s not a total wash, we have stuff like Spectral Armour etc, but with damage continuously going up it’s hard for it to cut it.

If they wanted to make attrition a viable option for a necro, they would have to seriously increase the rate at which life force can be generated in combat. However, you have to do it in a way that’s only usable for condition builds, cause otherwise burst builds would pretty much get neverending burst. I think the only way to do that is by putting it on the actual weapon skills, and mainly scepter, or maybe to introduce a trait that improves life force gain on a scale with your condition damage attribute.

Frankly though, the whole class is a total mess, with jury rigged mechanics and makeshift pathes that fail to keep up with the power creep of other classes. I really think DS should just be redesigned from the ground up in a way that’s compatible with the current state of the game. For one thing, with the ridiiculous amount of damage that’s flying around these days, I don’t understand why we should be starting off empty in pvp. Let people start with full life force, make life force drain faster while in DS, and increase the rate at which you can regenerate it by hurting people! That way it stops the necro from being a sitting duck at the start of a match, it lets the burst builds play like burst builds and open strong instead of sitting on a ledge and going “hold on lemme lay a few soul marks first so I don’t get one-shot when I jump onto the point”, it lets the attrition builds actually play like attrition builds by having a chance to keep their survivability mechanic up, and it preserves the unique flavour of the necromancer by forcing you to stay in a fight to regenerate your resources rather than letting you do it by running off and hiding and thereby turning you into a goth-themed thief.

They can do what you call “aoe proc”. Skills that have a separate ICD per target (like Shocking Aura and FLame Aura) use what you call “aoe proc”. They could have made Chilling Darkness have a separate ICD per target. It still would have been a huge nerf to Well of Darkness and Plague but not as big as the current implementation is. The nerf had no rhyme or reason to it.

Nothing to do with China, necro minions have always looked different from the stereotypical zombies and skeletons in ANet’s games. The Bone Horror in GW1 was the one that looked closest to a standard skeleton, but even that was weird with its creepy eyeless face. My favourites were the Bone Fiends (or headless chickens as I liked to call them).

I’ve often said though that there’s a lot of people (me included) who’d pay gems for custom minion skins! (and custom turret skins for engis etc) Maybe zombie kittens instead of Bone Minions, or clown face paint for the Flesh Golem, stuff like that. Would be funny and cool!

First class video, comedy masterpiece dude! Have some +1s!

Lily.1935:

Zetsumei.4975:

I think we should highlight that while we did initially ask for terror to be moved down that was because we wanted the old version of the lingering curses trait where it sounded like all condis would have +100% duration while on the scepter weapon set. But they nerfed the trait AND moved terror down.

Actually, we didn’t want it moved down. Toward the end of the discussion on the traits People wanted Terror to stay at grandmaster and fused with Fear of Death(once Master of terror) and increase its damage to compete with Lingering Curse in a more bursty role.

Yeah that would’ve made sense, make you choose between Terror for burst or Lingering Curse for duration. Unfortunately they nerfed Lingering Curse to the ground so that’s no longer a meaningful choice. Personally I would rather Path of Corruption go up to GM where it used to be, and that way you could have a choice between WEakening Shroud if you have enough crit chance to proc it, or PoC if you’re running Carrion.

Saiyan.1704:

People supporting Diamond Skin as if the trait is justifiable.

People Defending Diamond Skin

hide spoiler

“Yall are using Rabids, you should beat them with Carrion”
Nothing changes. Both amulets have the same performance against DS. You have 0 experience about this and should stop posting here.

“Oh well, it’s a team game. No one 1v1’s and if they do it only lasts for 5s.”
Want me to list Tournament videos of where people 1v1ing for 10+ seconds? More importantly, list videos where losing 1v1’s caused people a node and a potential comeback? 1v1 happens in Tournaments ALL the time.

Reasons against Diamond Skin

hide spoiler

“No other single trait counters an entire build like Diamond Skin”
No one can rebuttal this.

“There is no counterplay against it if you’re conditions.”
No one can rebuttal this.

As if Conditions didn’t have to worry about the Numerous AoE cleanses this game has.

Excellent summary, thank you!

Yeah makes sense they would be. Although I’m not so sure Aegis is a special case though – Corrupt Boon is unblockable anyway, so it wouldn’t matter if it corrupts Aegis or not, and I think I got “blocked!” messages using Signet of the Locust with Signets of Suffering. Can’t be sure though, since htere were probably 3 people around me and it was all a kittenaotic.

Would be useful to actually test for the transfers, anyone up for it and on EU?

Sagat.3285:

It’s amazing this bug is still here.

You mean the range reduction bug?

Most skills that hit twice though (lke Necrotic Bite or Lightning Whip) are only affected by blind for one of the hits afaik.

I seriously think speeding it up to the same speed as Reaper’s Shroud would solve a lot of problems. I don’t think it needs a buff per se – the zerker shroudmancer is a very formidable force and I don’t think that build needs any helps – I just think it’d be better if, instead of slow 5k life blasts, they could get in twice as many 2.5k life blasts. It would make it so much easier to balance with Reaper coming round the corner.

I haven’t tested, but given that Blind is ALWAYS transferred when I use Putrid Mark transfers are probably an exception to the random rule. If anyone’s willing to jump into a custom arena and cast signet of spite at me a bunch of times we could test! :p

I think he meant it shoots 2 projectiles?

Personally, I would rather it pierced baseline, because the projectile speed is so slow you can LOS a necro just by sidestepping behind your pet/rock dog/teammate.

Additionally, I think that, for balance reasons, they should cut the casting time down to 0.5", and halve its damage coefficient. I don’t think any of you are wondering what I mean by “for balance reasons”: I’m obviously talking about Reaper. Since they made Reaper’s Shroud skill 1 a 0.5" cleaving activation time, it becomes a nightmare to balance both this and Life Blast properly. If you’re a Reaper, Dhuumfire can inflict 3 stacks of burn to 3 targets in the same time it takes a core necro to get off 1 Life blast (1" cast time plus 0.4" aftercast) to cause 1 stack of burning to a single target. This will create a balancing NIGHTMARE for ANet, and it’ll only become worse as more specialisations and more traits that affect shroud skill 1 are released!

Making LB into a 0.5" skill (tuning down its damage proportionately) and letting it pierce baseline will solve all those problems, as it’ll be able to hit at comparative speed and comparable numbers of targets as Reapers Shroud skill 1 without any trait investment. That way, whatever’s balanced for Reaper is balanced for Necro automatically.

Clearly a 1,200 range skill shouldn’t be exactly the same as a melee skill, of course: but I think their relative effectiveness would be more easily balanced by giving Reapers Shroud 1 a higher damage coefficient than Life Blast, to counteract its disadvantage in range. It would be an easier and more effective way to balance these skills when there are so many different traits that can affect these skills.

Also, it’s clear that the piercing trait will need to be retired once HoT comes out because, come on, how do you make a melee skill “pierce” baseline? They can roll in the vulnerability into spite adept minor, or into Gluttony which is a pretty sub-par trait.

Plus remember, probably earth/fire sigils proccing as well.

Honestly I’d rather they reintroduce jewels, then people will get a little bit more choice and customisation without them needing to have 30 different amulets.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

To be fair, that would only list myself as having played 2 ranked games. Yet you all seem to think my views on Necro have some weight :p

Who are you again? :p

j/k, to be fair for all I know mayube the OP played like 4,000 unranked games since December (when unranked queue was introduced), but since his views are diametrically opposite to everyone on these forums who actually know a thing or two, I somehow doubt it.

I’d be happier if FitG was 2 stacks for 4", to make it good for stomping, but I think it’s more urgent that we get some longer-lasting stability that’s not tied to DS. And while I agree with Bhawb that the elite transformations are a bit boring, and they could be reworked to provide that role, I think a utility skill would be better.

I reall don’t think it should be pulsing though, that would make whatever you give that to pretty much a compulsory utility! You could add it to the active of a signet possibly. 2stacks/5" on Locust could work. Or maybe Undeath, but when you start the activation (like Well of Power) rather than when you finish the cast, to help you get off its ludicrously long cast time (which should also be shortened, frankly).

How bout this though: change Spectral Attunement to “Spectral skills grant additional boons” instead of giving you the measly 5% LF. You could give retaliation to Armour, stability to Walk, and possibly might to Wall?

I think the conversion traits just go off your base stats plus gear, it’s not very reasonable for them to recalculate your stats whenever you get a +30 from a temporary bonus that goes away 10" later. So Corruptor’s Fervor will always add +30 on top of whatever you end up having, and not be counted in for static conversions.

CrassBippy.4619:

haha i’ve read it all now. Condition users being able to stack 2 defensive stats and STILL do a ton of cond damage has been broken ever since cond started getting buffs.

What? Has someone put Dire amulet in pvp and I didn’t notice?

Also, as Ovid discovered Lingering Curse does not increase condition duration of Grasping Dead, only of the autoattack chain.

Oh dear… He’s right, I just tested. 9.5" bleeds and 5" cripple with Lingering Curse equipped.

First of all, I don’t see the point of the OP at all. If you’re happy with the necro, why do you care if other people are not? Since you too main necro, you literally have nothing to lose if we got buffs. It cannot possibly harm you if we get our way, so did you only post to insult us?

Second and more important though, gw2score.com lists the OP as having played 21 ranked games in all. So I don’t believe he has enough knowledge and experience to comment on whether the necro is ok or not at all.

@OP why don’t you queue up for some games, go through the school of hard knocks like the rest of us, deal with rampage warriors, shatter mesmers and all the rest of it, and then come back here with a better attitude before you call anyone else a crybaby?

Frankly, this whole thread should be deleted.

I agree, since Resistance is a thing now, skills and traits that make you immune to conditions should grant pulsing Resistance instead. That way those effects are somewhat counterable (even if only till the next pulse comes).

Why do people refuse to understand how this works? Nobody thought that Fear would be changed to stack in intensity instead of duration when they introduced Terror, so why do they think Chill does?

Self-inflicted conditions from corruption definitely aren’t decreased by Corruptor’s Fervor, but that might be intentional (they’re self-inflicted rather than “incoming”).

Can confirm the Signet of Spite bug, 1 stack vulnerability and 1 stack of bleeding.

There’s no such thing as “anti-mobility” in this game though. It’s always been impossible to stop people with blinks/teleports/shadowsteps from getting away, and now that movement skills aren’t affected by chill and cripple, it’s harder to stop other people from doing that either.
Much as ANet doesn’t like it due to imagining it goes against some arbitrary “flavour” they decided the necromancer has, the only way to catch people with mobility is to have mobility of your own, and necro doesn’t have that. Dark Path is so slow it can be easily LOSed or even outrun, and its Reaper equivalent is pretty short-ranged and locked behind shroud. Chilblains is literally our only long-ranged reliable snare, and even that won’t slow down someone with Blink. What are you expected to do? Stick Wurm down where you think they’re gonna run away to and set up an ambush?

Minion Master with this instead of Death Nova? OK, leaving the thread now, have fun!

A lot of helpful people have made videos explaining the basics of each map, and some of those are linked to in the sticky at the top (though that needs updating), but ANet need to understand that only a tiny proportion of the playerbase ever visits the forums! Every other game mode in GW2 works on a “jump in, have fun, <…>, profit” basis, so it’s not reasonable to expect people to alt-tab out of the game, go online and do RESEARCH before they can play pvp! (It’s reasonable to expect people who want to get good at it to go read guides and watch videos, but not complete beginners) Most of them will jump in, get confused, hear lots of abuse from their teammates for not knowing what they’re doing, and leave forever.

Unfortunately, Conquest has a lot unintuitive mechanics that need explaining before you can play. How do you get points? How fast do you get points? Are all nodes worth the same? Do they cap faster with more than 1 person on them? Why did the other team get the points for Chieftain even though I did 95% of the damage on him? What do each of the buffs on Temple do? All these things need explaining in-game, and the best way to do it is by introducing scripted tutorial missions, where you and a bunch of NPCs fight out specific scenarios that teach specific mechanics about each map.

It need not be a lot of work designing those. All the maps are done, all the models are ready, you just need to script the scenarios and maybe record some voiceover telling the player to “go decap their home point!” or “help us out by trebbing mid!” etc. For best results, contract some community members to consult on these mini-missions.

Sorry, I’ve tested this extensively and it’s mediocre. No decent team will let you freecast long enough to get to 10 stacks, and even if you do, the stacks expire pretty quickly, especially when you’re in DS where you don’t apply conditions as quickly.

3 stacks on Grasping Dead, 3 stacks on Mark of Blood

It does make Well of Blood and Well of Power slightly harder to use when you’re under pressurfe and you need to get them off fast, but it’s a matter of practice.

I find it slightly easier if I quickly pull my mouse cursor down to the skill bar just before I cast: ground targeted skills get cast at your feet if your cursor is somewhere not actually targeting.

Also remember that, for Well of Power, you still get the full 5" effect even if you’re not standing in it, so if you’re stunlocked and getting wailed on just hit the key, doesn’t matter where you aim it.

Yeah, I’m sorry but Golem AI is now worse than it ever was, even back at launch.

That’s besides the point though Bhawb, if I think Lich or Plague might be good as a MM elite, the fact that you think Golem would be better has nothing to do with whether or not I should be able to!

The only thing that matters is: why are necro elite transforms the only ones that kill summons? Why don’t engis lose their turrets when they use Elixir X? Why don’t eles lose their elementals when they Tornado? Why don’t necros lose their minions when they go into Shroud?