Guild Wars 2

Karl McLain.5604:

Dhuumfire is indeed a condition ‘burst’ application. When we lowered the PvP duration, we were doing two different things. Firstly, the duration of the burn was a bit too long for the fast-paced nature of PvP. Secondly, burning was covering up the conditions that tended to deal the more intense damage over time, bleeding. Many condition removal skills, abilities, and traits remove one to three conditions, which means that bleeding (usually being the first condition applied, meaning it will be the last one removed via skills) is quite difficult to fight against. With the duration reduction of burning, it allows players an opportunity to use their condition removal skills.

The bleed reduction on Grasping Dead serves the purpose of reducing the Scepter’s overall bleeding damage, while keeping the bleed up-time constant. In contrast, if we were to have reduced the duration of the bleeds, the immediate ‘burst’ AoE pressure would have remained nearly the same.

Thanks for the reply, I do understand your thinking behind this change and it’s very logical. However, while it does “balance” the Terror/Dhuumfire build vs other professions more, it also reduces the relative effectiveness of all other necromancer condition builds compared to this one! By weakening scepter instead of Dhuumfire (same as when Terror damage was nerfed by 17% a few patches ago), you’re making Dhuumfire even more vital for decent damage and thereby damaging necromancer build variety!

If you had instead lowered the proc rate of Dhuumfire, or increased the internal cooldown, and left scepter and Terror damage the same, you’d have made other builds, such as 0/20/20/0/30 or 0/30/0/10/30 possible, while still resolving the issue of burning being a burst condition which covers bleeds.

I don’t carry epidemic in pvp, so I can’t exploit their pet. I find the best way to kill them is lots of aoe to kill their spirits, then let the ranger stack bleeds on me and transfer them over with dagger 4 or staff 4. Then they just melt. Dangerous though, if they have a friend and you get focussed while under a lot of conditions you’re a goner, especially if they manage to stunlock you so you can’t get your transfers off.

It might be just me, but I’ve noticed something strange in the last month or so: when I exit DS, my skills 5-10 take about 1" longer to come back online than my weapon skills do. The skill slots just remain empty, as they are when you’re actually in DS, whereas skills 1-5 get replaced by your weapon skills immediately.

Has this been an issue for anyone else? Is it an actual bug in the game, or is it just display lag? Is it a recent thing, or was it always there and I’m just slow in noticing?

Acceptable’s build is pretty good, but I always take Flesh Wurm (drop Shadow fiend preferably). I’d also take 30 in either Death (for Death Nova, though Greater Marks is also a good substitute) or Spite (for Close to Death) rather than Blood, I find the siphoning traits underpowered. All well and good when all minions are up, but they die pretty quick in group fights so you can’t rely on that extra health.

I’d also rather take Staff instead of dagger/warhorn in the other hand, for the utility, though with Putrid Mark’s nerf I’d consider dagger/dagger. Cleanses are good!

People usually take Vampirism or Pack runes. I’ve also experimented with Lyssa, for the cleanse and stability on golem charge. Works pretty well!

CachoDm.4639:

Balance classes first that’s the main issue of why they afk.

Bullkitten. They afk because splitting the queues made the waiting times for a game ridiculously long. Not that it justifies it, I’d also like an option to report them, but that’s why it’s done. You really think anyone sits in front of their comp[uter watching the spawn point? They go off and watch tv, come back to check if they’re in, notice they’re not, and leave again.

ronpierce.2760:

but I feel like its losing its grip a bit.

I see what you did there! :p

Softspoken.2410:

However, the loss of allied condition transfer is positively infuriating.

I didn’t even notice that! I was still blithely chucking Putrid Marks in the middle of fights thinking I was cleansing my allies!!!! That’s just terrible, was it even mentioned anywhere?

Allie Murdock.8152:

Ok, here’s the deal. I’m hearing different things from everyone I talk to.
1. Necro DS is too much and should be brought down
2. Necro damage is too much and should be brought down
3. Necro survivability is bad

Allie I’m not in the top-1000 so I don’t pretend to know the game better than Phantaram, but I’ve played a lot of pvp with necro and I know the class well.
The bottom line is all the above is true! Necromancers did very good damage even before Dhuumfire came in. Hardly anyone on the necro forums was asking for more damage, except to point out how abysmal the axe and staff autoattacks were. Dhuumfire was overkill. It’s nice to have a trait in the Spite tree to synergise with condition damage (makes a lot of sense because of the added condition duration and lends itself to interesting hybrid builds), but its damage was so good that it basically eclipsed all other possible condition builds! 30 in Spite and 20 in Curses became mandatory.

Having said that, it’s also true that necro survivability is bad. The current metagame is very cc-heavy – knockbacks, stuns, immobilises can be chained together so quickly that even if you pop your stunbreak and try clear the conditions off you (whether with Putrid Mark or Consume Conditions), it’s likely you’ll be interrupted again by another knockback, stun or daze before you’ve even finished casting! Foot in the Grave helps, but it doesn’t remove existing control effects and isn’t a stun breaker, so if you’re already stunned you have the option of going into DS to eat up the damage, and wasting your 3" stability, or popping your stun break and try to heal through the damage, before you’re either downed or stunned again. And here’s the kicker: Dhuumfire is so good, even in its nerfed 2" form, that nobody brings Foot in the Grave anyway! It’s simpler to just stay on the edges of the fight and run like hell as soon as you see anyone capable of stun-locking you heading towards you.

Necros are therefore in the bizarre situation of either feeling helpless cause they can’t escape when focussed and cc’ed, or making everyone else feel helpless due to the insane amount of conditions they’re pumping out, overwhelming an entire groups heals and cleanses. Helpless is not a good feeling in an actiony-game like this: when the game puts you in the situation where you might as well raise your hands up and walk away from the keyboard because there’s nothing your class can do, you feel cheated and frustrated.

Of course, you’ll say, no class is capable of completely stun-locking a necro long enough to kill them even through death shroud – what you’re describing is being focussed by at least 2 people, and in that situation it’s well and good you should go down – nobody should be able to stand there and eat 2 people’s burst. Well, yes, nobody else sits there and eats the burst, because, even though other classes apart from the necro can also pump out very good damage, they all have very good escapes (stealths, blinks, invulnerabilities, stability and stun breaks) that they can use when focussed. Necro is the only class that HAS to sit there and eat it. As you can imagine, not even high toughness and 2 health bars is enough to do that, particularly when one of those healthbars degenerates naturally and doesn’t let healing through!

It’s been mentioned by developers before that this is intentional: they WANT necro to have little access to stability, vigour, and escapes, because it’s counter to the flavour of the class. Well, yes, perhaps so, but it makes necros frustrating both to fight against and to play (depending on how good the necro player is at avoiding getting caught up in the fight). The solution to this problem is twofold:

1. Dhuumfire has to go. If the developers want to make Spite synergise with condition buiilds, move all the Staff traits from Death and Soul Reaping there, and merge them into 2. (no other weapon skills have 4 traits associated with them!)

2. either reconsider the design decision to limit the necromancer’s access to escape mechanisms (and provide more stun breaks, stability, and invulnerabiilty skills), or build in traits which inflict massive debuffs and damage to anyone hitting the necromancer while stunned, knocked down or in any other way disabled. More traits along the line of Reaper’s Protection or Ferar of Death is what I have in mind, or possibly something like Chaos Armour.

As far as your request for replays goes, I would seriously recommend that, rather than soliciting youtube videos from random forumites of mixed knowledge and ability, you should instead set up a private arena and invite some teams or players in the top-100 to play several matches out while you observe through their perspective. That way you’ll get people of proven skill and get a better idea of the situation.

“Improved Effects Level of Detail System
Effects like fireballs, streaks that trail behind a sword, players’ footsteps, and even the fiery breath of dragons are all part of the beauty of Guild Wars 2. In situations where all of that beauty can start to take away from the visual clarity of the battlefield, this new system will slowly start reducing the detail of each effect in order to increase combat visibility when many effect types are overlapping. When action gets intense in dungeons, PvP, the open world, and WvW, this system will let you see more of the action.”

Awesome, thank you!

If they want Spite to synergise with condition builds why don’t they move all the staff traits from Death and SR to it? And merge the FOUR different staff-enhancing traits into two while they’re at it (merge Soul Marks and Staff Mastery and put them in t1, and merge Spiteful Marks and Greater Marks and put it in t2 – or better yet give Marks the default radius of Greater Marks and put unblockable in Spiteful Marks).

This solution is quite elegant because Staff 1 and 4 do decent direct damage, in addition to the condition damage of the other staff skills, so it would work very in a hybrid power/condition build without the need for Precision to proc the “on crit” condition procs of Curses (and Dhuumfire). Also, SR VII and Blood III also benefit, so it woulkd give Spite some synergy with those other trait lines.

I don’t mind the DS nerf, it’s reasonable. Especially since they’re fixing the increased damage bug. I think the internal cooldown on Spectral Armour and Spectral Walk is excessive, since the whole idea of using these skills as escapes is being able to build up your LF and pop into DS quickly to escape. 1" is more than enough for a glass cannon thief to burst you down completely, and the 10% you’ll get from a single hit while in Spectral Armour won’t be enough to save you from it.

However what I’m more unhappy about is the Terror nerf. I fully agree that Dhuumfire+terror is an overpowered combo, but nerfing terror is NOT the way to fix this! They could have decreased the burning duration in Dhuumfire or its internal cooldown, but instead they implement a nerf that affects not only the overpowered Dhuumfire+Terror build, but also most other viable condition builds at our disposal – the 0/30/10/0/30 build, the 0/30/20/20/0 build, everything really!

Arguably the 30/30/10/0/0 build is the one least affected by this, as fire is a lot more damage than terror – the reason the combo is so lethal isn’t so much because of the terror damage but because the fear locks you down and you can’t cleanse the burning and other conditions off you! Now, with terror damage reduced, why would you continue to run 0/30/10/0/30? It will cause even more necros to move to 30/30/10/0/0 because it’s better damage!

“Fixed a bug that caused the necromancer to take increased damage from direct attacks while in death shroud.”
I ALWAYS suspected this was the case, I knew they couldn’t be burning me down from 100% DS so quickly!

I’m not massively pleased with the rest of the patch contents (especially the terror nerf), but I think this alone will make a big difference to us!

Ehragus.5843:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spiteful_spirit

Anyday.

My favourite skill in the game! But in GW2 terms it really is simply aoe confusion. I think Soul Bind would be more interesting in this game.
Also possibly Tainted Flesh

Has anyone else noticed that our #2 Fear is missing a lot more? Was doing pvp tonight and I think it only worked twice in over 20 matches! I’m always checking that I’m not blinded and there’s no aegis, stability or distortion on the target, yet I still get a “missed” message

Minor change, I know, but having the weaponsmith show you a bunch of different tabs instead of a massive long list is a huge help. Thanks Anet!

I was personally rather underwhelmed by it, I think terror-based builds work better with the Doom buff and the new Spectral Wall.
I’m aware you can have both of course but then you have to sacrifice something, usually greater marks, and that just doesn’t work for me!

Agreed with Brienson, it’s probably a deliberate decision. Which also explains why the different conversion skills (Well of Power, Save yourselves, Contemplation of Purity) aren’t consistent on which conditions they convert to different boons: depending on the recharge and conditionality of the skill the different conversions would affect its balance.

A little disappointed by the shorter duration on Spectral Wall, but definitely still a massive improvement to what it was! One problem for me though is I’m colourblind so I can’t tell apart my own Wall from the enemy Necro’s. Is there meant to be a red outline when it’s an enemy wall? Cause I can’t see anything!

Another thing I like is how well fear synergises with torment, especially now that we have another source of aoe fear with spectral wall (and possibly well of corruption if you get lucky): forced movement ensures they’ll be taking the higher damage.

I’m EXTREMELY relieved and grateful that DS5 isn’t a channel!

The Doom change was both unexpected and welcome. IIRC it’s pretty similar to what Nemesis suggested a few months back.

Undocumented change: Enfeebling Blood seems to have a 20" cooldown

In my experience the client can sometimes lag slightly behind the server, so it’s possible your client was showing the skill having completed its casting and displaying the projectile going off whereas the server has you down as having left DS before it finished. It happens to me a lot while healing (client shows me as having completed the cast, my HP actually refills, then next thing I know I’m in downed state).

Do you like to keep this option on, or do you prefer to switch it off so you can clip through your enemies and make their LOS-requiring attacks miss?

Blaine Tog.8304:

manveruppd.7601:

Here’s why: DS5 will be another channel skill.

We actually don’t know it’s a channel.

Well if the leaked notes are right it seems it is, but yes, you’re right, we can’t be sure.

Huh, so with over 400 necromancer skills from GW1 to choose from they went and copied LoL instead? :p

If the patch notes are real then it doesn’t sound like Torment will be a big deal for us. Here’s why: DS5 will be another channel skill. Channel skills are already problematic for us due to our lack of evasion and stability. We’d need to go 30 deep in Sour Reaping to make sure we can even get the skill off! (Or alternatively bring Well of Power, though popping a 45" cooldown utility just so you can channel DS5 safely seems excessive!) Also, although I love having an extra immobilise, why put it at the END of the channel? It makes no sense, why would you want to immobilise a target that receives extra damage while moving? Why not put it at the START of the channel, so you can at least stop them from charging into you, knocking you over, and interrupting the channelled spell?

I do like a lot of the other changes in the patch notes (though I can’t understand why they put burning in the power tree, and it seems our Grandmaster weakness trait in curses got a serious nerf).

I’m not super crazy about Necro having burning (I don’t think it’ll solve the class’s problems), but I don’t see a massive lore problem with it. Flames of hell, or whatever? Anyway, my first GW1 character was a N/E so since we’re not getting secondary classes back I think it’s a good compromise! ;p Oh, and one of my favourite GvG builds revolved around Rangers with Greater Conflagration, Eles with Mark of Rodgort, and necros with lots of minions – all the physical damage from the minions was turned to fire damage, which when it hit anyone hexed with Rogort’s turned to team-wide burning!

Lylandrissabelle.5463:

3.Unique rewards ( if you’re going to separate pvp and pve, some skins should be unique, but give us the option to show them off in pve also. )

Yeah I’ve suggested this before too: how about a special transmutation stone in the gem store that will allow you to apply a pvp skin on pve gear?

ryston.7640:

lol listen to you, youre so cute.

gw2 isnt about gimmic strategies like body blocking, its about skill and clever builds. in gw2 we have gap closers and no body blocking to ensure gimmics like positioning and such arent a part of the equation

Wow, I felt shivers run down my back. Clearly this paragon of megaskill was a force to be reckoned with in the hardcore MMOs he ruled before coming over here.

Well if you get focussed you’re dead – no escape abilities and DS melts too fast. So roaming is EXTREMELY difficult to do as a necro unless you have a buddy to bail you out. But I think the necro is pretty useful in group fights. Well of corruption to peel off the enemy zerg’s stability followed by a Reaper’s Mark will do a lot to swing a group fight your way!
Well of blood and well of power also offer a lot of sustain to your own group but some commanders don’t like them as they interfere with the water fields that also provide healing.

Bhawb.7408:

I had used a WoB build before, I just got destroyed by conditions when I used it. I will need to try it out with the minions draw conditions though.

I tried the minions draw conditions thing, it’s terrible. Even if you have 5 minions, 1 conditions/10" isn’t reliable considering how quickly they die and how long the recasts are.

Oh there’s one neat trick you can do to help with your condition cleansing though: change your armour to Runes of Lyssa! the #6 rune cleanses all your conditions and gives you every boon in the game for 5". With the Minion Master trait you can use the golem charge every 40", fastest-recharging elite in the game! And yes, it works both on the summon and on the charge. I know Precision isn’t as useful as the bonuses Vampire gives you but the stats you get off armour aren’t really significant anyway, the 2,4,6 bonuses are always the main point.

So anyone who disagrees with you is unqualified to have an opinion of their own?

Hey Bhawb, I’ll definitely give the little bone minions another try then! Might be what makes Death Nova worthwhile, as it’s not really working in my build (since my only finishers are the Flesh Wurm return skill and Staff 4), whereas you also have Putrid Explosin from the minions, and the blast finisher from your dodge (which btw is my favourite necro trait!)

Better idea: make corrupt boon not miss? :p

But let’s be fair: I did acknowledge that there are problems for solo queuers in the game. I’ve said why I think the most popular and widely-requested solution would be a disastrous idea, but I’d just be contrarian doomsayer if I don’t offer any constructive alternative solutions, right?

Well, the truth is, I don’t really think we need other solutions. Sure, I lose A LOT of matches (current win rate 53%), and a lot of them due to being matched against premades or due to teammates ragequitting when they see 3 warriors in our party or whatever. But I think that as the ratings table settles down, with everyone near their true skill level, this will become less of an issue. The good, organised teams will be ranked far above me, so I’ll rarely get matched against them. If I do get matched up against a premade, it must mean that they’re such terrible players that not even having a pre-built team and voice comms on their side were enough to raise them from the roughly-74% ratings mark. I’ve beaten a few premades with a pug, and I’m sure it happens to everyone in this forum from time to time. And that’s because teamwork is only part of the skill you need to win at this –the larger part by far is individual skill. If you cultivate that, then coming up against a premade is not an auto-lose, not by a long shot!

But ok, you say, maybe you’re happy with your pathetic 74% rank, but I’m not! I want to make it all the way to the leaderboards, all the way to the top 10! Well, in that case there IS a solution: GET A TEAM! Everyone can get a team! Add competent people that you’ve played with to your friends list. Next time you’re both on ask them if you want to join as a duo. Add even more people to your list – eventually you’ll have enough to start a team! Or, if (like me) you’re in a guild with very few PvPers in it, run some training nights. Sure, it’ll tank your rating at first. But some of them might love PvP so much they’ll start practicing obsessively, get really good, and soon those former-noobs will be carrying YOU to an even higher rating than before! And if you want to go straight to the top, hang out in custom arenas: a lot of the top guilds use their custom arenas as recruitment tools, playing with and observing random puggies. And that, in fact, brings me to the final solution: hotjoin! There, everyone’s a solo queuer, so the field is even! It doesn’t matter if someone disconnects or ragequits, as someone else will join, or the system will autobalance. It truly is the most pvp fun for the least hassle! And don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re too good for hotjoin either – the standard of play has gone up a lot since Spectator Mode came in, both due to people watching and learning and due to genuinely great players joining in hoping they’ll get spotted by someone recruiting for their team. I really don’t see why we even need a separate solo queue when hotjoin does the same thing so perfectly already! The only thing it doesn’t do is get you on the leaderboards, and like I said, a solo queue leaderboard would be a bit of a joke anyway. Stop asking for a smaller hill: either get a team and climb the mountain of tournaments, or come down to the riverbank and join the beach party of hotjoin! :p

I know I’m going terribly against the general sentiment of this forum here, but having read that developers are indeed working on a solo queue mode, I find it necessary to voice some of my concerns about the idea.

Having no regular team myself, I fully understand the frustrations of being a disorganised pug and being matched against a premade. An organised team with voice comms will outplay a pug at every turn, using communication to dominate the map and run circles around you. Moreover, solo queue luck of the draw means that you’ll often get sub-par allies, and I’ve often suffered from clueless teammates, ragequitters, etc. I’m saying this so that you all know this isn’t coming from some top-ranked elitist worried that he’ll run out of puny pugs to destroy: I mostly play solo queue, and I’m not even any good as an individual player (74% on the rankings table right now). I’d probably be better ranked in a solo queue, but, even though it would be in my interest, I don’t think such a thing should exist, and this is why:

Firstly, I think it goes against the ethos of the game. The fact of the matter is that this format is a team game. The team with the best communications is SUPPOSED to have an advantage. People who are interested in competitive gaming seriously should realize and accept this, and understand that if you want to be competitive you need to get a team. The game simply isn’t all about individual skill, it’s also about teamwork, and to ask for a solo queue is to ask for this component to be removed simply because you can’t compete in it. That just goes against the ethos of the competitive PvPer: if you can’t be king of the hill, you find another way to the top – you don’t demand that another, smaller hill be built just for you!

The second reason is related to the first: I’m unclear how the rankings would be affected by the introduction of the solo queue. Would there be a separate leaderboard for solo queuers (the “smaller hill”)? Or would the solo queuers remain on the same rankings ladder, thereby devaluing the skill and hard work of the top-ranked teams when the better solo queuers started to aggregate enough rating to rise to the same levels as the top teams without ever having played them?

Thirdly, I have a very practical concern about how people who join the queue as 2s or 3s will be dealt with. From personal experience and observation there are A LOT of these “part-premades” around – much more than there are full teams. I do it too, because sometimes it’s easier to get a friend or two who happen to be online than to round up a whole team. So what would happen to these people? If they can only join the “normal” team queue, where will they get the random puggies to round out their numbers from? If they’re allowed to join the solo queue as part-premades, won’t the solo queuers (justifiably) complain that they’re exploiting the system and gaining an advantage? Or will it simply become impossible to join as 2s, 3s or 4s, and we’ll only be able to join either as individuals or full teams? The latter would, in my opinion, be an absolute disaster for the community, as that is how people find teammates! They get a friend and play some games together. They notice one of their teammates is really good, so they invite him to their party and join as a 3. Soon they’ve found a 4th, then a 5th, they win some games, add each other to their friends lists, and maybe after a few more evenings playing together they start a guild together and join as a team! To make the entry requirement for team tournaments “5 or nothing” is to put the bar extremely high considering how large a part of the community still play solo!

My final concern is possibly the most important one: there just aren’t enough teams around! Making a separate solo queue will mean huge waiting times for anyone still playing as a team, which will lead to people getting bored and quitting. It will also be very harsh on new teams, as, with no low-rated pug teams around for them to practice on, starting out in the team tournaments will be a baptism of fire! They’ll be thrown in against Made in Meta and Team Paradigm on their first game, and after a few dispiriting losses, they’ll go back to solo queue.

So, the tl;dr is: 1. it’s just wrong, get a team or suck it up, 2. What about the leaderboards? 3. Where would the duos go? 4. there aren’t enough teams!

For me personally:
1. Alternative game modes (bring back GvG from GW1)
2. Balanced downed state (which I think is the only serious balancing problem left in the game)
3. Delayed in-game viewing of top-rated tournament teams (like in GW1 observer mode, yes the authorised commentator programme will be fun but sometimes you want to watch a game from the pov of your own choice)

Wish I could join, but I’m busy all evening tomorrow!

I don’t like staff without greater marks. And I always take a staff, even in minion builds. I suppose you don’t really need to but it’s a great defensive and utility weapon.

Well of Suffering huh? I guess you drop that on an enemy trying to revive someone and watch as the downed player’s health drops faster than he can refill it? And then when they’ve both got a bunch of vulnerability stacked you putrid explosion to finish them off? That’s a neat trick, pretty evil! :p

I’ve been running minions too for the past month, it’s a lot of fun for muckabout games! I went for a more standard Shadow, Wurm, Fiend for my utilities though. I don’t really get on with the little Bone Minions, I could never get them to explode where I want them to, so I dropped them for Shadow fiend. I also couldn’t get on with Blood Fiend, its active heal is just sad and it dies far too easily, so I went Consume, like you.

My traits setup looks like yours except I picked Bloodthirst and Vampiric Master for my utilities. I suspect it’s subpar but I like the idea of life stealing. While the minions are alive I’m pretty durable with all the life they steal and all the regeneration I can give myself, but they die pretty easily so those traits aren’t really doing anything for me for a large proportion of the time. I’ve never used Ritual of Life in pvp (use it in wvw all the time), but it sounds like a nice idea, and it will help heal the minions too. I wonder if it works with Signet of Undeath btw?

Basically it sounds like your build is much more team oriented than mine. I assume you’re playing with a fixed team and gravitate towards group fights, whereas mine is geared more to 1v1s so I spend most of my time bunkering points. I was going to see I don’t see how you can survive without a stunbreaker like Flesh Wurm, but clearly if you mostly stick to group fights you’ll have friends to bail you out when you’re low, so I assume it’s not too much of a problem. It seems like a pretty original build though and I’d love to see how it plays if there’s a video of you on the internet somewhere!

Actually I agre with Enferian that axe/focus with minions is easier to play. It’s not more powerful (except in 1v1), it’s just that little bit tankier and you get a bit more cc from the minions. Downside is fewer condition removals, but you can always take Consume Conditions instead of Blood Fiend (which I recommend in fact, that thing steals a lot of health for you but the active heal is miniscule and it dies to a stiff breeze), and you’ll always have staff 4.

Makes sense actually, thanks for posting

One condition per 3" sounds very lackluster… I guess it is a passive effect so we probably shouldn’t complain, but the active has such a long recharge too!

Yeah, best designed class in the game imo.

Does Plague Signet work properly now? Last I checked it jsut copies conditions from allies to you, without cleansing allies.

Mammoth.1975:

It is very annoying not to be able to drop it where the heals are needed in large groups though.

Exactly my point!

As cool as retaliation is, as a healing ability it’s more reasonable for Well of Blood to provide healing in conjuction with combo finishers. It would be a very powerful group heal ability (especially in wvw), but the fact that finishers can only interact with 1 field at a time can actually screw a group over quite badly, as Well of Blood might potentially prevent finishers from interacting with any overlapping water fields, and thereby actively PREVENT healing! Pretty paradoxical for a healing skill!

And from a fluff perspective, well it is, after all, a WELL… :p I mean, I know blood is thicker than water and all, but it IS 92% water! ;D

Corruption skills are arguably good enough even untraited though, it’s why condition builds are so popular! I don’t even bother with the Master of Corruption trait when I run conditionmancer.
Minion skills desperately need consolidation. I take Iceflame’s point that they’re intended to synergise with different builds, but although that may have been the intention they’re not good enough for the job. Vampiric Master is pretty good (especially with bloodthirst) while the minions are alive and when they’re attacking properly, but in any 2v2 or greater fight with a moderate amount of aoe the minions will just die too quickly to significantly extend your life. (Let’s not forget how slow they attack – Fleshie is the fastest at 1" but even he effectively does less than that as he can’t attack while moving, and I think the wurm and the minions are ridiculously slow, once per 3" or so! Makes the ~170HP stolen sound not all that great doesn’t it…) And Bone Minions with Death Nova and Minioon Master sounds like a great combo in theory (poison is one thing MMs lack, that healing reduction is sorely missed!), but I tried it out and they just NEVER hit! They can’t move while attacking and they have pathing issues, so they’re always playing catchup with their target, so either you’ll explode them too far away or you’ll wait too long and they’ll die. I don’t see why they couldn’t make them like mesmer illusions which run up to their enemy before exploding, or at the very least make them explode on death. Incidentally, does anyone know if the blast finisher from Putrid Explosion works with the poiison field from Death Nova for aoe weakness?
Anyway, my point is that the traits are good but too conditional – not because the traits themselves aren’t well designed, but because the minions are too slow and buggy to make them trigger reliably. Since I think there’s some serious AI issues that will prevent a minion pathing fix from coming any time soon, trait consolidation is the way forwards.

I count SEVEN MAJOR TRAITS for minions (Training of the Master, Minion Master, Flesh of the Master, Death Nova, Necromatic Corruption, Fetid Consumption, Vampiric Master), 8 if you count Bloodthirst, 10 including minors.

Oh yeah, 2 in death and 1 in spite and SR, you’re right.

Iceflame.5024:

Here’s the plan:

Merge greater marks and soul marks into staff mastery or make them baseline->a huge amount of build possibilities opens up->some new traits and improvements are made to lifesteal and other stuff->the problem of being focused by 3+ people and being vulnerable to CC remains unsolved->we become OP for 2 days in 1v1 and small skirmishes as well as team fights where we are not being focused and then get nerfed back.

Agreed with that, every other weapon from every other class only has one, maximum 2 traits associated with it – but necro staff has THREE!

Oooh yes please, bring back disease from GW1! Make it long duration, damage equivalent to poison, stacks in duration, transfers to nearby targets (or possibly just nearby foes, but that’d be less fun) in a radius once per pulse.
Accompany it with a trait that gives addition power/condition damage while under the effect of disease (or, even better, per condition), and fix Plague Signet so it properly cleanses allies rather than just copying conditions over.

And please stick a tiny little bit of stability on our stunbreakers, jhust 2-3" will do. With the current chain-cc going on stunbreakers are very devalued, as you’ll likely get knocked down/feared/knocked back again.