Guild Wars 2

ty! fifteen chars

If your target is suffering from vulnerability do they receive increased damage from conditions?

I honestly never knew this either, thanks for testing and posting this!

Pendragon.8735:

Duration isn’t really our problem. Most of our bleeds are pretty decent length anyway, and we can get up to the length cap if we sacrifice some damage. The problem with duration is that it just gets cleared off in PVP too easily. If you lose 10 stacks of bleed, you just lost 1000 damage per second, that it probably took the first 5 seconds of the fight to put on, what other class has to deal with that? By that time you can be down to half health or lower against a burst profession, while only having done maybe 1000 direct damage of your own.

What I would like to see have longer duration is Poison, to give us a second source of attrition damage that stays on the target more often so that if they remove bleed, we are still actually doing some damage.

Agreed, I personally run with sigils of ice instead of sigils of earth on my scepter, plus Withering Precision rather Lingering Curse as my grandmaster trait in Curses when I pvp. I even use the golem as my elite, for the 1" cripple when he remembers to hit someone. This sacrifices A LOT of damage, but it also gives me cover conditions for my bleed stack. If their 30" cooldown utility was just wasted clearing a 3" weakness rather than 10 stacks of bleed, that’s a big win for me.

I know it sounds cheeky having necro players complain about condition removal considering we have the best removals in the game, but clearing 25 stacks of bleed just like that really hurts!

Actually folks I started a ranger recently and can confirm that pet AI is pretty much as bad as minion AI Yeah the command buttons sometimes help, but tbh sometimes they even ignore the commands, or lag up to 10" before executing them.

Umm… can’t claim to be an expert, but I think I do well enough to give you a few tips. The only class I consistently have problems again in 1v1s are elementalists, because with the standard bunker build they can remove a condition off themselves once every few seconds, so your deep bleed stack which is basically all your damage is toast.
I mostly play a conditionmancer. Scepter/dagger (or warhorn), staff in the other set. I’ve tried several different minor variations (changing the odd trait around, trying different sigils or armour runes, swapping the odd utility around) and I can’t definitively say that there’s one build that stands above the rest, but here’s a good starting point for you: http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=V044Z-FKlHkH0p37IkJ0g3gJFC0m3BK;5T99J;113B1;02;021-K3m6-Jl6jwmAjwmA2VH
Running with something a little bit weirder currently, 20/30/10/10/0, but haven’t tested it enough to recommend it yet. There are people running power builds with dagger and doing well, though I personally haven’t really gotten the hang of them.

Main tips are: always be circle-strafing (even againstg ranged classes, helps stay out of thjeir AoEs), don’t be afraid to spam your scepter no. 1 skill (it’s where most of your damage comes from: your cooldowns are situational and you should use them opportunistically, not blow them as soon as they recharge – same goes for staff, only spam Mark of Blood and Chilblains, the last 2 are situiational), and jump into death shroud as soon as you’re getting focussed.

If you see a thief, fear them. If they go into stealth, drop some marks, they get hit by aoe even while stealthed. As soon as they pop out of stealth, cripple and weaken. They’re not as deadly as people will have you believe. Unless you’re unlucky and get jumped while all your situational skills are on cooldown you’ll be fine, even against a skilled thief: the REALLY skilled thieves aren’t really the ones that kill you every time, they’re the ones that know how to run away even when they fail. Also make sure you bind an easy-to-reach key for select closest target (I have V), it helps to get them in your sights.

Against mesmers, keep your eyes on the battlefield, you can usually tell the real one cause of how they move, dodge, etc. Clones are pretty fragile, marks and your DS4 skill help clear them up.

Against Guardians you shouldn’t have much trouble. The smart ones will wait until you’ve used Corrupt Boon before they use their Contemplation of Purity. You can counter that by CCing them right after using it (fear, or your Golem’s charge, or your warhorn’s daze, whatever you’ve got). If they still get it off, relax, yours will recharge before theirs

Against eles I can’t help, like I said I suck against them.

If you want to win matches, I guess the most important thing is run away from fights where you’re outnumbered and go cap a point elsewhere. And be prepared to die a lot even if you’re winning most matches: I mean it’s unavoidable that every once in awhile you’ll be fihgting someone and just when you were about to kill them a friend of theirs will arrive and double-team you.

If you search in this forum you’ll find pvp videos by people a lot better than me, but play a few matches first so you can tell what’s going on.

I assume warriors don’t have the ability to apply as many bleeds as necros, so their trait has to be more powerful to compensate.

The teleport is actually almost instant, but the projectile speed is so slow it misses a lot. I think it should be at least as quick as Life Blast.

I have more of a problem with them not being triggered by downed enemies. It would be nice to be able to bleed multiple foes to death in wvw.

lettucemode.3789:

I made a reddit post about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10wgz2/how_healing_affects_necromancers/

Major kudos for that post, though I wish you had included Life Transfer/Transfusion and the Deathly Reinvigoration heals in your table!

I was running with Lich Form in wvw the other night and noticed the following problem: I could not persistently enable autoattack for skill #1. Each time I did it it would stay enabled for the duration of the transformation, but 3 minutes later when Lich Form recharged and I used it again, skill 1 would still be set to autoattack: disabled.

Has anyone else come across this?

Also, I gotta say,. while most things die really fast to this build I’m finding elementalists a lot of trouble.

Krilce.7864:

I’m using plague form, as those blinds now trigger the chill effect, so it can be invaluable in team fights.

Oh I didn’t know this, cool!
When did they fix it, if anyone knows?

Uskon.2519:

It’s not like the charge works in a surefire way either. It’s not all that rare for the golem to get stuck on something on the ground, resulting in a stationary charge, or go in the wrong direction altogether :P

Yep, it’s clearly a z-axis issue. Mobs and ranger pets have it too, that’s why mobs just stand there confused when you attack them from above or below even if there’s a clear path for them to come to you. I suspect they reused the AI from GW1, which didn’t have a z-axis, and didn’t teach mobs and minions to jump.

I’m hoping they’ve still got a couple of their brightest AI programmers working on this issue and in a few months’ time we’ll see a massive overhaul of all AI in the game (same as mobs suddenly got a lot smarter back when Factions was introduced, when they suddenly learned to flee from AoE and focus on healers, though I daresay teaching them to navigate a 3-dimensional environment is a good deal more complex).

As title, I tried to guess but since minion damage has a variable component (like yours) I couldn’t be sure. Anyone know?

That’s disappointing, even with 5 minions 79HP per hit isn’t anything to shout about, especially for a Master trait. Oh well.

Bloodthirst does not affect Vampiric Master, minions siphon 79 per hit whether you have Bloodthirst or not. Is this a known bug or working as intended?

Thresher.3049:

Yeah it would be nice if ‘Lifeforce’ was more than just an enhanced downed state you can use while still having hit points.

If I was a game designer, I would have given it 3 uses along the lines of-
Burn life force for:
F1: Extra DPS
F2: Extra Health
F3: Extra Boon/Condition Duration

A number of people (including me) have been shouting for something like that for ages. I wish they’d listen to us. I’m not saying DS as it is is underpowered, on the contrary it makes us very tanky, but it’s more useful for some builds than others and replacing your entire skillbar with just the same 4 skills no matter what you’re specced as is just dull. Also, having SO MUCH HEALTH just doesn’t feel very “necromancey” to me. Wish they’d listen to us!

Also loved Dark Aura, even ran it in Random Arenas for awhile, just for fun It did really well cause life steals went through protective spirit, but the downside was a single Vampiric Gaze could kill you!

Then of course they changed Aura of the Lich and it just wasn’t viable anymore. Except for rangers – with high expertise they can spam vampiric touch/bite ad infinitum.

On topic: I would also love to see a return to life saccing spells or other high risk strategies. Corruptions are pretty tame by comparison tbh. It’s not fun if you’re not constantly balancing on the line between ultimate power and accidentally killing yourself!

I’m not normally the type of player who would bother with beautiful gear in MMOs but I could totally go for some Prophesies-style Scar Pattern armour. My GW necro has them and they’re dyed purple to give him +5 mosh power when he does his headbanging dance

Just a suggestion for when you (inevitably) introduce new stuff for us to grind for!

Yeah I also thought of this thread after reading the patch notes! From the changes to Terror it sounds like someone in the balance team has read Nemesis’s suggestion!

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

That would be extremely welcome!

Well DS will be even more efficient when they fix Soul Reaping to provide a bigger life force pool, so there’s that.

gamefreak.5673:

I want my minion master from gw1 back. I know they will never let me have 3 flesh worms or 6 bone minions running around because the code does not allow us to have the same utility slot have the same skill but i miss my real undead army. Sometimes you needed all ranged minions in 1 and even in this game. Heck I miss all the combinations i had access to with my minions from 1. Besides a AI fix I still strongly believe for them to be effective in gw2 they all need much lower recast times. That way it doesn’t matter they die from everything, we would not be wasting a utility slot on them now when they all die from 1 aoe, we just keep them coming back.

It would be nice if we could have more. As in, make the summoning skills endlessly recastable and let us summon as many as we like (recharge allowing), like in GW1. But in GW1 that was balanced by the fact that they degenerated and by the limitations of requiring corpses to exploit and energy to summon them. Since GW2 doesn’t work the same way (group fights are smaller so there’s fewer coprses, no energy constraints, and fewer utility slots so we wouldn’t have the capacity to heal them if they degenerated), that approach wouldn’t work: we’ll never be able to stick a single minion skill on our bar and endlessly summon armies of them.

The only other option might be to make them disposable (ie they disappear between fights, like a Mesmer’s clones and illusions). But this would mean a radical redesign of the whole class, as not only the minions would need to be remade from the ground up, but we’d also need more minion-summoning skills (possibly some weapon skills would also summon a minion). But, frankly, the main point of a Mesmer’s illusions is that they also provide confusion and misdirection, mainly in pvp, and force an opponent to look carefully before spotting the real one. A necro wouldn’t get that additional functionality, and while I guess they could make necro minions more powerful than mesmer illusions to compensate for that, it would basically just make the class mesmers with a gothy skin, and I think it deserves more than that.

So, while I would have liked things to work differently too (larger armies, shorter recharges, letting us play with exploding minions more), it’s not clear that any redesign would make it better, and it’s also not something we can hope for in the short term. First priority must be the minion AI fixes, as any redesign would be pointless if the stupid things just stood around anyway (or, even worse, 20 of them all went off on their separate ways and aggroed several different veteran mobs, as Jaggies and the Flesh Golem like to do!).

I would suggest that, in the short term, a mild buff in attack rate and movement speed for them would tide us over until the difficult AI problems could be solved, as it would mean that even if half of them were standing around the other half would be working overtime to compensate. I realize, however, that when they’re all working properly this might prove unbalancing. Therefore, I think an even better idea would be to decrease the recharge on the minions’ activated abilities (things like the Golem’s Charge) by 25%, until some progress with the AI is made. Since those things don’t work half the time anyway (the Golem might charge from out of range and never reach the target, or just try to charge through an immovable object and end up sprinting on the spot, but you still might use the skill because sometimes it’s the only way to get it to disengage an enemy it aggroed on its own when you’re fighting elsewhere), it’s only fair to allow us to be a bit more cavalier about using them rather than have to worry about sitting through a 40" recharge.

You saying it’ll still say 25" or whatever the recharge of a particular skill is, but those seconds will tick down more slowly? If that’s the case I’m embarassed to say I never noticed it!

It does make it less powerful though, since most chills are only 3-4" long. If 1"=1.6" under chill, you’re basically only adding a couple seconds to someone’s recharges. It does matter, I know, I’ve gotten killed so many times with only 1" left to recharge on my healing skill, but I was under the impression it was a lot more dramatic, sort of like casting through Diversion in GW1 where the skill you’d activate would go on a 300% or so recharge!

That seems fairly tough, no mark of evasion though? Anyway, I get the idea, just jump in and out of DS and hope for the best? Might stick with my conditions build and use my ele to play bunkers tbh…

I’ve played ele and guardian bunkers, but apparently some folks have been using necromancers as bunkers in spvp. Can anyone post a sample build of what a typical pvp necro bunker would look like?

This may sound like a strange question, but I’ve often had Chilled applied on me and noticed that I can cast through it and my skills will go into the normal recharge cycle rather than 160% their recharge… Is this actually working? Or is it only supposed to affect skills that are already recharging when it’s applied? (if so it seems a lot weaker)

It was fun having 30 little critters running around behind you back in the Prophesies days, but doing nothing apart from healing them got kinda boring. I did used to love Putrid Exploding my way to victory in altar-type maps in Tombs though, before its recharge was increased! That was fun! And I miss long-lasting Wells – I would happily go back to needing a corpse to exploit to cast a Well if their duration were to go back up to what it used to be. Trouble is fights are smaller and things don’t die as often in GW2, not sure it would work.

You are absolutely right that more CCs would make a world of difference for the necromancer, but I don’t see why you’d need to change the way Fear works in order to fix this. Not that I don’t like your solution, I think it’d be pretty cool, but I think you really hit the nail on the head when you pointed out that you need to fix things using the smallest and simplest change possible. And the simplest change here is to just give the necromancer 1-2 more Fear skills: maybe replace scepter 3 with a fear, for instance, or focus 4. Also, you can vary the duration between skills, I don’t see why all fears have to be 1". Staff 5 for instance could be 2 or 3" since it has such a long recharge. And maybe DS 3 could be dropped to 0.5" duration but have a slightly shorter recharge, to act like a simple interrupt, like you said. Maybe even drop the internal cooldown on Reaper’s Protection (the Death VIII trait, the one that causes Fear on enemies when you get hit by CC) to 60" or even 45". My point is no need to overhaul a whole game mechanic, it’s simpler to just give us an extra fear to carry around (if we choose to).

However, I agree with others that priority should be given to fixing broken traits and mechanics before buffing us.

I think it would improve security if your forum login details were different to your game login details. I’m sure you could create an authentication system so that people could show their in-game IDs on their forum profiles if they want, but there’s no reason for the forums to be actually linked to the in-game account. Reasons:

1. a lot of people are more careless about logging in and out of forums, they might log into the forum from a friend’s computer or a public PC and not log out, thereby basically giving away their account to someone else;

2. a lot of people are probably still using old browsers with loads of vulnerabilities, which ANet can’t do anything to protect them from – I’m sure the majority of stolen accounts are due to people having used the same password in another game whose database was hacked, but it’s only a matter of time before keyloggers, rootkits and other malware akittengeted at users directly, and you don’t want to lose people just cause they’re still using IE6.

3. separating the two accounts and FORCING people to use a different password for each would allow you to safely allow cookies to keep people logged into the forums between browser sessions, and to switch off mobile authentication for forum logins (which is kinda overkill for a forum login).

Obviously this is a low-priority suggestion as the system already works, but I think it would improve our experience and our account security!

Actually yeah, you’re right there, everyone has Power and Condition Duration together. I can actually see why they chose to do that, it means that you can invest in the same trait line whether you want to go for conditions or direct damage, but it’s still not a great line for condition necros because of the traits and the frequent removal in pvp.

The problem as I see it is that they tried to make Precision relevant for condition necros by giving us some a few traits that add conditions on critical hits. But of those traits Barbed precision and Reaper’s Precision are pretty meh, Vampiric Precision is meh and in the wrong traitline (and too high up). Withering Precision is excellent but nobody would choose it over Lingering Curse which adds a massive amount of duration to your conditions! So most condition builds have no useful traits that trigger on criticals, and with direct damage from scepter and staff being so low the high Precision is effectively wasted.

Doesn’t matter all that much though, I mean it would be nice if they swapped some things round but fixing the buggy traits comes first. Attribute lines account for a much smaller proportion of your stats than equipment anyway.

@Kitai: +1 for the punnage! :p

Actually several other classes have condition damage and condition duration stacked together. The only downside to this would be that it would slightly disadvantage traits like Withering Precision

Oh yeah, wanted to add my admiration for the VA who does Thorn! Helluva voice, stentorious and full of character! Would love to know who it is!

I enjoyed everything apart from the jumping puzzle!

I was slightly disappointed with how early the dungeon was removed though. I never even got a chance to try it due to having had a busy few days. I was surprised that what turned out to be the most popular event was removed on THE ACTUAL DAY of Halloween! Strange decision.

@OP Power doesn’t affect the damage your conditions do at all. It’ll affect the direct damage your skills do (you know, like the staff autoattack, or your Life Blast, or when you trigger a mark you also do a little bit of direct damage as well as applying the conditions), but staff and scepter have so little damage that it’s not useful to you. It’s mostly necros that run dagger main hand or axe, or who spend a lot of time in Death Shroud that need power.

However since the Spite line improves condition duration as well as power, any points you spend there won’t be totally wasted, so if there’s any traits you want in that attribute line go for it! Generally you should go for the traits you want whichever line they’re in, because you’re going to get a lot more stat boosts from your equipment than from your attribute points. If you’re doing conditions you’ll probably go for Condition Damage/Toughness/Precision gear, though you have other options too.

But yeah, you’re right to want 30 points in curses. Every conditionmancer needs that. But everything else is up to you really. Personally I like to spend 10 points in Blood for Mark of Evasion and 10 points in Soul Reaping to get Vital Persistence (cause life force is hard to come by in pvp), but you can do anything you want!

Derk.3189:

We’re likely on par with a water attuned elementalist. A heavily specced heal warrior can provide OK utility but awesome instantaneous 2-3k aoe heals also.

I played as a healing ele in spvp (stole zravex’s build), and believe me, they provide FAR MORE raw healing! Just indicatively, check out my post above about Healing Ripple, which heals for 1,200 on attunement even with nothing in Healing Power, and is only a minor trait!
Condition removal is debatable, they cleanse a single condition every 5-10" or so, but can’t remove multiple conditions like necros can with their Staff #4 skill (keep forgetting what it’s called) or well of power. So only one at a time, but far more frequently.

How did you even manage to stay in there long enough to take the screenshot? When I jumped into the cauldron I was instantly and violently catapulted out of it in costume.

Not entirely sure about your method, you say that Vital Persistence makes it tick down 3%/sec, but surely that percentage depends on the amount you put in Soul Reaping! If you have a bigger life force pool, will it still tick for 3% of your max life force? I don’t think so, otherwise you’d only get the same amount of time in death shroud no matter how large your life force pool is! Which may actually be the case for all I know, though I doubt it.

I think a more reliable method might be to build up to full life force, no points in soul reaping, enter death shroud, count how long you can stay in it. Then optionally do the same but with 30 points in soul reaping, but no traits equipped. See how much longer you stay in there, so you can gauge what that 30% extra means. Theoretically you should be able to stay in DS 30% longer. It might not though: the extra life force might simply degrade faster, for all we know! Then equip Vital Persistence, and see if it does indeed let you stay in there an extra 25% longer on top of that.

That’s not all though: we don’t know whether life force degrades by a percentage or by a fixed amount of “HP”. ie. 100% life force might degrade more slowly if you have a larger HP pool. The only way to really be sure is to do the above tests at 2 different levels of HP. (Go to the Mists, get a +vitality amulet, and do the same test with it on and off, just go into death shroud from full life and see how long you can stay in there) It kinda makes sense it should run down by a fixed number of HP rather than by a percentage.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

That tweet was misleading. Halloween will end on the Nov 1st, approximately 6PM eastern time.

There is a one-time event in Lion’s Arch on the 28th. Watch the progress bar in the Grand Piazza.

So the finale event is on the 28th but the rest of the event will continue till Nov 1st? Thanks for the clarification!

OK I take your point, this build does provide a lot of utility other than healing to the team, with all the blinds etc, so it’s wrong to view it in terms of raw numbers along.

However, if you’re telling me that Deathly Invigoration, a MASTER level MAJOR trait, heals for a piddly 700 at healing power 1200, when the Elementalist MINOR trait Healing Ripple heals for twice as much at zero healing power, then I have to lift my hands up and say they just don’t want us playing healing builds!

I fully acknowledge that the necro offers stuff to their team over and above their healing ability that other professions don’t, but, well, so do the others. Elementalists have more heals, higher damage even when specced for healing, and very frequent condition removals, and Guardians have more tankiness, cc and group boons. Not saying those are better, just saying everyone brings something unique to the table, and the very least you can do to maintain balance is to ensure parity between equivalent-level abilities. So if a master-level trait that does exactly the same thing (passively-activated PBAOE heal triggered by activating your class mechanic every 15" in the case of the ele or 10" in the case of the necro, so they’re pretty much equivalent) is twice as effective on one class than in the other, well, that’s clear evidence of poor attention to balance or dodgy quality control.

It’s true we have quite good condition removal though – even with Plague Signet bugged (which will hopefully be quite powerful when/if it’s fixed), we also have Staff #4 and Well of Power, so that’s quite a lot of options. (Although I’m not sure how many conditions per pulse Well of Power converts, if it’s only one then that would be somewhat underpowered compared to the other wells…) But again, not something other classes too can’t achieve.

Haishao.6851:

and medium have trench coats

Ah, but what you don’t know is that those rangers and engineers are all naked under their trench coats – they’re perfect for flashing people!

Does that make it a bit sexier for you? :p

This condition can be powerful, but it seems it’s disproportionately effective against enemies who deliver damage in multiple rapid packages of small damage, and much less effective against enemies who attack more slowly for big damage. For instance a greatsword-wielding type will attack more slowly and do quadruple numbers of damage with each swing, suffering only a few hundred points of damage from retaliation, whereas someone who delivers damage using skills which cause multiple rapid hits per attack, or from multiple condition stacks ticking once a second, may deliver the same amount of damage over the same period of time but due to it coming in multiple small packages it will proc retaliation more times in that space of time and receive many times more damage.

The solution: instead of a fixed amount of damage scaling with Power (not sure why you use Power rather than Condition Damage for this condition, but that’s another topic), change retaliation to inflict a percentage of the damage you inflict, scaling upwards with power, eg. 20% at Power 1000 scaling up to 60% at 3,000. That way if you do 10,000 damage at your target you should receive the same amount of retaliation damage whether you do it in 5×2000 or 20×500.

Oh come on folks, Corrupt Boon is major! There may be a long way to go but at least they’re paying attention to big, important skills that a lot of people use. Now hopefully they’ll fix Plague Signet next patch!

And Spectral Walk wasn’t a nerf, people being able to swap it out while it was active was clearly an exploit and was making quite a difference in pvp.

At around 1200 healing power:
Regeneration ticks for about 289.
Well of Blood ticks every second for around 670.
Leaving death shroud heals for about 700.

Well of Blood is a beast with its long duration! How frequently does it pulse by the way, is it 1" or 3" nowadays?
700 for Deathly Invigoration sounds pretty underwhelming actually… Does it at least heal you as well as people around you? Or just people around you?
I assume by the fact that you switched that Transfusion was even worse?

How much does that typically heal for (and at what healing power)? Does it heal you as well or just allies around you?

Ascii, how are you coping with no stun breaks? Do you just tap DS and eat the damage when the cc lands? Are you able to build enough life force quickly enough to deal with the next cc when it comes?

Also, how long can you last 2v1?

I can’t confirm whether this happens with Well of Blood, but I DID notice green numbers appearing over my targets when health-siphoning while I was attacking dummies in the Mists. The numbers appeared consistent with what they should have been receiving as damage from the health siphoning though, so I assumed that this was merely a visual bug rather than the health-stealing was actually healing them. (Of course it might have been, but the amount of health that trait steals is far too small for me to be able to confirm visually by looking at their health bars)

At any rate, the bug was reported.

Agreed, if it’s not a weapon skill it shouldn’t be classed as an attack, and ergo unaffected by blind or aegis.

HOWEVER, I honestly wouldn’t care as long as they at least fixed it to work as intended! This and Plague Signet are our biggest outstanding bugs.