Guild Wars 2

Really? You wouldn’t take 6xDeath Nova explosions over the golem’s buggy AI that never attacks? The charge is great, of course, but it needs a clear run-up to the enemy, which it never gets if it’s picking flowers halfway across the map.

The reason something like what you suggest will NEVER be baseline is simple: it changes the basic rules of the game on multiple levels. You’re either stealthed or visible, putting in single-instance exceptions (“except for that ONE class when it does that ONE thing, but then ONLY FOR THEM and not even for any of their teammates”) is what turns MMOs into labyrinthine flustreclucks of obscure rules that become impenetrable to new players.

The closest this could get to “baseline” is if it were a minor trait. But even then, I personally wouldn’t like if it was something that only applied to the necromancer and not to any of their teammates.

I like the idea of putting revealed on people too. Not that we need it, as necro does ok against thieves now, but it would be interesting as an optional trait, and useful to your team. I don’t think it would be unclear to enemies: if someone puts revealed on you, you de-stealth and you can see a revealed icon on your status bar. It’s not like they’d think they were still stealthed. And of course any such trait would have a range, so you could just back off if you see they’re about to go into shroud.

I agree, I think there’s no reason for it. Being locked out of the actives is surely enough to balance this. If it weren’t for this stupid interaction, Lich Form would actually be a better elite for a minionmancer than Golem!

I agree that the change to movement skills is a big nerf for snares (chill and cripple). They were already pretty pointless because they didn’t affect teleports, but now with all these rampage warriors running around being literally unstoppable there is literally no point to crippling someone, and the only point to chill is the skill recharge reduction.

When they were previewing these changes, Roy justified it by talking about situations where people used Swiftness and movement skills to get “unintended movement buffs”. In other words: speedrunning dungeons. Listen here: they upended pvp balance and made snares and control gameplay much less viable (unless you’re a stunlock mesmer) SIMPLY BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T BE BOTHERED TO FIX THEIR DUNGEONS SO PEOPLE COULDN’T RUN PAST ALL THE MOBS!

Could they not simply have made movement skills be affected by snares but not by swiftness?

Frankly, I’ve been wondering about this: when they previewed the specialisation patch, they said Putrid Curse poison duration would be upped to 6". Even 6" would be a damage nerf, since poison does about half the damage it used to, so we’d need either double the duraiton or 2 stacks. But when June 23 rolled around, Putrid Curse was left at 4", it wasn’t even upped to 6!

@op, yeah they changed it when they allowed us to begin stomps/revives in DS. I think you want to be here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Change-DS-so-it-doesn-t-interrupt-actions :p

Would’ve been easier if they hadn’t nerfed barbed precision…

I wouldn’t mind if they did, as long as they weren’t hugely more powerful than the default ones.

Zetsumei.4975:

manveruppd.7601:

Hugh, can you do something about the fact that defenders hiding inside their base can hit your NPCs by aiming AOEs at the door?

I don’t mean they’re standing on top of the walls or something, they are standing behind their gates, where the attacking players cannot see or target them, aiming their AOEs onto the gate, and whatever is directly adjacent to the the gate on the other side of it is hit too. The gates are basically permeable by aoe damage skils. This also happens in Foefire, though it’s not as big a deal there.

I just had a game where a single elementalist hiding in his lord’s room took down Grymm Svard just by aiming lava fonts at the inner gate! I think it’s pretty broken that NPCs can be taken out with no risk at all to the defending player (since they’re directly behind their own gate and can’t be hit in any way by attackers). NPCs are the only way to get into the gates, so once this becomes common knowledge heroes who need to move into melee range with the gate to hit it will become useless, and a lot more games will end up as stalemates.

It’s been in wvw for three years xD

OK maybe it is, but it’s more important here, cause at least in WvW you can knock down a gate from further away so they can’t always kill your offense with cheese tactics like that… :P

Lopez.7369:

Overtime flat-out doesn’t work.

Yeah I don’t think work for me either, had 2 matches end on score even though the lord had been engaged. In one of them we knocked down inner with only a couple of seconds to spare, so it could be that our attacks just didn’t have time to hit the lord before the timer hit 0. But in the other one the lord was DEFINITELY engaged, I was in our lord’s room at the time, and the opposing team had gotten him down to half health, but then the timer hit 0 and we won on score!

Hugh, can you do something about the fact that defenders hiding inside their base can hit your NPCs by aiming AOEs at the door?

I don’t mean they’re standing on top of the walls or something, they are standing behind their gates, where the attacking players cannot see or target them, aiming their AOEs onto the gate, and whatever is directly adjacent to the the gate on the other side of it is hit too. The gates are basically permeable by aoe damage skils. This also happens in Foefire, though it’s not as big a deal there.

I just had a game where a single elementalist hiding in his lord’s room took down Grymm Svard just by aiming lava fonts at the inner gate! I think it’s pretty broken that NPCs can be taken out with no risk at all to the defending player (since they’re directly behind their own gate and can’t be hit in any way by attackers). NPCs are the only way to get into the gates, so once this becomes common knowledge heroes who need to move into melee range with the gate to hit it will become useless, and a lot more games will end up as stalemates.

Bhawb.7408:

It always interrupted actions, the fact that it didn’t was a lag abuse. They just need to up the stability duration so you can stomp fully in DS covered by that stab, but it interrupting actions is meant to prevent “abuses” like casting normal abilities while in DS.

Well, you call it lag abuse, by which I assume you mean something we weren’t meant to be able to do. But the fact that they held off fixing it until they decided to give us the ability to stomp and revive in DS should probably tell you that they knew about it, they were able to fix it, but didn’t cause they realised we needed some way to mitigate damage and interrupts while stomping/reviving.

Also, the fact that they “fixed” it for us, and DS now interrupts actions, but that they haven’t fixed it for stuff like Mist Form or Elixir S, even though they clearly CAN, should tell you that they don’t consider it an exploit or abuse for any skill that allows you to do that. Every other instant-cast skill in the game, whether it’s a transform or not, does not interrupt actions: look at shatters, Plague Form, Spectral Armour/Walk, attunement switching, cantrips, etc. DS is the one and only exception, and what that means is that FitG is useless for securing stomps, because you have to activate DS before starting to stomp and the stability duration is shorter than the stomp!

I agree with you that upping the stability duration (possibly the number of stacks too) would also be a way of fixing it. To be honest, I’d like them to do that anyway. I mean it’s a GM trait for crying out loud! But DS interrupting actions should be fixed regardless, because it’s an unnecessary inconvenience and it’s simply unfair that it has this additional restriction that all other skills of its type do not have.

As for the potential problems you raise, I disagree on all counts:

Bhawb.7408:

What if you started to heal then went into DS?

Then being in DS would block the heal, though it would still go on cooldown. So yeah… sucks for the necro, but not a balance problem :p

Or used elite + death shroud?

Well they’re both transforms so the one you activated second would theoretically cancel the first, but I don’t see how that would happen since going into Plague/Lich locks your F1?

Then there are issues of your skills being unequipped while in DS so you would still self-cancel almost everything, which they’d have to fix.

Not a problem. Eles can activate most skills and change attunement mid-cast, the skills don’t cancel, with only channeled skills like Meteor Shower as an exception. They’re not meant to cancel! A skill finishes activation even if you no longer have it on your bar in all instances, that’s how chain skills work man! It’s not an exploit or anything, it’s how every other profession works.

Assuming that wasn’t an issue though, things like Foot in the Grave and Death Perception would get balanced around being able to activate skills before entering DS for massive boosts to their damage or not being able to interrupt them.

I don’t see the problem there either – first of all you CAN still interrupt them through corruption, and secondly it’s fair game to use stability to secure the cast of a burst skill – it’s a skillshot. Hell, mesmers even have a trait that gives them 5" of stability whenever they activate a shatter, which sort of combines the two! With Deathly Perception you can already do it: everyone goes into DS after casting their wells to get higher crit chance!

There are just a lot of possible abuses, bugs, and more weird interactions for something that doesn’t provide that much benefit.

You only see them as abuses because you’ve been conditioned by the devs to think we don’t deserve stability, or the right to use our skills in synergy with each other. Try playing some mesmer, warrior, or elementalist and see how fluid gameplay is with them, how everything works in conjuction with each other instead of fighting each other, and you’ll see what I mean dude.

I’ve been wondering about the “heals and partially revives” phrasing in Transfusion and Life from Death. I always thought that when you healed allies it also affected downed allies, was I wrong? If you’re downed and an ele casts Cleansing Wave next to you, don’t you receive any healing too?

If so, what does “heals and partially revives” means? Does the “partiallly revives” portion of the trait functionality act in addition to the healing? So if I’m downed and someone uses Life From Death, will I receive 790HP in healing, and also be revived an additional 5% my downed health? Or does the “partially revives” overwrite the healing, and downed players only receive that portion, and not the healing?

Or have I had it wrong all along and you can’t be healed in downed state?

CodeHavoc.7926:

Been plague stomping since….ever.

Thanks for the insight. Did you walk into the wrong thread or something? :p

MethaneGas.8357:

DS always interrupted stomps and resses if you entered it while channeling the stomp/res. You were able to do a trick where you start a res/stomp as you enter DS and it would allow you to finish your action

Yeah I know it TECHNICALLY interrupted them, but, in practice, once you learned the shroudstomp trick you could do it properly. Moreover, if you ran out of life force midstomp it didn’t cancel the channel!

but now we can res/stomp while in DS, so the trick isn’t needed.

Of course it’s needed! The stomp takes 3.5", the stability you get from FitG is only 3. Plus, because you have to use DS immediately BEFORE starting the stomp (instead of after starting the stomp like with the old shroudstomp trick), the stability runs out about 2.5-2.75" into your stomp, giving them a decent window to interrupt you. And since we lost boon duration from attribute lines there’s no way to extend that.

The thing that sucks is not bring able to continue your action when you start it while in normal form, and THEN enter DS and stability doesn’t last long enough so…

Agreed. That’s exactly what I’m asking for. If you could do that you could start stomping in normal form, tehn flash DS when you see the interrupt coming. It’s such a short duration of stability that it’s unreasonable for them to expect us to enter DS BEFORE we start the stomp!

I usually try to start a stomp, then when I see the enemy do the push back or knock down from downstate, I quickly enter DS and start channeling again and finish em. It’s annoying, but it works… and it annoys your enemy.. which is always nice

That still means your stomp takes a 1-2 seconds longer though, since flashing DS interrupts your previous stomp. In a team fight that’s usually enough time for the downed person’s allies to get him up, or for them to do enough cleave to down you.

Also: to my knowledge mist form cant interact with thing when you are already mist.

Yeah, they can use it like the old shroudstomp trick though, start stomping then immediately enter mist form. Same with elixir s.

Axelwarrior.9084:

Did it ever really work like that?

Yeah it did, but I don’t think it was intended to: before it was changed to allow us to interact with things while we were in it, you could start a stomp or a channel and then hit DS immediately afterwards to go into it without interrupting your stomp. Now this no longer works: activating DS interrupts actions (same as leaving DS interrupts actions, which is why Life Transfer no longer keeps channeling if you run out of life force midcast).

I think the real reason it doesn’t is a technical issue, since your skills change and it’s treated as some sort of a transform? Just a speculation.

Don’t think it’s a technical issue (Elixir S and Mist Form also lock out your skills and they still work), but, frankly, I don’t care. It’s annoying, unfair, and they should fix it.

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

• Each supply pile only has a maximum of 2 supply in it at any given time.
• Supply piles will replenish their stores after 15 seconds.

Excellent change! I’ve been asking for this since Stronghold was first shown off! Hopefully we’ll finally get some mid fights now instead of each team just rushing straight to enemy base.

• Overtime
  • If a game goes to time (0:00) and a lord is engaged, the game will not end. It will continue on until one of the following conditions has been met:
    • A lord is stomped
    • Both lords are out of combat
    • Overtime lasts longer than 6 (-6:00) minutes

OK, that’s gonna be interesting. Makes last-ditch lord rushes a viable comeback mechanic if it works like you intend it to. We’ll see how it goes.

Three times in a single match I tried to shroudstomp someone, and still got interrupted by them, because FiTG’s pathetic 3" stability doesn’t last long enough to get off the stomp! If DS worked like it used to, where you could flash in/out of it midway through an action (like a channel or a stomp) this wouldn’t be a problem, as you could activate DS after you began the stomp.

DS is an instant cast skill, so I don’t understand why it’s the only instant cast skill in the game that interrupts you when you’re trying to stomp someone! Why do Guardians get to use their virtues, eles their cantrips, warriors their stances, and engis their elixir Ss, without interrupting their stomps and channels, but necromancers can’t use their shroud, which doesn’t even offer the invulnerability, multiple stability stacks, or aoe blindthat these other mechanics do?

I disagree, the duration nerf is not a big deal, you rarely could stay in it for the full 20" anyway. The fact that it gives 20% life force on exiting is a HUGE buff for shroudmancers, if anything! Means if you’re focussed as a Lich you can always instantly drop out and into shroud, rather than just die like you used to. Plus you can now trait it to take over half a minute off its recharge, and have it give an EXTRA 5% life force on activation!

Honestly, Marked for Death is terrible but all the other skills are not terrible – they’re just not as good as the autoattack with its massive damage! The problem with the other skills is that the cast times is extremely long. Mark of Horror would be good if it was 0.75" like every other mark in the game, but at 1.25 it’s literally 2 autoattacks – those poor jaggies will never do the amount of damage you could do in zerker gear with 2 Ghastly Claws. (Unless you’re using condi gear, in which case they outdamage 2xGhastly Claws, but it’s unlikely you’re using Lich Form on a conditionmancer…)

As for Chilling Wind, I know what the tooltip says but there’s no way that kitten only takes 0.25" to cast – from the moment you start casting until the actual pushback it’s probably closer to about 1"! Probably one of those skills where the actual effect occurs during the aftercast instead of during the cast time (like Grasping Dead doesn’t actually land until 0.25" after you’ve finished casting it). Plus it keeps missing, maybe the arc is too small? It should be 360 degrees, and either instant cast or much further knockback.

Always was a terrible skill: Chilling Darkness was the only thing that made it worthwhile.

Well I make a point of flashing shroud to get some FITG stability before healing. That protects against Mantra of Distraction just fine, but not against Diversion, because that’s 1 stun per clone shattered, and FITG only gives you 1 stack of stability.

The problem isn’t just the high damage, it’s that it can be delivered from maximum range at a very short recharge. I don’t have a problem with a profession that can burst half my health off almost instantaneously, I have a problem with a profession that can do it again and again and again faster than your endurance refills, faster than your other defences can recharge, and without giving you a window to fight back (since obviously you’re not attacking while you’re dodging). If there’s enough scenery around you can fight back by LOSing them, but if you get caught in the open it’s gg.

Sigmoid.7082:

It initially starts going 400 odd damage but you can see the only condition on the wurm is chill and when it’s below 50% it takes 6-700 damage a second just from chill being on it. So unless they changed it to on application, which would be completely stupid, its damage over time.

It does look like chill is doing 647dps in that video, but that’s from months ago: they might have changed it by now. If it really is damage per second rather than on-application, I seriously cannot think of any reasonable explanation for the Chilling Darkness nerf!

GoogleBrandon.5073:

Just remember to not panic – because Panic has been the strongest utility from a Mesmer since GW1

Actually it was an elite! :p

Sorry for the derail

jax.5679:

Totally not helpful, but I find playing a minion mancer against mesmers is the most viable build so far. You can sustain just so much while still dealing out fair DPS and fears to break up their rotations.

Also don’t forget you canm use your minions for los.

They created a balancing nightmare for themselves when they decided to make Reaper’s Shroud 1 cast so much faster than life blast, and cleave as well. They should have tried to keep each shroud skill as close to the others as possible, otherwise so many traits will be impossible to balance.

I think at this point the sensible thing would be to reduce Life Blast’s cast time (and damage) rather than increase RS1. 0.5" with 0.5" aftercast, and halve its damage coefficient.

MLK speech is funny, but slightly offensive.

They’re OP and they’ll win most of the time, but you stand a chance: use scenery to block their line of sight while using your aoe skills (marks etc) to stack conditions on them. They can still spam clones without LOS, but their phantasms require the attack to hit to spawn, so blocking LOS will slow down how quickly they can generate illusions, as well as protect you from the GS damage. Their mantra also needs LOS, and what the good ones will do is try to stun you to ensure their shatter lands. Dodge when you see the clones running to you (shatter), and if they’ve spawned a lot of them but haven’t shattered use DS4. After you’ve eaten at least 1/3 of their health while LOSing try to fear-lock them by chaining Reapers Mark and Doom while spamming life blasts. They’ve only got 15k health in zerker gear, and if you’ve killed the clones with aoe they can only do a 1sec distortion. 3 life blast crits (2 if you get lucky with a sigil proc) and they’re downed.

tl;dr: staff is your best friend. If you’re out of life force don’t even bother engaging.

ellesee.8297:

People took Chilling Darkness? Over Plague Sending?

Wahoo! Bye frands!

Before the June 23rd update, when Weakening Shroud had a 24" cooldown on it, I routinely took either Haemophelia or Chilling Darkness in the adept slot. If you were running Signet of Spite it was an extra chill (along with Deathly Swarm), so by far not the worst option in that slot.
I admit Plague Sending hugely overshadows it now. However, if you’re running Carrion instead of rabid, Plague Sending is hard to proc. With appropriate runes, Chilling Darkness could be decent.

Yeah good change making the lord harder. Would be nicer if the casters could also heal him.

Ratphink.4751:

Can we all just agree that this trait got hit by Isaiah’s Balance?

Isaiah’s Balance can only hit something that was ACTUALLY overpowered before it was nerfed! :p

I totally agree Cogbyrn, it wouldn’t have been that bad anyway imho. But clearly someone at ANet disagrees, so maybe the numbers are higher than we think they’ll be. I’m just pointing out that there could be a way to have Deathly Chill do high damage without nerfing Chilling Darkness, simply by spreading the Deathly Chill damage out.

Well spotted, I did mean Deathly Chill, which is what I called it in the actual body of the post! :p I think you’re wrong about it being damage-over-time though, I remember the damage proccing instantly when they were demonstrating it. If it really is dot then the nerf had absolutely no basis, since reapers can keep people perma-chilled anyway!

I tried it again tonight since they fixed the range and damage bugs. Still mediocre. Was at its worst when I was fighting a mainhand sword ranger: the amounts of evades they had meant that only 1 in 3 life blasts was hitting. Of course, I also tried all the other standard tricks, like “fear them and then pump dhuumfire into their bottoms”, or “immobilise them and pump dhuumfire into their faces”, but with the duration of our CCs being so short, I could only ever get a single Life Blast to hit before they were free to start endless evades again. So, no, for 1000ish damage (assuming it lasts the full 3"), totally not worth it. Especially compared to a Deahly Perception power necro, who can get that life blast to hit for 3-5k instead!

OR: How to Have Your Cake and Eat it (chilled)

OK, in the thread discussing today’s balance changes, I said that I couldn’t see how they could balance Deathly Chill without giving Chilling Darkness an ICD. I thought that, while the Chilling Darkness nerf was harsh, there was no other way around it.

I’ve now changed my mind: it occurred to me that Deathly Chill causes chill to do damage not as a “damage-over-time” effect the way every other condition does, but on-application. In other words, it’s not like Terror, where the duration of your Fear determines the amount of damage the trait does: instead it does damage when it’s applied, regardless of duration.

This is what could potentially make skills like Plague and Well of Darkness game-breaking when traited with both Chilling Darkness and Deathly Chill: because the short-duration chills caused by Chilling Darkness will proc Deathly Chill for just as much damage as the longer-duration, less frequent chills that are part of the Reaper’s weapon and Shroud skillset.

I’ve written earlier that there was no way to balance this by putting an ICD on Deathly Chill instead: most of the Reaper’s skills are aoe or cleaving, so if you put an ICD on Deathly Chill there was no way to guarantee that the chill damage would land on the person you’re actually targetting. If it procced on a ranger pet or rock dog, making the trait go on cooldown and sparing my real human target from eating the damage, I’d definitely be kittened off.

Therefore, the only way to ensure that Reapers could do decent damage with Deathly Chill, without causing Well of Darkness and Plague to singlehandedly destroy entire zergs, would be to put an ICD on Chilling Darkness instead. This is unfortunate, of course, as that trait was the only thing that made taking those skills worthwhile in WvW large scale fights, where the necromancer could spread a lot of snaring and disruption. Now, those skills will proc for only a single chill each, making them pretty useless.

It’s now occurred to me that there was another way they could have balanced it. Instead of putting ICDs on either Chilling Darkness or Deathly Chill, they could instead have changed the way Deathly Chill does damage! Instead of doing only a single packet of damage when you apply chill on a target, change it instead to work like Terror and do damage-over-time. So, instead of it doing 200ish damage when you apply chill, make it do, for instance, 75 damage per second. That way, assuming 50% uptime for a GS reaper, it’ll be roughly the same amount.

This way, chill duration matters, and Well of Darkness and Plague no longer turn into massive AOE damage, which also snares you so you can’t get out of it. Chilling Darkness only does 2" chills, and chill has just been changed to cap maximum duration stacking to 5.

Frankly, I don’t think either of those skills would’ve been bad enough to warrant this nerf anyway. After all, they do roughly what the ranger’s Barrage does (snare and aoe damage), but with added blind and MUCH less damage. I don’t see rangers stopping wvw zergs in their tracks personally. But, nonetheless, I don’t know the final numbers, so maybe Reaper would indeed have been overpowered with these skills. I accept that the Reaper’s traits have been balanced with the Reaper’s ability to apply chill in mind, and since they apply chill infrequently but with long durations, it was a bit silly that Core necromancer skills could get more damage out of Deathly Chill than the reaper’s own skills could. But by changing Deathly Chill to do DoT instead of single-packets of damage, duration now matters, and the Reaper’s long 4.5" greatsword chills will no longer do less damage than multiple short-duration Chilling Darkness chills: it’s the same damage, applied per-second like every other damaging condition in the game.

If you agree that this would make sense, please bump this thread till whoever’s handling balance sees this.

What did you blast with? Your one 20" blast finisher on staff?

Yeah to clarify: when they say that conditions like Chill or Cripple or Immobilise “stack”, it means the duration of the new condition gets added on to the existing duration.

In fact we really don’t know what the old stacking limit was! It might have been more than 5, but it might have been less too: Immobilize only stacks to 3!

Moreover, as far as I know applications over the stacking limit STILL stack duration, they just overwrite the oldest application (which would have nearly expired by that point anyway). So you’re not “wasting” chills – it’s a short duration effect anyway, a 5-limit duration stack is effectively an infinite limit duration stack.

Seriously, the Chill nerf is nothing to worry about, not even if you’re a Reaper (which isn’t even out yet, come on guys)! In any real world situation, no human opponent will let Chill stack to 5 on them anyway, there’s too much cleansing around.

The nerf to Chilling Darkness, otoh, is something to be sad about, as it makes skills like Plague and Well of Darkness much weaker, but, like I said above, I don’t see how they could have balanced Deathly Chill otherwise, and, also, it’s those skills that are weak in the first place.

Surely though your chill build didn’t rely on Chilling Darkness that much? We really don’t have that many reliable and consistent blinds outside Plague: Deathly Swarm’s projectile is so slow an old lady with a walker could sidestep it, and Well of Darkness was on a monstrous cooldown.

nekretaal.6485:

Putting a five second internal cool down just kills the trait. Imagine trying to use well of darkness now and only getting one tiny chill on the whole long cool down.

I agree that it now makes Well of Darkness worthless. The reason for that though isn’t because Chilling Darkness is now too weak, it’s because BLIND (and by extension well of darkness!) is too weak.

Yeah this was, of course, intended to balance the Reaper trait that causes Chill to deal condition damage. Deathly Chill iirc? I doln’t know how high that damage is going to be, but presumably they felt it would make condition reapers too strong when paired with Plague and Well of Darkness, especially in zerg fights.

Of course, a sensible question could be why put an ICD on Chilling Darkness and not on Deathly Chill? Well, I guess with Reaper being able to inflict Chill in an AoE with so many different skills, putting an ICD on Deathly Chill itself means that, in group fights, Deathly Chill would often proc on something OTHER than your primary target (a mesmer clone, a ranger pet, a different opponent than the one you’re focussing, whatever) and go on cooldown. Then, when you threw a single-target chill at your primary target, Deathly Chill woudln’t proc again as it would be on cooldown.

I feel sad too, I was kinda looking forward to Chilling Darkness being OP, but it’s hard to see how they couldn’t have balanced Deathly Chill in any other way.

I don’t know, if it was just a bug they wouldn#t have made the effort to change the tooltip would they? But it’s a pretty strange thing to stealth-nerf when the trait is so mediocre in its own right. Condi builds don’t have enough life force generation to stay in DS very long, and, even if you do, the burning application is terrible due to Life Blast’s glacially slow attack speed and how easy it is to dodge it.

Well, it keeps missing for none of those reasons for me, I’ll have to catch it on video for everyone to believe me I guess…

It does man, I tested it many times. I played 8 matches last night with PS and the transfer missed for no apparent reason at least once every match.
If you’re trying to test it on a golem, it’s not enough to just be facing away from it when you cast. If you do that it will work anyway. You need to be stunned or immobilised or otherwise UNABLE TO TURN TO FACE your target for it to fail.

It’s not actually a good stunbreak in my opinion, because the condition transfer requires facing. When you’re stunned/knocked down/feared/whatever, or even when you’re immobilised, you can’t control your facing, so you have no way to ensure your condis will transfer anywhere. Not to mention that if you get stunned by a thief coming out of stealth you won’t even have them targeted, and pausing to tab-target before breaking stun will get you dead. I literally just had it miss against an immobilised opponent in a match on Temple!
I have to give them credit for changing it to transfer blind instead of missing because of it, but they also need to make it not require facing if it’s to be good.

And while I agree with Pazu that the passive CAN occasionally win you a fight by giving you some fat stacks of damaging condis to transfer, it’s a dice roll: it can just as easily cost you a fight by transferring an immobilise onto you just as you’re trying to escape (and then failing to transfer it with the active cause your target was behind you and you were immobilised!). So 90% of the time it’s simply an annoyance, a nerf to your movement speed and an extra load on you that doesn’t help your opponents. Would have much preferred if it was “+25% outgoing condition duration”, or something more imaginative like “Once every 3 seconds, a condition inflicted on you is also copied to the nearest enemy.”

No, I’m sorry but its utility to the rest of your team is pretty limited: in a 3v3 fight, the chances that you’ll pull off the right condition to save the guy that’s currently being focussed, and in a large 3" interval when bursting someone down takes half that time, is just miniscule. It’s like playing darts with your eyes closed.

Yeah, it’s rare that the passive can kill you (though it’s happened to me with a random immobilise), but the problem is it really slows you down. If you’re running past Clocktower to get to one of the side points in Kyhlo, and you pull a cripple from a teammate of yours fighting inside, it feels like the game itself is trolling you. Even a measly 1 stack bleed will seriously slow you down, as it puts you in combat and you move 25% slower.

In effect, the passive is an actual nerf rather than a buff, as it means you have to move 1,200 further from your teammates before you can be out of combat.

Rym.1469:

@manveruppd If you’re asking about the graphic, it was made by made as part of suggestions for necromancer design before the patch. I posted finished version on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3aghyy/graphics_necromancer_changes/

I missed that thread, nicely done! (Both on the graphic and the suggestions)

Who made that?
/15

Yeah you’re right, sorry for derailing. I agree, it’s pretty much mandatory for power necros. Currently all an enemy needs to do is hide behind their pet/clone/minion/turret/parrot and the life blast will miss.

I think it should pierce too, but if it’s going to get baseline buffs I would rather its casting time was reduced. Currently it’s 1" to cast and 0.4" aftercast, meaning people can step around obstacles/other players/YOU and force it to miss during its cast time. If you try to use it against a thief you basically can’t hit them, all they need to do is walk through you for it to miss.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Foefaller.1082:

Nice build, have a question though:

If Plague Sending requires you to crit a target to trigger, and CC’s (with the sole exception of taunt) prevent you from attacking, how are use suppose to use it to stunbreak out of CC’s?

Pre-set pulsing effects like Locust Swarm or wells.

Also, popping DS with Weakening Shroud traited, I would assume.