Guild Wars 2

I think stabo should be someone’s rap name. MC StabO in da house!

In all seriousness though, the OP does have a point that stability from a utility skill would be a very welcome addition to the necromancer’s skillset. Could be in WoP, could be in Spectral Walk, maybe even on Corrosive Poison Cloud for all I care. I think pulsing stability on WoP would be way too powerful, but its 1" duration could be extended to 3 or even 5", and perhaps even given to allies too. Atm you can be knocked out of it very easily, meaning you can get as little as 2 pulses of condition conversion. This explains why it’s not as widely used as any of our other stunbreakers except in wvw zerg warfare (I even see more Plague Signets in pvp than WoPs), even on the double-well zerker builds who already take well traits.

I’ve turned it off too. The number of times I tried to fear somebody only for them to stealth and my fear to hit their pet or rock dog or whatever (so going on full cooldown instead of 5") is insane.

I’d rather they gave us strafejumping and megahealth powerups.

In that Ready Up video showing Stronghold 2 weeks ago, I noticed a grey bar under the health bar of the lord. Having seen that Wyvern video, I now think that’s a Defiance bar like the new pve bosses will have.

So, no more easy heal interrupts to speed up a lord kill I guess?

Bhawb.7408:

Putrid Explosion will self combo with Death Nova 100% of the time, however it is delayed by 3 seconds.

Cool, thanks, that’s what I was asking.

Flesh Wurm has been used for a long time in the highest tiers of PvP. You can place it far away from the fight and it allows you to create z-axis separation from your opponent that cannot be followed without them also using a shadowstep. It is one of the best skills for both mobility and distance creation that we have, and there is no substitute for its use.

I think he meant actually in combat, as opposed to placing it just outside the fight so you can use it to escape if you get into trouble.

Has anyone noticed the Lord in Stronghold has a defiance bar as well?

There’s probably legal reasons they can’t give cash prizes to under-18s. And remember, this is an international tournament so they have to pick a minimum age that’s legal in ALL countriies eligible to join. So unless you want to create a global advocacy group to change US, EU, Canadian, and Chinese legislation, there’s nothing you can do.

Does it combo? Don’t think I ever noticed weakness on my targets when using Putrid. I haven’t used minions in months though, so don’t take my word for it. I won’t be able to play till Sunday probably, so if anyone logs in later blow up a bone minion near a golem while waiting for a match for me please? :p
Also, does it combo instantly, or with the 3" delay? Just noticed I was wrong about Death Nova’s poison field being 3", wiki says it’s 4 so it would still combo with the delay.

Well that’s the thing though, we need more frequent application – long duration/long recharge weakness is useless because it will get cleansed quickly. It should be something you have on demand when you see the big burst coming.

It didn’t catch it in my next post though! And I went back and checked that there was a space in my previous one. Weird!

Why is “isn’t it” being caught by the swearie filter?

Bhawb.7408:

I bet I could come up with some cheese build that used WoS and Bone Minions to do some funny stuff, especially since Bone Minions are unscaling.

In fact I’d probably argue Death Nova is actually so good that if I was already 4 into DM that its worth dumping 2 more traits in just for Death Nova’d Bone Minions. I might try that sometime with a tankier build setup.

Well the challenge was to take Bone Minions without Flesh of the Master, so you don’t HAVE to go 4 into death, you can run whatever you want! You could run CPC with Bone Minions I guess, though the recharge on that thing is ludicrous, and it already applies weakness on its own… WoS though? I don’t much like dark fields, blind is a marginal condition. Time to bump the “make well of blood a water field” thread maybe? :p

Speaking of the putrid blast delay, has anyone considered that it might be a stealth nerf to make it never combo with Death Nova? Its poison field is 3" long too, isn’kitten Or am I being paranoid?

@Scynte Yeah, integrating minion manipulation skills into the profession mechanic somehow would be a great way to go, but that means completely redesigning the profession, which I doubt they’ll do…

Don’t you have the fastest broadband in Europe or something? It was definitely one of the Scandinavian countries, could be Denmark instead but I’m pretty sure it’s you guys!
(Please don’t kill me for mixing you up with Denmark! :p )

It was a 15" icd, which, assuming you spent a little time in DS rather than just flash, is basically every DS. It alone gave us 40% weakness uptime, although weakness was, err, weaker then. :p Now it’s 20%, 40% with near to death, which is hard to fit in on a condimancer (who will be the one taking it, zerkers take ranged wells instead usually) and only if you DS on cooldown. Not to mention fewer bleeds. I’d be happier if they removed the bleeds and applied 4" weakness alone.

Also, just read your sig Bhawb, it gave me a laugh!

Actually yes, I would, if we had any decent fields to combo them with. On non-MM builds it isn’t at all a big deal to leave them unsummoned when not needed and summon them specifically to combo with a field/deal burst damage.

Well, uh, there’s a 3" poison field on Chilblains? :p
Seriously man, how about a little wager? If you run bone minions without Flesh of the Master and win 2 out of 5 games (screenshot proof accepted), I’ll run bone minions instead of Spectral Walk for two weeks thereafter ON MY CONDITIONMANCER!

Bhawb.7408:

This heavily depends on build. A bunker Warrior will do the same damage as a glass one, a bunker ele will be the same, and this is relatively true in many other cases as well, because they equip similar weapons.

Like I said, the only profession where the damage would be the same would be rabid and cele engi (and then only with kits, not their main weapons). Every other profession takes different weapons depending on amulet. Zerker warriors use GS, don’t they? That’s a burstier weapon with very high power scalings (Hundred Blades is over x4!). Hammer, longbow, and even sword don’t come anywhere near that. Cleric eles use staff, not d/d, whose skills have lower scalings to make up for its larger aoes. Bunker guardians use mace/shield/staff, zerkers use scepter or sword and either hammer or GS, again, much better-scaling weapons.

Trust me man, if you make minions immune to crits, whether by a trait or baseline, MMs will become the new turret engis: everyone will hate them, and deservedly so, but, unlike turret engis, whom you can just cede the point to and go fight elsewhere, a MM will follow you around with swiftness and beat you up at your home point too!

Flesh of the Master isn’t compulsory to run a minion. Flesh Golem, Flesh Wurm, and Bone Minions in general can be used without HP traiting in a normal build without issue. If they die they die, its not such a big deal to a normal build, and they are used for their utility. Shadow Fiend and Bone Fiend with the proposed changes would also be worth using in normal builds. Also we are proposing a 20% HP boost without traiting.

I’m with you on a baseline HP boost, and if that happens then yes, Flesh of the Master wouldn’t be compulsory. But as they are, the melee minions really aren’t durable enough without the trait right now(with the exception of Golem). Especially Bone Minions who only have 5k HP, and who REALLY have to get close to the enemy to be useful! They have a short recharge so it’s not a huge disaster if they die, but that basically puts one of your utilities on a 10" recharge before the fight even starts and it sucks.

hitting 5 targets with heavy amounts of retaliation will absolutely hammer you with damage, and many builds rely on AoE attacks, even to hit a single target.

It’s not that bad. I don’t know how much power the minions have, but, assuming it’s about 1500, retaliation damage would be 300ish per hit or so? Assume you had 5 minions, 1 dies, gives the rest retaliation, 4×300=1200 per hit assuming you hit ALL of them (unlikely since one will be Wurm). You’d have to hit them a lot of times to really hurt yourself, and considering that, in the version of the trait I proposed, one has to get killed to proc it, the rest are probably going to be pretty low too. So realistically they’re not gonna take more than 2-3 hits more MAX before they die, so it’ll hurt but there’s no way you’ll kill yourself even if you’re complete glass! Unless you hit them with one of those skills that does a million little tiny hits, like guardian’s Smite, in which case you’re kind of an idiot and maybe you’ve earned it. :p

If it was tied to something the MM had to intelligently activate and time (like, watch the DPS guard come in, activate AoE retal, laugh while guard spams AoE like an idiot) I’d be fine with it.

Yeah I could go for that too, maybe on activation of a specific skill or something.

My issue is more them just getting a bunch of random buffs from dying. Death Nova already covers the punishing of killing well on its own, and it has a lot of play with the rest of the kit.

Well, I love the trait, but I don’t think it covers it. A glass ele or a longbow warrior can kill them well before they’re close enough for death nova to hit him. And if they lower their autoattack damage like I think we all agree on, hitting with death nova becomes more important.

Plus, like you and Sikari said, dying cause you ate too many death novas is kinda toxic – annoying to the enemy, and doesn’t need much skill from the MM’s part. At least with retal the damage isn’t delivered in huge chunks so you can stop attacking till it expires, so there’s some counterplay. I’m not suggesting anything that’ll replace death nova, just a replacement for Flesh of the Master that, instead of trying to prolong a minion’s pathetic, miserable life, gives you some benefit from its death.

I guess specific CDs could be argued in some cases, because this would only really affect Shadow Fiend/Bone Fiend/Flesh Golem, the other minions have actives that are tied to their death and couldn’t be lowered. But for those three, yeah I think you might have a point to lowering CDs.

That’s all I’m suggesting too, clearly lowering the cd on bone minions and ol’ Bloodie would make them OP! I think a case could be made for Flesh Wurm too though.

Some useful answers, but also some funny ones which I enjoyed even more! :p Thanks all!

I’m pretty certain Enfeebling Blood was nerfed as well, plus the amount of weakness blasting poison fields gave.
Also, weakening shroud wasn’t nerfed. It was obliterated.

Worse than tanking than a necro with full life force, far better than a necro who starts the fight with empty life force. Especially with those Mallyx skills that have bonus effects with each condi on you!

I mean I know they nerfed weakness uptimes in general, but it feels like we got much harder hit than anyone else. Why does Enfeebling Blood inflict the same Weakness duration as warrior’s warhorn, even though that’s got 5" faster recharge and a much larger pbaoe range?

Here’s a question about tactics:
You have a d/d ele on your pug. He casts his FGS just before the game starts, so he can spin his way at superspeed to mid.
Who’s the best person to grab the 2nd one? Another person going mid? Someone going far? Or just whoever doesn’t have swiftness of their own no matter where they’re going?

Bhawb.7408:

manveruppd.7601:

How about this:
“Flesh of the Master: when one of your minions is killed by anything other than a sacrifice skill, you and your minions gain 5” Retaliation and 5" Resistance"

Zerker and bunker wouldn’t have any difference in damage in our setup. Even Carrion would be relatively close to Zerker, since they have fairly close power stats.

No Bhawb, you’re comparing unequal things. The math is lying to you! Yes, a non-critical hit with skill X from weapon Y from someone in carrion gear will do 75% the damage of someone in zerker gear, and from someone in rabid it will do 50% of the damage of zerker gear.
Get this though: power builds and condi builds don’t use the same weapons! When was the last time you saw a bunker guardian holding a scepter? Or a carrion necro with a mainhand dagger? They’ll be using different weapons, therefore different skills with different scalings! The power scaling of Dragon’s Tooth (ele scepter 2 in fire) is 2.25 – but of Grasping Dead (necro scepter 2) is 0.7! Guardian’s scepter 2 has a whopping 4.9 scaling!
So yeah, a rabid scepter ele will do 50% of the damage a zerker scepter ele will do with their scepter 2 skill, but a a rabid necro using THEIR scepter 2 will only do, like 15% or something?? (arithmetic may be approximate) That’s basically making minions completely immune to a build! COMPLETELY!
There’s some exceptions – both rabid and celestial engis use nades, so they’ll have the same scaling, and, although the celestial build stacks might better, skill-for-skill rabid does half the damage of celestial.
But tbh my main problem with your suggestion isn’t how tough you’re making the minions: it’s that, without the trait, they’re just as vulnerable as they are now! This would make your revised trait just as compulsory as Flesh of the Master is now.

That is actually the main point of the no-crit suggestion. Giving them a ton of retaliation makes it super punishing against professions that rely on AoE skills, remember the mesmer build that instantly kills a guardian if they use one ability?

That was a bug: halting strike would proc repeatedly off durational skills. Wasn’t just guardians, I did it on an ele too.

Lowered CDs lowers one major point of counterplay, and that is being able to kill them. Minions being dead is a big point of counterplay to the build.

Well, I’m not saying zero cooldown obviously, but lowered to something that doesn’t make the MM completely useless. And actually, you KNOW that the best tactic against a MM is to focus the master rather than the minions – I’ve seen you giving that advice to people on the pvp forum. And you’ve repeatedly said in this thread that the problem with minions dying isn’t so much that they get focussed down, it’s that they die incidentally from aoe while the enemy is targetting the necro. So you can’t really call it counterplay if it happens by accident!
I do agree to an extent though, but I believe the need for this counterplay would decrease if the autoattack damage of the minions was nerfed, as you and Sikari already suggested in the OP.

manveruppd.7601:

a utility skill has to be at the very least VIABLE (not top-tier, just viable!) without any trait investment

Agreed. Although I would argue that everything but Blood Fiend is currently or could easily (with small changes to it or other skills) be made to be viable. Flesh Golem/Flesh Wurm are obvious.

Golem and Wurm are pretty tough by default, yeah, though the Wurm owes its survivability to being placed way outside trouble in the first place :p But come on, would you take bone minions untraited? They can literally be one-shot by some skills, even non-critting, and you don’t even need to be a zerker to do it!

Shadow Fiend with an animation reduction would be an amazing way to secure stomps. Bone Minions are our best non-WoC burst, plus could be good sources of blast finisher if we got better fields going. And Bone Fiend with an AA reset would be great for CC and holding people inside stuff like wells.

Yes, I completely agree, which is why what I want is for these utility skills to be become viable without having to take 2 master-level traits for them!

Basically, we need to stop thinking of them as completely passive damage boosts, and start thinking of them as utility skills which you can only use while your pets are alive! So, really, THE PET ACTIVE is your REAL utility skill, not the minion itself! This predicates a complete rebalance:
1. the passive bonuses your pets give you has to be negligible-to-mediocre, hence lower autoattack damage, and
2. if being able to use the active is gated by the pet being alive, the death of the pets must not be as crippling a setback as it is now, hence lowered resummon cooldowns.

But my question is: did they unintentionally say that blind will be changed to stack in intensity, or am I just reading too much into that comparison?

And @Rising Dusk yeah, if they did do it, it would probably be a good idea to limit stacks to 5, but remember that a single cleanse will lift 1 stack just as well as it would lift 25, and also that each stack would also have a duration, so it’s not like you’d need to spam 25 attacks if their duration was only 5"!

It’s logical since it’s intended to help the necro kite vs melee opponents. But maybe they should have made it “remove swiftness and one additional boon”, since Swiftness is so easy to reapply anyway. Or even make it more situation with “remove Swiftness. If Swiftness is removed, remove one additional boon”

ronpierce.2760:

manveruppd.7601:

Snip for length.

The problem with your suggested (original) Flesh of the Master is that you’d be exchanging 50% HP for a means to avoid conditions, but zerker builds would even more-so tear through them at that point. They’d need a passive health boost (which frankly, wouldnt be a bad idea because at this point in sPVP they’re paper without flesh of the master, if they already aren’t WITH it).

Oh I totally agree: baseline health boost somewhere betweeen 25-50% in pvp is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY to make minions viable. So basically making Flesh of the Master in its current form baseline. I loathe “goodenough traits”, ie. traits that you just have to take before the utility skill you want to slot in is even good enough to consider taking (like back when Rangers had to take a grandmaster to make the actives on signet skills apply to them rather than just their pets – blatant trait tax). They’re incredibly lazy design.
The same goes for Training of the Master (in its current form obviously, not the replacement I suggested), but since I agree with you about toning down the autoattack damage of minions, I think the trait should just be scrapped in its current form, and a baseline damage increase to the minion active skills become standard.

That said, I like the thought of it, though I’d go for sacrifices too, and reduce it to 4 seconds. I think having a little bit of “on demand” would do us good, otherwise it’ll only come when they’re too low to recover from anyways. Plus having more “boons to pets, but not anyone else” would be an interesting way to utilize the boon boost we get from death magic without making US a “boon class”. (Oh, I forgot, don’t have it apply to the master, just pets).

Yeah, making it proc on sacrifice could work if it didn’t boon up the master as well. I like the idea of being able to sacrifice a pet to buff the rest. Plus on second thoughts resistance on an already tanky necro on every pet death would be way OP! :p My original thinking on that was that a boon like that could open up zerker amulet for MMs, giving them a small window of condi immunity every time one of their pets got killed, plus better access to retaliation. But proccing on every minion death would give the necro perma-resistance. What if it had a 10" ICD? Or if it only gave retaliation to the necro? Would that work?

Plexxing.2978:

@manveruppt:
Unquiet dead sounds so good you’d be sure that it’d come with a cd or low max minion count…basically nerfed into oblivion. If, by chance, it wasn’t nerfed, this would seem to be a good trait. Imagine if there were so many jagged horrors out that some survive long enough to actually hit a target in a team fight. This is assuming they allow 2 jagged horrors to spawn off of 1 that was killed. Shame about losing death nova though…imagine the carnage…Mwhahahahaaa….and that’s why it’ll never happen.

Yeah it can totally see how it could steamroll out of control. I think an ICD would defeat the point (the point being all your minions dying simultaneously to a scepter ele’s aoe), but a limit on jaggies could work. Personally I was undecided between the version I posted and “utility skill minions” only proccing the trait, so the jaggies could NEVER recycle themselves, whether they kill or die naturally, but in the end I decided there would never be any reason to pick that over Death Nova.

Lopez.7369:

I think the only other great necromancer I’ve seen in-game was Supcutie, simply because he positioned correctly and used fear as an interrupt instead of opening with it.

Didn’t he play mesmer?

Back in that Revenant PoI video they said that the Stability change will make it “more similar to blind, where one stack prevents one CC”. Since Blind currently stacks in duration, not intensity, I gotta ask: are they also planning to change Blind to stack in intensity, each stack making one attack miss, and they told us so in that vid by accident?

I think it’d be a good change, for what it’s worth.

Reanimator: we’ll get a syringe-shaped greatsword, and square-rimmed glasses as a special headgear skin. And a labcoat light armour skin. Come to think of it, I’d pay gems for these things!

Teutos.8620:

I can list you some pros(still would prefer separate queues):
snip!

All valid points, but I too would prefer separate queues, for a simple reason: Stronghold will suck in the beginning! It’s brand new, it won’t have been adequately tested, and it won’t be ready for prime time! It needs a “test season” and tweaking before it can get taken seriously as a competitive map. Putting it in the conquest queues will prevent adequate testing from happening for 2 reasons:
a. If you put it in conquest queues, people will mostly play with conquest comps. Therefore, if, due to a weakness in the map design, some build comps are seriously overpowered in Stronghold, this won’t show up in the data, as a combined queue won’t encourage people to find those comps and try their hardest to break the game. (Sure, some people will switch to another character that they’ve got set up for Stronghold, but these will be a tiny minority.) So the map’s weaknesses will fly under the radar. Then they’ll have some kind of Stronghold tourney, with cash prizes, and of course a team running a cheesy build will take it and everyone will complain because how have they not noticed something so blatantly broken, etc.
b. If Stronghold has an equal chance of coming up as any of the COnquest maps, they’ll get far less data than they need to spot any obvious problems with the map.

Not to mention it’s gonna be annoying for people who have been looking forward to a new game mode and really want to try it to get 5-6 Conquest maps in a row instead when they try to play! Even if they love Conquest it would annoy most people if what they want to do is try out the fun new shiny thing they’ve been waiting SO LONG for!

I’m absolutely in favour of this change! The way it works now, unless you have someone on your team that can remove boons, stability is incredibly overpowered. Even then, with the tremendous amount of boon spam going on in team fights (particularly with last year’s rune changes), stability was difficult to remove simply because of how low it’s buried on most skills’ removal priorities! Now, while it will still be difficult to cc someone with 3-5 stacks of stability, it’s not impossible, if you all choose to blow all your cooldowns in an effort to do so. If you really, REALLY want to interrupt an absolutely crucial action (a stomp that will let half the enemy team rally, a channel for a hero in Stronghold, etc), you have the option to do so, at the cost of using all your interrupt cooldowns. Real, genuine counterplay, with serious tradeoffs!

On the obverse, now that stability stacks in intensity, it also gives the developers scope to give MORE stability! I expect most skills that currently give stability to get multiple stacks of it, especially if they’re on long cooldowns. However, skills that currently don’t give stability but need it can be given a single stack of it, or maybe two, without making them OP, because a single stack is easily dealt with. So you can look at this change as a buff for stability, in that we can get more of it in smaller doses, because it’s no longer an absolute invulnerability to CC. So maybe if they judge that class X really needs a way to get their heal off reliably, here, have 1 stack stability for 3" on a skill that didn’t give it before.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Just a note, Well of Suffering is just damage and vulnerability. Well of Corruption is the boon stripper.

You’re right, I did mean Corruption! I’ll edit my post.

I agree with most of what the OP has said. I still feel reasonably powerful in an organised team, but much, much weaker when I’m playing with pugs, ever since the nerf to starting life force and the change to DS recharge times (used to let it run down, pop SWalk, and jump back into it 3" later). It’s not just the nerfs, like the OP said, it’s the metagame changes too: teams are packing too much aoe condition removal, and in team fights our application can’t keep up.

It’s more than that though: soft CC like chill, cripple, and weakness has been highly devalued, in favour of hard CC like stuns and immobilises (and fears, we’re part of the problem there). These conditions have received further nerfs lately, while skills that remove them have become more common in the metagame. There are too many skills that remove chill and cripple in the current metagame (warrior’s warhorn, thief’s withdraw, engi’s overcharged shot etc.), in addition to the already substantial aoe condi removal around, so they never stay on people for very long. Not to mention that teleports and shadowsteps completely ignore snares anyway. As for Weakness, its duration has been nerfed badly across the board (not just for necros), and blind has always been kinda useless except for securing stomps, as the downed body’s interrupts are the only skills in the game that are predictable enough and have long enough cast times to reliably blind without causing an autoattack to miss instead.

These conditions used to be the bread and butter of the necromancer: except for during the Dhuumfire months, we were never a condition burst class. We were the class that debuffed their enemy so we could survive their damage until they were dead. The class that didn’t beat you, but just lost slower than you. That playstyle is pretty much impossible with the nerfs to weakness and snares. Not that it was ever great in Conquest, because it took too long to kill someone, and while that wasn’t a problem if you were holding a point, it made you terrible at decapping compared to someone who could either kill faster or knock the defender off the point (so pretty much everyone), but it was viable at least. Now it’s downright terrible.

ANet need to go one of two ways with the necro: either they increase the number of conditions available to us so we become a condiburst class like rabid engis, or they unnerf some of the soft cc (and nerf some of the skills and mechanics that remove it) to make the debuff and attrition playstyle viable again. Preferably they’ll make both playstyles viable and give people the option to go one way or the other by picking appropriate traits, tbh.

To make debuffs meaningful again, they have to increase base durations on all soft CC (including from traits like Enfeebling Shroud, which I personally haven’t been running in months, and chilling darkness, which should give a 2" chill), and give us more frequent and reliable blind application (perhaps through an adept-level trait that blinds on fear?) Deathly Swarm has a fast cast time, but the projectile is too slow to reliably blind specific skills – we need a blind skill that’s fast enough that you can use it to blind skills with 1" or longer cast time at max range given a reaction time of 0.25" plus a bit of lag (so total activation time+projectile travel time if any under 0.5"). Withering Precision needs to be buffed, either by drastically cutting its ICD or, preferably, by reworking it in a way that carrion builds can also use it (eg apply 2" weakness when striking a poisoned foe, maybe?)

Additionally, necro needs the following general balance changes: Mark of Blood neeeds to go back to 3 bleeds, Grasping Dead has to be changed to apply torment rather than bleeding to give us more condition variety, staff traits need to be amalgamated into 2, and the 17% nerf to Terror damage that happened soon after Dhuumfire was introduced should be reversed.

ronpierce.2760:

I don’t have any specifics yet. But flesh of the master might be able to include some sort of Resistance boon for active minions with some sort of trigger. I’d have to consider it further, but resistance as a boon really opens options for dealing with conditions on pets.

How about this:
“Flesh of the Master: when one of your minions is killed by anything other than a sacrifice skill, you and your minions gain 5” Retaliation and 5" Resistance"
I honestly feel that Retaliation on minions is better than making them harder to kill. The delta in direct damage-dealing capabilities between zerker builds and bunker builds in this game means that if you make minions too durable some classes will just get hard-countered by minionmancers. But giving them retaliation instead of just making them tough as nails basically gives your opponent a choice: Sure, you can still 1-shot 4 minions with a Dragon’s Tooth, but they’ll take half your health with them. The fact that minions have varying degrees of health (and that some of them are ranged so they’re not all clustered together) should prevent against htem all dying simultaneously and thereby wasting the trait proc, and Resistance should prevent them from being burned to death and also wasting the trait proc (since condition damage doesn’t proc retaliation).

Of course, the REAL solution would be to reduce recharge times. That way, even if they all die, you just need to survive 10" and summon them again. Except on Bone Minions obviously – if you reduce their recharge time you’ll have infinite Death Novas on tap! The point is to acknowledge that minions die easily to aoe, and to make it so that their death is a setback for the master, but not an automatic GG, rather than to force the master to invest in a bunch of traits to prevent them from dying. Lower recharge times to resummon them would accomplish that automatically. Once you’ve got that, then you can introduce traits by which the necromancer can (optionally) benefit from their deaths, such as Death Nova or the Flesh of the Master rework I suggested above. The keyword is optionally: the minions should still be usable without a trait tax! If I want to take Greater Marks or Reaper’s Protection in that master trait slot instead, I should be able to. My minions won’t hurt people as much, but I’ll have other advantages.

Necro minions and Guardian spirit weapons are the only utility skills that demand so much trait investment before you can take them anywhere. I understand that this is in part because having a pet running around giving you a completely passive damage boost is kind of a big deal, but a utility skill has to be at the very least VIABLE (not top-tier, just viable!) without any trait investment, otherwise we’re back in Guild Wars 1 where some skills just weren’t worth slotting in at all until you had at least X points in its attribute. I think lowering recharge times with a bit of a nerf to autoattack dps like you suggested would make minions viable without compulsory taxing traits without making them OP.

Oh, and if you want more ideas of COMPLETELY OPTIONAL traits benefiting from minion death, how about:
Training of the Master (Spite, master major): When one of your minions dies, you and 5 allies within 600 gain 5 stacks Might, 10"
Necromantic Corruption (Death, grandmaster major): when one of your minions dies, create a Well of Corruption at its location. (5" duration, 10" ICD, which might seem short but remember, it’ll be pretty useless for ranged minions, and unless this manages to corrupt something really good in the one pulse your enemy will be standing in it it will do far less damage than a Death Nova)
Unquiet Dead (death, grandmaster major): when one of your minions is killed, create two Jagged Horrors at your location. (Might not seem anywhere near as good as Death nova at first glance, but in a team fight with lots of aoe this can create a snowball effect, and even if the jaggies never make it to the enemy either, they could be overloading the enemy’s 5-target limit so you and your teammates don’t get hit instead. “Is killed” rather than “dies” so you can’t start the snowball yourself by blowing something up, and so jaggies naturally degenerating don’t endlessly recycle themselves)
Deathly Vigor (blood, grandmaster major): when one of your minions is killed, you and surrounding allies are healed for 10% of its original health pool (again, “is killed” to prevent endless healing cycles from degenerating jaggies; this trait would, of course, also heal other minions if no other player allies are close enough).

Just some ideas of how you can reap a little benefit from minions getting killed, but, like I said, for these traits to be good, the minion skill itself has to be viable (not good, but viable) even if it’s untraited, and the only way to do that is to lower passive dps and reduce recharge times on resummoning them.

Wait, I don’t see why the small number of classes has anything to do with the frequency of balance patches. And I DEFINITELY don’t get the relevance of comparing the number of professions GW2 has to the number of heroes/champions a MOBA has!

First of all, a single hero from a MOBA is IN NO WAY equivalent to a profession from GW2. The notion that DOTA2’s Alchemist = GW2’s Engi, for instance, is ludicrous. A DOTA2 hero is pretty specialised, with only a small amount of customisation options. Broadly speaking, each hero will fall within one or more of the support/carry/initiator roles, and there are several heroes who can all fulfil the same roles with minor variation in their abilities and gameplay styles. Sure, LOL has even more, but that’s partly because of their pay-to-unlock business model making it necessary for them to have the most optimal champion for each role locked behind a paywall.

Each profession in GW2, otoh, has multiple viable (not optimal, but viable) builds available to it. A bunker guardian plays completely differently to a dps guardian – you can never get that huge a difference from a single hero in DOTA no matter how different your choices in levelling and gear acquisition are! Moreover, each of those builds has a number of minor variations you can make to it. Sure, your amulet and weapons basically define your build, but you have lots of customisation options in your utilities, sigils, runes, and exact trait loadout. Plenty of conditionmancers run greater Marks rather than Reaper’s Protection, for instance, or any of 3 different Soul Reaping Master traits, Rabid instead of Carrion, Spectral Armour rather than Spectral Walk, sigil of Frailty rather than Energy or Geomancy, or any of a huge number of variations, each of which has a small but tangible influence on the gameplay!

When you count all these builds and all these minor variations to these builds, you’ll find that GW2 (and ANY MMO as a matter of fact) actually has a lot more character choices than any MOBA! I’m talking an order of magnitude more, not just a few more! And that’s the case even if you only count the viable pvp builds – once you start counting the just-plain-bad builds you can make then we’re starting to talk about thousands of possible builds!

Come to think of it tbh, I’m not even sure why I’m writing this post: I have no idea what “MOBAs can afford to balance more frequently because they have more heroes than GW2 has professions” means! In fact the opposite is true, because surely in an MMO with only 8 classes, if one class is the developer’s one-eyed, asthmatic, ginger stepchild, then you’re disappointing a full 12.5% of your playerbase who main that class. Sure, a few of them will just play something else, but they won’t be as happy as if they could play their favourite class. In a moba with 100 champions, though, if one champion is kitten, you’re only disappointing 1% of your playerbase for whom that champion is their favourite. Not to mention the fact that people in MOBAs don’t form as close emotional attachments to individual champions as MMO gamers, who had to level them up over hudreds of hours and obsess over their gear and looks, do with their main characters, so not being able to play them in pvp because they’re as sub-par as an ele in 2013 is a far bigger disappointment.

So yeah, I’m sorry but that argument is just plain rubbish. Less character choice greates a greater need for frequent balance, not a smaller one. And even if it weren’t, I think I proved above that it’s factually wrong in its essentials: once you count all possible builds, GW2 does not in fact have smaller character choice than any MOBA, but far greater.

Someone posted this a couple weeks ago (sorry, don’t remember what your forum name is dude), which I quite enjoyed reading.
It’s quite long, so I’ll quote one section I strongly agreed with:

A balance update is to a PvP’er what a new Living World episode is to a PvE’er.

This is so true! I really enjoy tinkering with my builds, and it’s always a treat when they change a trait a bit, or add a new sigil to pvp that I can try out. Even when they turn out to be meh, at least I’ve had fun testing it. New stuff is FUN! Knowing what the optimal builds are and playing nothing else for month after month after month just leads to boredom, disillusionment, and burnout.
And I encourage people to scroll down to the “Successful eSports Games Update Regularly and Often” section and just look at the graphs. They’re very telling.

I hadn’t considered that Slow might also affect rezzes/stomps. And they haven’t told us how strong the effect is either – is it 1.5x activation times, exactly the opposite of quickness, or is it twice activation times? If it’s the latter we might never see a stomp in pvp ever again – 6" stomps will be really hard to pull off!

I really do hope we get slow too, though I suspect it’s somethign that’ll initially be exclusive to the Mesmer specialisation. Same as me and lots of other people on this forum have been begging to get Confusion ever since launch (complete with repeated and gratuitous links to Spiteful Spirit ;p ) but still haven’t. Confusion+weakness+slow could conceivably allow a necro to facetank an enemy’s attacks while they’re hurting more than you are, which seems pretty close to ANet’s design vision.

I think the addition of Resistance is good – that way it’s removable and there are fewer hard counters to conditions floating around. The only thing is they really should rework removal/corruption priorities to bring it near the top. If it’s buried under Swiftness, retal, regen, vigor, and 2 stacks of might, and it’s removed last, it could be gamebreaking.

Actually I really think they should move to a last in/first out system for both boons and conditions but this thread isn’t the place for that discussion.

It’s interesting that they chose to make Slow a condition rather than a status effect like Quickness. I think it’s a good decision: it’s an effect that needs to have a fairly long duration to have a significant effect on the enemy’s DPS, but it’s still pretty powerful, so it would have to be easily removable.

evilapprentice.6379:

Taunt should have been handled it like it was in WAR (Warhammer online: Age of reckoning). Taunt should have been a debuff that reduced your outgoing damage by 50% until you hit the taunting target X times, or until the duration was up. That’s a well designed taunt.

What Anet has proposed is a poor imitation.

Yeah that was one of the few things I liked about the pvp in that game, it was an original implementation, and one that let heavy armour types meaningfully protect their squishier teammates without using hard CC.

GW2 desperately needs better soft CC (cripples, weakness, blind, etc), and far less hard CC (knockdowns, fear, immobilise, and now I guess taunt).

But overall, I don’t think taunt will be overpowered. Since it’s a hard cc, I’m sure they’ll put it on long recharge, and the classes getting it will probably get it instead of getting other hard CCs like knockdowns and fears.

Muchacho.2390:

manveruppd.7601:

OTOH, Deathly Swarm ALWAYS misses when I’m blinded.

Even if blind is the only condition? As is said before i tested it on the npc guardian in the mists and it always worked. I am 100%. So i dont really understand…

Yeah I haven’t actually tested it against the guardian npc yet, sorry. And I can’t tell you with absolute certainty whether in the times it happened to me in-match I had more than 3 condis total on me or not, as they get applied pretty quickly. I definitely remember getting blinded while the projectile was in flight on 2 occasions (I remember cause I was at Quarry in foefire both times), but I can’t tell you for sure if blind was the 3rd or 4th condition on me. But Putrid Mark ALWAYS transfers blind first, Deathly Swarm not so.

Umm… in case anyone is actually discussing the points I raised seriously, my post was intended as a joke!

I don’t think they’re worth it. The healing is marginal even if you invest in serious amounts of healing power (which as a condi build you can’t). Plus you won’t get the benefit of them when you’re in DS, and you’ll be missing out on some very powerful traits you could get in the Death line instead (Greater Marks or Reaper’s Protection). I hate it that some choices are just so clearly superior to others – I would love it if we had some actual scope to personalise our builds, but with necro builds there’s a yawning gulf between the optimal builds and all the rest.

RashanDale.3609:

nekretaal.6485:

The only one that might be OP is life transfer. Perhaps that can be recoded to not heal the necromancer. Or maybe that should be moved to master/grandmaster.

It certainly can, so it becomes part of transfusion. Or it heals but doesnt increase life force anymore. that wouldnt be that OP either.

I could definitely go for that: “Transfusion: Life Transfer heals the user and nearby allies instead of granting additional life force”

Or perhaps blood traits should be very good because the boon duration healing trait line in a class with bad healing scaling and poor access to boons better be good.

I dont get this part, at all. what does blood magic have to do with our boon traitline?

but yeah, if we already have stats of a traitline wasted on boon duration, we better get some good (boon-providing) minors in it.

Oh that’s completely true and I never noticed it before: Spiteful Vigor and Ritual of Protection are the only traits in our Boon Duration line that actually give boons – and they’re both very short duration boons too! Meanwhile, we can get Retaliation and Might from Spite, Fury from Curses, Regeneration from Blood Magic, and the most important boon in the game, Stability, from Soul Reaping! It’s kinda ridiculous, as if it’s deliberately designed to give us as little access to boons as possible by making it impossible to invest in both boon traits and boon duration…

You guys saw the Revenant article they posted today? They’re apparently getting upkeep skills that you consume a certain amount of energy for as long as they’re active.

Here’s hoping that we’ll get somehting similar for our Life Force now that they’ve bothered to build that functionality into the game!

Unblockable skills ALWAYS go through Aegis for me, I tested it on a guardian friend (just Corrupt Boon and Dark Path, forgot to test wells). OTOH, Deathly Swarm ALWAYS misses when I’m blinded.

Is it actually possible that some skills work differently for different players??? It makes absolutely no sense, but there’s precedence for bugs (like the one that gave some necros 1/4 of the right health in downed state) that only affected characters created before or after a certain date…

Knighthonor.4061:

manveruppd.7601:

Also, one thing I can tell you: the first necro I see holding Twilight and calling themselves Edward, I will make it my personal mission to make their life in the game as miserable as possible.

Stop giving people bad ideas fool

Yeah like they needed me to think of that… :p

1. Embrace the Darkness is like Epidemic (except about 72.3 times better).

2. Taunt is like an inverse Fear (they run towards you rather than away from you)

3. ArenaNet is trolling Revenant players by only confirming hammer, mace, and axe as weapons for them, even though we saw Rytlock in a cutscene using his fiery dragon sword, just like they trolled us by giving Trehearne a greatsword (except Revenants probably won’t have to wait 3 years to get it).

Any other similarities?

zaced.7948:

manveruppd.7601:

You know why there’s so many noobs around? Because most people quit after 10 matches cause they get sick of the people in pvp.

if i can make noobs quit ranked with verbal abuse that’s a good thing imo. as it is now i’d rather have a 20 min que than to have to watch my 4 kittened teammates lose the game for me.

That would be awesome. Maybe it’ll just be you playing in the end. Then you’ll be happy.

Also, since you’ve had less than 250 games by December 16th, I’m sure there’s a lot of people who’d consider you a noob as well.

manveruppd.7601:

blablabla white knight in shining armor blabla

if people have no idea how to play they shouldn’t be playing ranked. period.

My point was they think they DO know how to play: they see an objective, they go for it. It makes sense, you’d think you’d be helping your team. It’s bad design that the objectives are so marginal your time is better spent elsewhere. But I’m sure you know better, so I nominate you for pvp commissioner so you get to decide who plays and who doesn’t.

brannigan.9831:

How many matches are they going to cost people by going 2 or 3 to chief or Svanir to start leaving there teammates to get run over at keep? Even after outlining the split to start in chat? The fact of the matter is the vast majority of the time people rage its because of bs mistakes people make. I could care less if people lose even fights. But to not know simple rotations and splits to start the various maps you have no right to play rated not knowing those things when there is unrated and arena to learn. You will cause your team mates to be in totally uneven unfun fights all match long. It’s 100% totally unfair to experienced players to not know the basics (or care) and jump into rated play.

I’ve told off people for going for Svanir at the start of the match too, your frustration is understandable, but that’s no excuse for the abuse some people are throwing at their teammates. You know why there’s so many noobs around? Because most people quit after 10 matches cause they get sick of the people in pvp.

Besides, it’s not really their fault if ANet put marginal objectives not worth going for on their maps. That’s just bad design. At least the bosses on Niflhel are worth getting sometimes – the side-buffs at Temple are so marginal it’s ALWAYS a waste of time to cap them! And it’s not like you know what they do if you’re new, and even if you hover over the buff to see, it’s not like you can calculate on the fly how many kills you’re likely to get for the duration of the buff and whether the extra points will be worth it. You can’t figure it out except by playing dozens of matches on that map! So it’s not really a “BS mistake” if they’re going and doing what they think the game designer wanted them to do – it’s intuitively the logical thing to do. It takes a lot of experience to get to know the game better than its designers!

I mean, yeah, it’s not really comparable, some classes are definitely easier to play than others, and even within the same class some builds are tougher than others, whether because they have more cooldowns to manage (eg. kit engi has about 4 times more cooldowns than turret engi), or because they’re a lot flimsier (eg power necro vs condi necro). Also, a lot of it is down to finding a playstyle that suits you – maybe a class that’s hard for most people you will find easy just because its style sits well with you.

Like others have said, use something you find easy until you get the hang of each map, then try a few different builds until you find something you’re comfortable with. You should definitely try several games with each though, this is a very twitchy game and it takes awhile just to train yourself into learning each build’s rotations and cooldowns.

I disagree, yeah you can afford to have someone at each objective but that doesn’t mean you have to. For instance, the treb could be gamechanging in a big fight, but if you’re contesting lots of places at once and it’s all 1v1 and 2v2 the treb is marginal and you could choose to ignore it. Plus, there’s a matter of how many to send to each objective – I’ve had lots of games at Temple in which one side lost because they overcommited to Tranquility, for instance!

I just feel that this game isn’t at its best 1v1 – there are lots of classes that counter one another effectively (guardian>thief>ranger>necro>engi etc), so the sweet spot for fun, skillful combat is 2v2 up to 4v4. I think that in a map with so many objectives we will mostly be fighting 1v1, seldom 2v2, and almost never more than that.