Guild Wars 2

Bhawb.7408:

Necromancers have absolutely amazing condition removal, and it even got buffed (slightly).

Necromancer condition removal is awful.

All of it is high cooldown. Most of it has targeting restrictions, which is inefficient when all you need is a heal.

Staff 4 and consume conditions are good at removing a lot of conditions at once. They are not good at removing low duration spammable conditions.

Like the immobilize on 15 second cooldown that every theif is going to start using. Like the various taunts and fears. Like constantly reapplied burning stacks. Like the spammable cripples that other classes have, or even the new (rumored) chill on greatsword auto which will just wreck the long cooldown necromancer.

The new spite condition trait wolnt proc when you’re in trouble. Dagger 4 is slow and easy to avoid without even dodging, the signet isn’t taken by anybody now because of its terrible passive, the death trait is the best of the rest.

Pretty much every time i die in wvw, it is because im immobilized, not stunned, immobilized. Condition removals on almost every other class have caught up to and/or surpass the necromancer.

I guessed revenant.

But necromancer isn’t an awful choice. The specialization is melee and may not have better CC than chill at the end of an auto attack chain. Asking such a build which has no ranged defense and bad healing to also e a ping pong ball is a bit much.

Besides, defiance = nerfed.

I don’t care what any calculator says: reflects are the king of of DPS in all PvE that matters.

Reflects do orders of magnitude more DPS than everything else combined, and necromancers do not have access to them, everybody else (including revenant) does.

(posted in the other thread by accident)

Unholy Martyr. —- Since basic necromancer condition removal is awful, this needs to proc a second of resistance when it draws conditions (similar to the previewed Revenant skill) or it will not see play.

Unholy Martyr. —- Since basic necromancer condition removal is awful, this needs to proc a second of resistance when it draws conditions (similar to the previewed Revenant skill) or it will not see play.

But we already know Some of the trade offs of the Specialization.

Greatsword is melee, which means that the existing weakness to ranged gets worse.

Greatsword takes up a weapon slot, which means that you can’t take both weapon based condition removals anymore and are stuck with consume conditions. (and the new heal doesn’t matter).

New specialization only has three major traits. If none of them are stability, you are stuck taking stun breaks and your new utilities don’t matter. If the new traits are stability, then you have max 2 traits to support your team with.

If the new specialization actually fixes our issues, and all future specilizations don’t work with this specilization, then we have nothing to look forward to ever.

Tl;Dr. Don’t expect expansion specialization to fix core issues.

I really really don’t want to do map completion another 6 times just to get / re get the stuff I already have right now.

Necromancer’s Deadly Strength is in a similar spot.

That one converts toughness into Power, but the necromancer (as a light armor character) has little toughness and the Death line no longer grants toughness.

Does anet intend such a massive nerf for these boring % stat traits?

I have no idea why axe mastery was nerfed so hard at a time when many traits were being combined or baselined.

Maybe a axe buff is coming?

EDIT: Landing a rending claws will reduce the recharge of Ghastly Claws by 0.16 seconds? wTF seriously wTF is this trait doing?

(1) Bad condition removal traits mean we are stuck taking consume conditions

(2) No vigor and bad access to stability mean we are stuck taking 2 stun breaks on our bar

(3) Several interesting but underpowered traits removed completely. The necromancer’s access to weakness from traits is gone for example.

(4) Lifesteal traits are horrible. Even if the numbers were better, they are just damage + heal. They do not support the team or do anything else interesting. Ditto for life force traits. They are boring.

(5) necromancer gameplay is still 1-spam (scepter for condition, dagger for power).

(6) Spite changes are bizaare with all of the conditional threshold stuff. Basically you can’t count on your traits to work for you during gameplay.

(7) Death is still too focused on minions, which are essentially optional utility skills and not a core feature of the profession. (minions have nothing to do with death shroud) This means that Death sucks for non MM, MM locked into taking death, and minion utilities suck unless you devote your whole bar to them.

(8) Blood is the worst trait line in the game. Give up on lifesteal, anet hasn’t been able to balance it for 10 years. Merge all of the vampirics into one optional trait and add boons to the line please.

(9). Still nothing done about being able to receive healing in death shroud.

(10) curses has nothing but condition grandmasters. this means that all necromancers after the changes will be (soul reaping) + (curses or spite) + (underwhelming trait line that doesn’t offer much for offense or defense).

(11). Anybody who has been paying any attention to the game’s development knows that these traits, unchanged, are what the necromancer will be stuck with for the next three years.

(12). Power creep in other classes, but not on the necromancer. So the thief gets a trait that immobilizes and can be used every 15 seconds. How are necromancers supposed to cope with this? Consume conditions? We’ll be sitting ducks.

The plot of GW2 is a bunch of lesbians investigate the relationships of other lesbians to find out clues to the whereabouts of a Dragon Egg

So of course there are going to be more females.
& of course the males aren’t going o drive the story.

Duh.

That’s kind of the point.

Clearly the writers at anet understand warriors for social justice.

New lingering curse is a terrible trait. Anet frequently balances by using extreme situations and the duration of every condition might as well be halved.

Kill lingering curse with fire and bring back withering precision.

Minions are a utility skill.

There is nothing unique about minions. They are equivalent to turrets, phantasms, or spirit weapons.

Nothing about the class mechanic benefits minions, other than they don’t disappear like the other utilities do.

Choosing minions as a utility skill, means that you don’t have… Utility. Doubly so because necromancer skills have terrible utility.

There is no special reason why 1 utility skill type deserves an entire trait line. Maybe minions as a skill type should get one trait, but Definately not one trait line.

Most of the time you will go 2 to face tank. 2 is really strong, especially traited with chill.

but # 3 is underrated, sapping dodges and tons of damage from enemies. #3 is quickly becoming my go to move for Zerg vs Zerg.

That curses trait that the necromancer needs for power builds exists too: it was called withering precision and it was removed.

With withering precision gone, access to weakness is severely kitten. That’s sad because weakness was a way to limit the advantage that classes with extra dodges have over the necromancer.

Inimicus.7162:

How to fix the gripe that all non-Necros have: Blast finishers. ETA.

Blast finishers would help soo much.

I don’t know why they gave Necomancer a. Bunch of blast finishers, but put them all on underwater weapons.

If Necomancer had good access to blast finishers (eg, on axe 3 and Warhorn 4 and dagger 5), then Necromancers could have the option to take well of blood instead of consume conditions, blasting the well to remove conditions.

That old give us team support and more build variety and more strategic/tactical choice all in one move.

Is withering precision just gone?

On the reddit thread there are a lot of apologists “ok these traits are bad/boring, but the utility reworks can fix the class.”

But so long as bad utility traits pigeonhole the necromancer into taking stun breaks, the utilities don’t matter. We could have the signet of pwnage and it wouldn’t matter as long as we’re stuck taking stun breaks.

Turret engineer can get away with no stun breaks because of access to spammable CC or reflects.

Boooooo. Hisssss. Hisssss.

Who was it who told angry joe that they were fixing necromancer? All I see here is trait shuffling. Still no defense, sustain, or team support.

On the other hand, the necromancer specialization is melee based (and we all know that the necromancers have bad access to non fear Cc and terrible defenses against ranged), so defiance could be a good fit.

Admit it: most of us dislike being stuck investing into spite with its terrible minors and grandmasters, but we all do it anyways. We need the power and condition duration too much.

Admit it: most of us kinda want to play with some of the blood or death traits, but don’t because healing power and boon duration are worthless on a necromancer.

Who else can’t wait to dump spite?

Plus the new changes will give us access to 9 minor traits and 9 major traits.

You’ll be able to take deathly percption, dhuumfire, and (for example) withering precision to make sure that your life blasts hit with fire and have a cover condition.

You’ll be able to fit unholy sanctuary in any build easily, and experience the extra sustain.

And less face it, if the blood line stays worthless, every necromancer will have 3/4th (3/5ths with expansion) of all of the traits available in every build

A defiance bar should go to the revenant. They have no blocks and really long cast times.

Defiance kind of sucks, most of the time it is just “gain 3 ticks stability when your character is stunned.”

Doubt it.

I think that means different skills in DS with the profession change.

Too much work.

Do you realize exactly how many death shroud traits there actually are? All of these would have to be replaced.

Except for overnight when 5v5v8 decides who controls the whole world…. T8 is roamer paradise.

You have map queues in prime time and substantial blobs at all other hours. Your actions will meaningfully impact the world which will not feel empty.

Turk.5460:

Dragonbrand, please transfer to Sorrow’s Furnace.

The other two servers in T8 got new guilds to transfer to them and now they outnumber us on every map <:(

Borliss Pass didn’t get any transfers… We got some ancient players who quit long ago back when the news of the beta hit.

You guys have plenty of players, way more than us, but SF has a ton of up levels and a ton of fair weathers who quit after they die twice.

Would like to see an activities NPC and a costume brawl fountain.

Warriors and Thieves aren’t in much better shape.

Warriors survive in SPvp only as ressbots. Thieves are super squishy wet noodles that only get by by broken (in WvW) stealth or broken (in SPvp) z axis spammable teleports.

Mesmer is in even worse shape, hard countered by thieves.

And

Ranger is in terrible shape, locked into only a few builds that don’t work.

If your profession doesn’t maximize celestial amulet, you are out of the meta.

BRING BACK THE TRADE FORUM

Regular unidentified dyes don’t drop, aren’t directly purchasable in the gemstore, and are rare drops from black lion chests (the drop rate is less than you’d think) .

Essentially, anet dumped a billion free dyes on the market last year, and have since been trying to let residual demand clean up the glut.

Right now unidentified dyes have returned to the place thy were before the big dump. Their price goes down when anet releases new Black lion skins (because players buy the chests), or the price goes up by a few silver per week.

Since unidentified dyes are craft able, I don’t think there is a problem as long as dyes stay below 1.5-2 gold.

But, why is OP buying unidentified dyes anyways? Pick the dyes that you want and buy those. That is waaay cheaper.

These runes are underrated, especially if you have chill of death and close to death.

If you have both, then the automatic spinal shivers that you get from chill of death has (12+20)% bonus damage. Do your “nuke” hit (a big damage skill like axe 2 or well of suffering) and you can 50-0 spike some players before they can heal.

Basically, you are trading DPS for spike damage which is better in some metas, such as metas where regeneration and heal over time dominate.

In addition, you get cloaking at 20%. 4 seconds is long enough to get out of a bad situation. Necromancers have death shroud which could protect you from conditions during these 4 seconds too. It’s enough time to Consume Conditions and set up a lich burst.

Is this better than Vamipiric runes (mist form) or earth runes (protection nd reflection)? Probably not.

You also get precision as a secondary stat. Precision is really important to take if you don’t plan on Death shroud 1-Ing players to death (easily dodged).

Thanathos.2063:

I don’t think that the dye supply will be largely affected by this. It’s a too rare drop, plus there’s only a chance to get a limited dye.

You are wrong. A simple history of all other special dyes and what happened when they got added to BL chests will tell you… They lose 50-80% of their value. Dropping fom 60 to 3 gold in one instance.

BL chests are spammed by people gambling for BL tickets. Everything else gets dumped onto the market in mass quantities. The true demand for these dyes isn’t anywhere near 300 gems for a 20% chance, but at least with a cartelized market buyers could get their money back if the particular dye that dropped to them wasn’t the one they wanted.

On the other hand, now may be the time to pickup the devalued dyes that aren’t in BL chests. Anymore (eg Abyss Dye, Enameled Dyes)

Signet of the Vampire is terrible and pointless.

The minion will do more damage/DPS than the signet. The well + projectiles = confusion which will do more damage/DPS than the signet. Necromancer has bad condition removal, so we all use consume conditions which is enough condition removal for PvE, freeing up our traits and utilities for DPS.

In addition it is not easy to drain all 25 stacks in a 5 man party. Only one stack can be removed per second, and signet of the vampirism has an aftercast. All dagger, and axe skills as well as the third hit of dagger 1 have aftercast too. So the necromancer himself can only remove 4 stacks, which mean you already missed the 25 stacks.

In addition, dagger only have better DPS than life bast with high might stacks, which you usually will not have because you can’t provide them yourself and your party can’t keep on you with 100% uptime.

OP based his speculation on supply and demand.

He didn’t base his speculation based on anet undercutting him.

This was not cool. Don’t buy gemstore stuff, anet will just undercut you.

It’s dumb that these are in BL chests. After you get 1, the rest are 100% useless. At least you can sell extra mini Kasmeers.

Some of us already paid for them the first time. I did, and I would be upset if I got one in a BL chest instead of something that I could use.

They are already down since December.

People are saving their gifts of exploration for the new Legendaries, which cuts the demand for old Legendaries way down

In addition the old precursors will still be draft able in the mystic forge, but the new precursors wouldn’t be. In essence you will have the same supply and much less demand. Power/income creep could continue with rare weapons dropping at a higher rate, further devaluing precursors.

Plus, the hunts for old precursors are tied to achievement points, which means that players who don’t want the precursor or even have it unlocked already will do the collection anyways, adding additional supply.

Unless anet introduces something new to reduce supply (like an alternate MF sink for rare weapons) or increase demand (like a collection with a big shiny reward for having all the precursors), prices for or precursors could dramatically fall.

Talonblaze.3175:

It being a Stunbreak still offers very little. DS was instant cast to begin with. If you saw a Hammer warrior or such, you popped it before hand. Not after and you shut them down.

Plus, the 1 Stab stack is still laughable. Necros will still be ping-pongs..

Need to test the trait, but the trait is really good if it lets you take only one or even zero utility skill stun breaks.

If the trait works well, condis will be able to get both signet of spite and corrupt boon on their bar again.

I would love to try this trait in a power build. Something like 2/6/0/0/6, with path of corruption. Is there a runeset that allows for enough precision to run berzerker gear and reliably crit even without the trait? Or even 2/0/6/0/6 with unholy sanctuary. (may have to swap in precision gear for that one).

It looked enormous in the beta. You could fall for 5-6 seconds and still not hit the ground

Nothing to talk about until new information is released.
I’d expect about 7k-10k worth of new achievements. Likely categories:

Story Achievements. LS story style challenge achievements.

New map related achievements.

They said they were going to “Dry Top” map specific achieve every map in the game other than the stater maps

Minipet set 4

Collections (like the above poster said, at least 63 new collections for old Legendaries, probably the same for new Legendaries. The screenshot showing one such collection showed that it rewarded 3 AP). This in addition to whatever other new collections get added. Collections for things like new Luminesent style armors seem likely. Plus Black lion collections.

They said they were going to add timers to jump puzzles, so there will probably be achievements for beating the clock on every single jump puzzle

A lot of the masteries may double as achievements.

Basketbrawl may arrive In the expansion. (A map and a load screen were data mined a longtime ago but this never arrived)

Pvp champion titles for revenant and every mastery. (Could be 20 tracks total)

WvW players have been complaining about their achievements forever. I would be surprised not to see a revamp with HoT. But even if that doesn’t come, I bet there are a bunch of desert borderlands related achievements.

I wouldn’t be surprised either if we got a Queen’s Jubilee living story festival to hype the expansion before it came out.

And a bunch of stuff we can’t even know about.

Chinese Necromancers are golemancers. All of the death stuff like skull icons have been removed. If anything, I believe we will see less death stuff in the future as our client becomes more like china’s.

Jelzouki.4128:

Let’s say all the lodestones for some reason become relatively the same price as the charged lodestone (3gold), would that be bad or good for the economy? What would change? Sorry I know it’s a very broad question but I just need some opinions to get my thought process going.

Anet can we pleeeeeze get the economy subforum back?

(1) Lodestone prices are tied to supply and demand. Charged Lodestones are demanded the most because they make the prettiest weapons: shiny Legendaries, Dwayana and Foefire weapons, infinite light, Mjolnir, etc.

If anet made new shiny weapons needing things other than charged lodestones, this would be good news. It might increase lodestone prices, but it is good news.

The rarest lodestones might even be crystal lodestones, which are useful for zero legendary,zero collection weapons, and few non legendary, but shiny, skins. They are the cheapest, beacause they are the least demanded.

(2) In HoT Lodestone supply may go up (anet reveals that map event rewards will include lodestones), or down (skill points used to promote cores to lodestones are being nerfed).

(3) Price shifting may cause lodestone prices to rise. If demand for a legendary is 3k, and the price of one component part of the legendary (ectoplasms) collapses, then prices of the other component parts may increase because crafters have more money to spend on these parts. Ectoplasms seem likely to collapse as anet moves away from ’tossing rares in the forge for an RNG precursor.

Yeah I vote no to tons of F keys.., I’d have to completely redo all of my keybinds!

If the “conditional” stuff breaks the power budget, get rid of the conditional stuff.

Add a stun break.

Yeah, there exists season 1 stuff that never returned. Tequatl’s wings, scarlets helm and the Super Adventure Backpieces for example.

The toxic spore backpiece is on the TP right now. Ditto for the desert Rose and the giant hobo sack as well as the Wind/sun/lightning catcher.

The season 2 Wintersday item should go to the laurel vendor so we can get a new reward in season 3… Lol.

You have stability, good refreshing stability, on plague form.

Time to aggressively offensively use plague form for pushes, taking chilling darkness trait or using plague for weakness spam.

For ‘pirate ship battles’ you have up to 2 ranged wells. You can also take spectral wall to burn enemy stability.

I though gameplay was clunky and I wondered why I was hitting like a wet noodle, then I saw that I was in celestial gear, and had an awful trait setup.

Zenith.7301:

Ranger isn’t passed over for mobility. Greatsword on a ranger is virtually one of the most mobile specs in the game, Swoop has a joke of a cooldown and with the 25% speed signet a ranger is not having trouble rotating. If for some reason longbow is passed over, greatsword/sword+axe or warhorn has swoop+ monarch’s leap which is not something even a thief can catch if the ranger wants to disengage, because the cooldowns on those skills are that low. Mobility is NOT a ranger problem mps.

None of this ranger mobility is z axis teleports, so it almost doesn’t count.

None of this mobility will get you from center point to stillness in 3 seconds, or will let you jump up the ledge above center point on Kyhlo allowing you to free cast AoE. Nor will this mobility allow you to skip the maze of choke points going from the trebuchet to center point.

Only on the relatively flat map FoeFire, and only away from center point does the ranger mobility rank as top class.

I wouldnt mind another TDM map, but this time with actual mechanics on it.

My courtyard experiences have played like “pirate ship battles,” so adding lava or an arrow cart or pitfalls or a guild lord (worth 150 points) these would be nice additions.

Maledictus has like 30 accounts.

Anyways each dummy account that you have generates about 56 gold a month just for logging in.

Its also quasi legal to run multiple accounts on the same box. There are vids of people doing just this to play the game while simultaneously refining huge numbers of materials.

WvW players like to have accounts on different servers for good reasons (play style differences between tiers) and bad reasons (spying on the enemy)

Also extra storage, extra bank, extra bank guilds.

Bhawb.7408:

It would have to be a specialization, with some other changes to the profession, because adding extra abilities has a really high potential for power creep. They managed to do it well with DS 5 but there is only so much you can add.

It depends on what the skills are.

For example, I always thought that a channelled block or reflect would be an excellent DS skill.

DS degens naturally so using a channelled block would trade your damage and natural health degen for whatever damage that the block prevented.

Likewise an out of combat mobility/teleport skill involves trading deathshroud degen/HP/DS recharge for extra mobility.

They’ll come back.

Anet brought back discontinued skins before, and Fused skins are not special. If anything, since you could get them from pve once upon a time, they are less special than, say, wintersday skins.

Pay big prices now or wait. And if you are selling, price them to sell b/c anet will undercut you.