Guild Wars 2

I think “necro is OP” is pretty much nonsense. But if something has to be done, choose one of the following: 1) Replace Dhuumfire with a 1 or 2 second chill on crit, no cooldown; 2) Swap the +30% condition duration in the spite tree with +30% crit damage in the SR tree; 3) Swap the -40% condition duration food and the -25% condition duration from Melandru, making Melandru -20 condition/-20 stun/-20 condition and stun for 2,4,6.

In exchange, give us healing through death shroud to improve survivability. If unkillable necros are really a concern, give it a -33% penalty.

At level 39, you have enough for greater marks and a full minions build with 20 in Blood Magic for Flesh of the Master. From there, work into Vampiric Master and then Training of the Master. Wear all magic find. Multi-pull all day long, blaze through your personal story, etc.

I currently run PVT gear with carrion gemming and undead runes; 0/30/10/20/10. I used to run PVT with all knight’s gems in all slots. I run tuning crystals and -40% condition food most of the time.

I’ve considered Dolyak, Melandru and Earth. I decided against them because of 1) cost and 2) the main problem with tanky PVT gearing is damage output. It’s actually a big problem, and so I rune a little more offensively. I am starting to think that the long term solution for tanky PVT builds is to obtain the precision/condition damage/toughness/vitality ascended gear, but that’s another story.

If I were you, I’d avoid spending the cash for runes, jam in some cheap gems and go play the build before making any firm decisions.

So I suppose I understand that the scenario will be roughly a sequence of scepter 1 to Dhuumfire proc, staff 2, scepter 2, an epidemic-ed Dhuumfire+bleed and stakitten , achieving 10+ bleed stacks + burning. I think the rough math on that is 3k damage per terror tick (2 of these at 100% fear duration, which will be getting nerfed), 2k damage per non-terror tick.

If that translates to “you can sometimes wipe a team if they’ve already been weakened or if they’re glass and don’t have any type of condition clearing or aren’t wearing Melandru,” then I guess that 1) I don’t see what the crying is about; 2) we were able to achieve similar results pre-patch in a variety of ways; 3) other classes were and are able to achieve similar results.

If the argument involves precise team play, then I guess I’d call that “skill,” and skill will always be OP.

For what it’s worth, I don’t play this build – I tried it briefly, and it wasn’t for me. If there needs to be a fix beyond the sigil nerf, I think good ones would be any (one) of swapping +condition duration and +critical damage in Spite and Soul Reaping; swapping -40% duration on food and -25% duration on Melandru; swapping the burning proc for a chill proc.

Nemesis.8593:

The real problem they said necromancer is “borderline OP” in the rare situations when everything “clicks in” and you have AoE burning + AoE bleeds and you drop AoE fear on top… you can wipe a team…

Yes… no character should be able to do that, that is OP.

I would like to know exactly how the theorycrafting behind this works out, because to be perfectly frank I don’t believe that it can happen unless the team is stacking on a single spot for 5+ seconds while the necro is casting, are all glass, and refuse to use their heal buttons.

sorrow.2364:

sas.6483:

Consume conditions is not too strong and does not overshadow the other heals. The three of them do different things, and are better than one another in different contexts.

Tell me last time you’ve seen any competitive necro not running consume conditions.
I’d like to have proofs too.

Blood Fiend, as mentioned, gives ridiculously good sustained healing in minion builds, which do in fact have their place. WoB gives excellent group heals and are often more useful than CC. Playing a terror build in sPvP is not all that people do.

It is as if you picked up the GW2, rolled a necro, got to level 2, went straight to the Mists portal, and then never played the rest of the game.

This topic is bad and a troll.

I think I’ve officially seen the most ridiculous of all the necro OP threads this week. Maybe that’s not true – “Putrid Mark is OP” from the sPvP forums yesterday was bad.

Consume conditions is not too strong and does not overshadow the other heals. The three of them do different things, and are better than one another in different contexts.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve found scepter/dagger to be completely ineffective in large scale fights. You use Scepter #2 and Dagger #5, and then you’re left with a pea shooter that goes plink plink against one guy in a 15 vs. 15 fight. The most you can do then is use Tainted Shackles or try and follow up with epidemic on one target.

The staff has great AoE, and also has good condition damage when specced correctly, and it does this at 1200 range. Lets compare it to the AoE bleeds of other weapons:

So far, I use a 20/30/20/0/0 staff build in WvW. Utilities are Spectral Wall, Spectral Grasp/Well of Suffering/Epidemic, and Locust Signet for movement.

Do you have a build to link to? I’d like to see this. Also, why not 30 in spite for Close to Death instead of 20% CD on staff?

Homonavn.6348:

They started talking about terror and dhuumfire when the Anet guy said something along the lines of: “I don’t think torment is OP at all, but it is the combination of burning and terror that is”

Also, he stated that: “Necromancers got buffed in this patch, so they are now alot easier to do good with, maybe to easy. If the player is experiences, necromancer are very OP”

Someone asked HOW they are going to adjust necro’s and he answered: “We are going to adjust the damage terror does, since that’s where they are OP because of all the fear they can apply. Also, we don’t want to change the core of necromancer like bleeds, because we dont want to ruin the main builds”

Good to know that the ANet devs can’t do math; don’t realize that terror / conditions was a main build before burning; don’t understand that if they nerf terror 30/20/10 is even more forced than it already is.

I liked the video and build analysis. I’ve played around with the build and can’t do any better. I guess I have two thoughts.

1) I wonder if 100% fear duration is really necessary. Was it really necessary in the pre-patch terror builds, considering what the tradeoffs were?
2) Post-patch, it is as if the 100% duration is almost coming for free. You’re getting the 30% duration and Dhuumfire from spite along with 15% from a sigil. You had to give up 20 points in Soul Reaping and an additional 10 talent points along with said sigil slot. It seems to me that the SR option is totally inferior. This might be a problem; 30 points in spite + 20 points in curses as mandatory for a condition / terror build seems a bit odd.

… my guess is that the Sigil will be nerfed, and to get 100% fear duration we’ll be forced to go 20 deep in SR. My guess is that losing the 100% fear won’t be enough to justify giving up the 30 points in Spite. Just to speculate, ANet may have to swap +condition duration in Spite with +critical damage in SR or something similar.

Also VR is fun to fight against. My guess is that video is definitely #magswag.

I do not understand for the life of me why people are going on about this. At this point it’s just a straight troll by people who know better.

1) If terror + burn + torment is OP, then there needs to be a statement about why, and that statement needs to include some hard numbers. The numbers that have been posted are all pretty consistent; about 2.5k – 3.5k damage per second on a 3 second fear chain. As far as I can tell, that is not any more OP than any other burst build. Furthermore, burn is a minor contributor to that damage.
2) If terror + burn + torment is OP because of two necros coordinating epidemics (as Rennoko suggested), then it’s probably a torment stacking issue that could be dealt with by reducing torment durations on DS 5 substantially. Things like torment on spectral wall will only make matters worse. But, you know, I’m not totally sure why it is the same thing couldn’t be done pre-patch with bleeds.
3) Speaking of spectral wall, spectral wall fears are fine.
4) If you really want a “fix” for PvP then the right thing to do is up Melandru to -40% duration (-20% for 2 and 4 piece, then the additional -20% on the six piece), and then reduce food to -25% duration so as not to break WvW.

Bull Zooker.1672:

my burn hits for 830+ with blood is power and 25 stacks of corruption. thats ALOT of dmg when you take into account terror (maybe ticking at 1400+) and 10-20 stacks of bleed at 140+ a tick.

scary dmg. is fine in pve but maybe too much in pvp wvw. time will tell.

So I think that upfront, this seems like a lot of damage. The thing is:

A) It depends on you having 25 stacks and BiP. If these aren’t up, the damage is considerably less; I’m guesstimating say 10% less. But OK, let’s go with your numbers.
B) It depends on you having burning + 10 bleeds on the target. So there is some lead in time until you can do your terror burst. How much might be some debate.
C) Figure (generously) that you get 3 ticks of fear, this puts staff and DS 3 on cooldown. Per tick, you get 1400 + 1400 + 830 = 3630 damage. Over the three ticks, you get 10900ish damage. I guess that’s maybe enough to deal with a glass build in berserker gear. If you have 20 bleed stacks, you get about 15000 damage, but you might need a lot of lead in time.
D) The above might be a lot of damage, but I think we all know other burst builds can do comparable things.
E) The above damage doesn’t depend on burning as much as you might think; without it you get about 9k / 13500k damage. In other words – the burning has only very marginally changed what you were capable of pre-patch.
F) If the target runs Melandru, the terror burst will probably be reduced to two ticks. One might say something like “who runs Melandru,” but I’d argue that other GC burst builds have forced people to make heavy investments in toughness / vitality or pay a price; why should this be any different?

If my math is wrong, please feel free to correct.

Also – kudos to Mammoth with a nice explanation of burning procs vs dps.

Symbolic.7910:

okay we just won a tournament with 2 necros, our strat was to run around and kill stuff. Necros are op.

Okay, where is the extra damage coming from that is making Necros op? Is it the torment, or the burning, or is it the fact that you have two necros working together to coordinate epidemicing torment stacks?

Dhuumfire giving torment would make it even easier for two necros to epidemic torment stacks, would it not? It seems as if it would make the problem even worse.

Sounds like hysterics.

I guess I’d want Xeph to explain very clearly exactly where the massive condi damage was coming from, why something very close to it couldn’t be achieved pre-patch, and why the opponents could not have handled the damage by speccing / gearing differently. Burning damage stacks in duration and can only be applied to a single target. Torment is on a 40 second cooldown and does damage similar to bleed. Terror does the exact same damage as before, the most that one might get is an extra tick on doom. Is it the case that high end tournament players haven’t figured out how to avoid spectral wall, and so were eating multiple terror tics?

Edit: Rennoko did a good job of explaining. Is the solution to reduce torment duration on DS 5?

Lopez.7369:

That’s the whole point. Our coverage is too strong with both burning and torment. Throw terror in there and the damage is unmanageable.

Seriously, I recommend all the necros who are seeming to have hysterical reactions to how OP we supposedly are think through the following questions:

What were the changes to our damage dealing capabilities?
Exactly how much damage is done now vs before?
Under what circumstances will that increase in damage be observed?
Exactly what do we have to give up to get that increase in damage?
Why does the increase in damage suddenly make it unmanageable?
Why is it impossible for other classes to attenuate or otherwise compensate for the increase in damage, and why should they not have to make an effort to do so?
Finally, how is the damage less manageable than what other classes are capable of, and what are the things that we have been forced to do to attenuate that damage?

Right. You get two extra slots in WvW, one of which I choose to fill with -40% condition food. In sPvP, you can get -25% condition duration if you choose to.

wvw is imbalanced

So is sPvP and PvE. What of it?

Rennoko.5731:

The fix is to reduce the damage that terror deals. Put it back to X damage from fear, and take away the extra damage on condition component like it used to be, and everyone can stop the crying.

This is the wrong fix. It will hurt terror condi builds in every part of the game but 1v1 duels over points.

People will figure out that not taking stability, not anticipating the fear, and not taking condition removal/stun break is going to be bad against a necro. This is no different than everyone who played glassy, then discovered that backstab thieves would 2 shot them, so they stopped. People who didn’t anticipate the CnD…. etc etc.

This is the right fix, but people don’t want to hear it.

An acceptable fix would be to reduce doom to a 1 second baseline. To appease kittens it might be reasonable to adjust spectral wall.

Seriously – we just got something that provides a small bit of help in one part of the game. That small bit of help is easily managed if people drop their glass builds. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, that small bit of help almost puts us on par with what other classes can do, and have been able to do. To get that small bit of help, it is necessary to go 30 points into a tree that wasn’t amazing to begin with.

I ran into one of the new terror necros the other day. I run -40% condition duration food. The new terror build was not very impressive.

Softspoken.2410:

sas.6483:

So, will the new meta be everybody wearing two runes of Melandru to reduce the damage they take from a terror by 1/2 to 1/3rd?

Only if the meta is Terrormancers melting everyone who doesn’t.

To hear the sPvP forum speak of it, this is indeed the new meta.

We can only hope the ANet devs actually think things through before they try to appease the masses.

Bhawb.7408:

Our offensive pressure is insane, and most likely Dhuumfire will get a nerf when they start actually fixing our defenses. The problem right now is people can’t handle the pressure we put out…

So again, I would like to know exactly how our offensive pressure is insane, and why it is insane with respect to what other classes can do. Keep in mind that a 2 rune investment in Melandru can cut terror damage by 1/2 to 1/3rd. Dhuumfire hits one target and one target only, and that 2 rune investment can cut its damage by 1/4th to 1/8th. On the other hand, you have to entirely gear in toughness to get a comparable reduction in non-condition damage.

So, will the new meta be everybody wearing two runes of Melandru to reduce the damage they take from a terror by 1/2 to 1/3rd?

Kravick.4906:

sas.6483:

I don’t think I understand. Is your real argument that if you time a condition duration-enhanced fear with a Dhuumfire proc in a 30/20/-/-/- terror build you can do quite a bit of damage once every 40 or so seconds?

I don’t find either of them OP. I don’t even find them OP together. However, this is the argument other people are going to make when calling for nerfs, which has already begun to happen. If terror wasn’t OP before, I don’t see why it is now.

People aren’t used to conditions being able to burst like that. When you bring up the fact that terror and burning together do a little over 2k damage per second, they suddenly kitten a brick, not realizing that HGH engineers were doing something similar with grenade damage + conditions (which engineers can still do, HGH has not been nerfed).

Hm. So 2k damage per second (if burning is up), for a fear of say 3 seconds = 6k damage over 3 seconds, if we go 30 into spite, 20 into curses, 20 into SR, get 20% more duration from runes / gear, and then manage to time things correctly.

Meanwhile my bunkered out non-terror build necro gets hit with 2.5k heartseeker spam (yeah, WvW is not sPVP, but whatever), while running around on a baseline 3 second stolen fear.

Honestly, it sounds to me like thief players should quit being babies, stop playing glass burst builds, try speccing some vitality and learn to use some Melandru runes. It also sounds to me like Symbolic is being a bit kittened about this.

Edit: 20% additional duration is required, I forgot about the 30% from spite..

Kravick.4906:

Lopez.7369:

Terror is overpowered. It pushes our damage over the top. Our damage is fine otherwise as power and condition builds.

This puts terror in a bad position. If you don’t take Dhuumfire, terror is fine. If you do, then terror does too much damage. If you nerf terror, you basically destroy all of the old builds that used terror, and those builds weren’t OP in the slightest. Maybe its burning that needs nerfed. Burning is still pretty strong even with no condition damage. With condition damage, burning alone can kill people.

I don’t think I understand. How does terror do different amounts of damage whether or not you take Dhuumfire? How can burning alone kill people? Is your real argument that if you time a condition duration-enhanced fear with a Dhuumfire proc in a 30/20/-/-/- terror build you can do quite a bit of damage once every 40 or so seconds? If so, are there hard numbers on exactly how much damage?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Tl;dr: Procs with cooldowns muddy everything up, especially procs that stack in intensity instead of duration.

If it helps, here is a handwavingly exact formula for the time to event bound for a proc.

Let T be the time to event. Let C be the cooldown time. Let H be the number of hits. Assume that hits come every half second (we could easily get around this, but let’s not). H is geometrically distributed with event probability pC*pP, where pC and pP are crit and proc probabilities.

The time to event from cooldown is given as T = C + 0.5H. The probability that T happens before some target time t* is Pr(T <= t*) = 1 – (1-pC*pP)^(2*(t*-C)). If p* is the target probability for time to event, then we want to find t* such that 1 – (1-pC*pP)^(2*(t*-C)) = p*. Grinding through some equations gives the formula:

(ln(1-p*) / (2*ln(1-pC*pP))) + C = t*.

For SoE, at p* = 50%, I calculate we get bounds on times to event of 2.97 second and 4.13 seconds for 50% and 25% crit respectively. At p* = 90%, the numbers are 5.22 seconds and 9.08 seconds.

For Dhuumfire, at p* = 50% I calculate bounds of 10.5 and 11.20 seconds for 50% and 25% crit. At p* = 90%, the numbers are 11.66 and 14.00 seconds.

As always, if something needs to be fixed I’m happy to have somebody fix it…

Edit: BAR is right in his above post, just tidying everything up here to make it clear for the very few people that are actually interested.

Well, let me put it this way:

50% crit, you’ll get one proc of BP every 1/(0.5*0.66) = 3 hits, for about 120 damage.
25% crit, you’ll get one proc every 6 hits for about 120 damage.

Vampiric with Bloodthirst gives me about 42 damage per hit plus the healing (in my current soldiers / carrion gear with 300 healing power). I’m guesstimating that’s about a 3%-10% damage increase from my staff and various dagger 1 non-crit attacks. Now, of course this requires 15 points in Blood Magic rather than just 5 in Curses… but, you know people go gaga over the other 25 point percentage damage increase traits, so why not Vampiric.

A few points that might be useful:

1) Barbed precision is terrible. It’s so terrible in fact that vampiric is better. (Vampiric is actually pretty good, but people that can’t do math think it sucks.)
2) At 50% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get a proc from SoE every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 3.66 seconds. At 25% crit and attacking every half second, you’ll get it every 2 + 0.5*(1/(0.6*0.5)) = 5.33 seconds. Crit isn’t really as critical as you’d think, given the cooldown.
3) With respect to Dhuumfire, you can do a similar calculation. At 50% crit, you’ll get a proc every 10 + 0.5*(1/0.5) = 11 seconds. At 25% crit, you’ll get it every 10 + 0.5*(1/0.25) = 12 seconds.

Somebody knowledgeable can check the math, but it should be about right. Crit just doesn’t seem to be all that important, at least to me, in terms of proc effects. The only good reason I can see to take rabid would be the toughness.

Really nice analysis by BRA. I’d argue that the Sigil of Earth is over valued by a factor of two or so because of the cooldown, but it’s all good.

Just out of curiosity, what exactly were the gear sets you were considering? Straight carrion / rabid weapons (with sigil of earth), armor and jewelry without assuming any runes / gems?

So, I agree that you’d get more damage through LB spam if you had infinite DS; the math is clear on this point. How much I think would be (is) a matter of some debate. How it compares to what other classes can it is likewise a matter of some debate; it’s not clear to me that saying “life blast does more damage than engi hip shot so spamming it is OP” is reasonable, given all the other variables that are left out of that equation.

I also agree that it would probably not possible to infinitely keep a rotation going on a 5 second DS cooldown; my guess is that there’d be a method to achieve higher efficiency than staff spam, that might involve not going below 50% on life force, and might involve rotating around weapon cooldowns (axe). It would probably require going 10 points into spite, using a signet of undeath, and using various foods and runes. It might result in higher steady DPS numbers than what you’re giving above. I guess you could conceivably hit 8 + 9 + 2 = 19% life force every 6ish seconds (plus some from spite talent procs I guess), which might buy you 6ish seconds in DS.

At the end of the day I don’t think that the particulars are all that important, because I don’t agree that non-decaying LF leading to infinite LB spam would be gamebreaking in PvE. To the extent it would be, it would be in group content, due to vulnerability procs, and these are capped anyway. Nobody is going to care in group PvE if you can do a little more personal damage as a necro acting as a life blast turret, given the lead up times required, the other things you’d give up, etc.

Again – what is the objection? It can’t be PvP or WvW. It clearly isn’t solo PvE, and there’s no way it can be group PvE. Maybe it’s the cool factor of hanging around in LA with DS on. I agree. That would be OP.

I’d argue that the change would introduce little to no imbalance in PvE, beyond what is already there. You can already DS dance in and out of staff autoattack and life blast while achieving very high might and vuln uptime. Heck, if you go 30 points into SR and take the 5 second DS cooldown with 3% lifeforce on marks, along with the two minor traits in spite and SR you could achieve almost the same result as DS with no natural decay could get you. So, what is the problem?

Whenever a buff to DS is proposed I am always amazed and baffled by the number of fantasy land theorycrafted scenarios that get trotted out to justify not buffing DS.

In the case of healing through DS it was “gee in this theoretical case if I time my regen just right and I was being damaged just a little bit and wasn’t otherwise being CCed I could hypothetically be immortal so healing through DS is a bad idea.” Now it’s “gee in full berserker gear with two minor traits in spite and soul reaping you could hypothetically hit 20 stacks of might if you were left alone for 20 seconds or so and then your life blasts might hit for almost as much damage as 1/2 spam from a thief, so no DS decay is clearly a bad idea.”

It is as if nobody actually plays the game, in which we get chain CCed, our DS gets blown through in a few shots even in a bunker build, we don’t get enough life force fast enough to make up for that fact by the time our 10 second timer is up, and sooner rather than later we are dropped. But that doesn’t happen, because we are the attrition class, amirite?

So for wells builds, I think people would agree that you usually want to go power heavy. That means rabid is probably out. If you want to be tanky, you’re looking at soldier’s or knight’s, if you want to go GC berserker’s, and if you want to mix in condi damage, carrion. IMO one of these has to be a main thrust of your gearing, and another can be done secondarily through gemming. Personally, I go soldier’s with knight’s gemming although soldier’s with carrion also seems appealing.

For builds, you’re going to get 20 in curses and 10 in death magic for sure. With the other 40 points, the options people usually talk about are to go deep in spite (30/30/10/0/0 or 30/20/20/0/0) or deep in blood magic (0/20/20/30/0 or 0/20/10/30/10, or something similar). I’ve played both, and I think I prefer the blood magic option. I suppose 0/20/20/0/30 would also be playable and maybe interesting.

I don’t think that spiteful marks is worth it on its own. If you go 20 into spite, you should go an additional 10 to get near to death.

For the second weapon, if you want more ranged / AOE then go scepter / dagger. If you want a melee weapon, go dagger / x. I’ve played both, and prefer dagger. I think axe is not great, although I’m sure some people would support it.

Go to gw2 buildcraft and try a few sets out. With a few exceptions (Undead and Vampirism being maybe a couple of them, similarly if you’re trying to squeeze out as much fear duration as possible), as far as I can tell we’re usually better off just going with gems.

mons.1386:

Sas,

What i meant is that the earth sigil can proc a bleed on the 1st,6th,11th,16th hit etc …Or never.
Not expected but a probability as well.

No worries dood, just pitching in a bit with some math work for ya.

If the hits are every 0.25 seconds, the expected number of procs in 25 seconds should be about 9. That’s a little more than the 7 ish you guys were calculating before. There’s 2 seconds + about 0.85 seconds waiting time between procs.

If the crit rate is 25%, I calculate the expected number of procs in 25 seconds to be about 7 (waiting time 2 + 1.65 seconds). If the crit rate is 5%, I calculate it to be about 2 (waiting time of about 8 seconds before the first proc, + 2 seconds, then 8 + 2 more seconds and you’re done). From this perspective, all crit isn’t quite as critical as you’d think; 25% might be sufficient.

To clarify about my armor choice – I don’t spec condition damage because you give up so much direct damage and straight survivability if you go all into it. I currently spec all PVT gear and use knight’s gems in all slots. But I have thought about going all PVT (everything), using undead and then gem in chryo gems. I think that gets a bleed up to about 75 damage per tick (in my current build) and gives a little more survivability, at the cost of 20% crit. If I were forced to go max condition damage and choose one or the other I think I’d go with carrion rather than rabid, because I wouldn’t want to give up wells.

mons.1386:

Sas,
If you have 50% crit, the expected number of hits until proc from an uncooldown state can be from 1 to infinity . The expected number of hits between procs is 5 to infinity …

No, I don’t think so, at least for the expectation part.

The number of hits until proc (off cooldown) is roughly geometrically distributed, with parameter p = p.crit * p.proc and expectation 1/p. The expected number of hits until proc once cooldown is begun is equal to the number of hits achieved in 2 seconds + the expected number of hits until proc (off cooldown). The expected number of procs in 100 hits is roughly 1 + (100 – 1/p) / (N.2secs + 1/p).

100 hits = about 14 procs, with an average of about 7.33 hits between each proc at 50% crit. If the hits are coming every half second, you’re getting one proc every 3.5ish seconds, which is perfectly within the cooldown limits. I think that was Ascii’s original problem conditions.

For attack sequences with uneven sequence timings (e.g. scepter) things are more complicated, but only slightly so.

Can’t totally guarantee this calculation, but off the top of my head, it’s roughly right… I can provide a simulation code if you want.

Ascii.9726:

100 hits, with 49 being critical hits.
49 critical hits @ 0.5 seconds per hit takes 24.5 seconds.
2 second internal cooldown applied to 24.5 seconds (with first hit procing) is 19 hits that can proc Earth.
60% chance applied to the 19 hits leaves 11.4 procs.

As an alternative, you might think about it like this:

From a cooldown state, the first four hits don’t count. Following, you get a proc if (A) you get a crit and (B) the sigil activates. The expected number of hits until this happens is 1/P.A*P.B. Then you enter the cooldown state again (4 hits), and so on. So the main thing is to figure out how many hits there will be until an activation, and then divide the total number of hits by that… from an uncooldown state the formula will be slightly adjusted.

If you have 50% crit, the expected number of hits until proc from an uncooldown state is 1 / 0.3 = 3.33. The expected number of hits between procs is 7.33. The expected number of procs from an uncooldown state in 100 hits is 1 + (100-3.33) / (4+3.33) = 14.19.

Personally, if I were to use condi damage in WvW, I’d go PVT with undead runes and carrion gemming.

S/P and Shortbow for weapons, caltrops, signet of shadow and thieves guild as skills. Go Shadow Arts and Acrobatics; make sure you take Assassin’s Reward. Cloaked in Shadow and Uncatchable are also useful. For melee you can pull groups, hit Black Powder once every three sword combat sequences while working in caltrops, and literally never die. Likewise, you can kite almost forever with shortbow.

Thief PvE is silly easy.

Edit: Let me add that dodging is almost never necessary if you’re sitting in your BP, and your stealth will go unused except for when you don’t feel like engaging an enemy.

Edit again: Use signet of malice as your heal.

Last edit: Sword / pistol is what you want… ugh, shouldn’t have posted so late last night.

For WvW, I’m currently running full PVT with knight’s gems and a 0/20/10/30/10 wells build. Prior to this I’ve run 30/30/10 wells with a mix of PVT and berserker’s, 30/30/10 wells with a mix of PVT and rampagers, and rabid/carrion in a conditions build.

If I remember right we maximize our effective health by equalizing vit and toughness, and we get about a 2:1 tradeoff (percentage-wise) when we swap between effective health and effective power (you can see this in the buildcraft numbers given above). So, I just plow into PVT, take as much life steal as possible to get a little more direct damage, and knight’s gems so I can get enough crit to make on-crit effects noticeable.

We’ll see how it ends up playing, but I’m becoming more and more convinced that beefier and tankier is the way to go, at least for me.

EnRohbi.2187:

We can hate on each other all we want

BRING ON THE HATE

, but this is a good tier.

awwwww…. I see what you did there…. I begrudingly agree I guess. Still tho more hate please.

Elvahaduken.3609:

I use condys on my engi, dont use condys on my necro because they are so subpar to my engi, had a duel with bunker ranger with my engineer, with water fields combo our duel lasted a good 30 mins before someone else came in and killed me (in wvw) so i thought i’d try against him on my necro, tried condys (pet takes all condys so was kitten power and even an odd type of bunker, i just didnt have the sustain no matter what build i used, i couldnt dodge as much as he could to avoid my key skills. I had NOTHING on him, yet my engineer could hold his own against most i go against.

im not saying that game should be balanced around 1v1’s in wvw or pvp, but its clear to so many that the necro is lacking alot more than any other class in mostly every area.

We can agree that engi is in a lot of ways more fun to play than necro. I might agree that 1v1 engi is better, except that things like MM and power spectral builds exist and are good, so maybe there’d be some dispute. I might also agree that condi damage is better on engi than necro, but I don’t play condi builds because I don’t think condi damage is terribly effective in wvw, and you can get all the non-damage condi effects without giving up direct damage.

I’d argue that it is indisputable that necro is far better at large scale wvw than engi for a variety of reasons, including death shroud, plague form, and condition clearing. The mix of durability, long range AOE damage, and zerg busting potential you get with necro is totally effective, and I don’t think that the engi can match it. I think that there is a reason why I see wvw guilds advertise for necros and not engis.

Finally, I’d argue that if and when extended staff AOE radius becomes baseline, necro wvw will become ridiculously good because substantial investment in soul reaping will be possible while going 30/20 in spite and curses. That’s a different topic tho…

Elvahaduken.3609:

I have 450 hours on my necro, 30 hours on my engi and i regret every second on my necro atm, i dont even think ds#5 will make up for it, the class needs a rework on useless traits/skills before it can even think of being viable.

I spend most of my time in WvW, and I also have a 80 necro and an 80 engi.

I play power wells on necro, and power grenades on the engi. My experience is that the engi has a damage advantage (and obviously a range advantage, which is nice), but requires significant amounts of micromanagement. The necro is far, far more durable. Overall I think necro is stronger, hands down. Not to say that the devs couldn’t improve some things, but really, necro is more than viable, whatever that means…

RedSpectrum.1975:

So I decided to run her in WvW (condition mancer 0/30/10/30/0) and I didnt kitten her, she has full exotic gear as well as runes of the undead so I thought she was pretty set and by the Gods. You guys have nothing to work with!

The problem here is that you don’t yet realize that the true power of necro is in using power/wells builds, DS life transfer and plague form in choke point defense and to provide AOE damage support in zerg and siege warfare. You’re not a 1v1 duelist. You’re a blunt instrument used to help smash through groups.

NevirSayDie.6235

Full power, zero condition is 100% viable for flamethrower or grenades, and some mathematicians argue that it’s more effective dps than a mix. I’d suggest choosing your gear based on whether you like pistols (condi or condi/power mix) or rifle (power, no condi). Again, I’d say that grenades work well with any mix, and flamethrower works well with either full power or power and a little condition damage. The only combination I would really avoid is full condition flamethrower.

Awesome, ty. This makes my life a whole lot easier. Rifle, grenades or flamethrower, soldier’s / berserker’s build it is.

Thanks so much, I think the Engi forums probably saved me a lot of gold.

So if I avoid on-crit traits, soldier’s and carrion, and if I take on-crit traits, use some rabid or rampager’s.

One last question – what about soldier’s and berserker’s for grenades / flamethrower?

OK, so carrion and soldier’s it is. It wasn’t totally clear from the traits and damage how to gear… I was originally thinking power / cond, now I can go forward without second thoughts. Thanks very much!

So I just got my engi to 80, and I’m thinking about wvw. I’m interested in using either the flamethrower or grenades, but I’m having a little bit of a hard time figuring out how offensive stats match up with these weapons. We have power, prec, cond damage. Is it that grenades are power > cond damage > prec, and flamethrower is cond damage > prec > power?

Any advice is welcome.

Got it blocked by Aegis 10 mins ago in wvw, and also looks like sometimes it gets obstructed by grass lol.

An unupgraded camp guard gave me a ‘miss’ on Epidemic today, I had never seen that before, even in its nerfed form. The internal mechanics of this skill were likely changed, or they just remade a whole new skill for it, but seems buggy now.

These are both “l2p” issues in that you need to l2notspecepidemicinwvw. It has been garbage since last patch. It’s a real shame, because it used to have really interesting and fun gameplay.

vlad.3467:

What would you like to see in tomorrow’s patch, what changes ?

I am hoping that the devs don’t break what we can do right now with poorly thought out changes (e.g. last patch Epidemic) or otherwise introduce new necro bugs.

What are you expecting from it ?

Thief buffs. Mesmers are also in line for a buff to compensate for the confusion nerf. Buffs to things that don’t need buffing, badly thought out nerfs intended to bring “balance.”

For necro, maybe a new and still lousy signet of spite.

30/20/20/0/0 or bust imo and use plague form. Take soldier’s and add berserker’s gear / gems until you feel just a little bit squishy. Blood sigils, runes are pretty meh so just go with gems. Secondary weapon set is either scepter / dagger for more AOE or dagger / whorn if you feel like you need to have a dedicated close range weapon to deal with melee.

Bhawb.7408:

sas.6483:

Necro is not really an attrition class, because we do not have the defensive tools and mobility to play the attrition game. Honestly, if you want to play a real attrition class, play P/D thief or guardian or bunker engi or something.

First off, you said if you want to play the attrition class go play builds X, Y, or Z. That isn’t an attrition class, those are specific builds that play the attrition game quite well.

Attrition is extending a fight out over a long period of time, and having tools that make the fight easier for you. Boons, healing, mobility, stealth can all do this, but so can weakness, poison, DS, cripple, chill, life siphoning, condi transfer, etc. You can argue that at this moment in the game they aren’t as strong as those other builds’, but it remains that every single Necromancer build, regardless of how much you decide to take advantage of it, has access to these very attrition tools, whereas every other class needs to use a very specific build to achieve attrition results.

I think that the distinction between “class” and “build” is somewhat pedantic here, and doesn’t address the point that necro does not play the attrition game well. But:

1) Fair enough – we can agree that P/D thief for example plays the attrition game far better than nearly any if not all builds of necro.

2) Boons are generally better than conditions, and it is easier to build an attrition class around boons than conditions. You’d think that boon corruption would solve this, but we all know it doesn’t. Weakness does not compare well to protection. Cripple and chill only really work if you can kite, which often you can’t because of your lack of stability and the ready availability of gap closers and ranged damage for other classes. Siphoning … to get maximum siphoning you’re required to go 20-30 deep in blood magic and use minions. My educated guess (I used to play this) is that such a commitment will net you the equivalent of 1.5 unbuffed regens as long as your minions are up and attacking. Poison is reasonably good in group play, but doesn’t do much when your DS and health gets burst down while you’re chain immobilized because you haven’t gone 30 in soul reaping and don’t have plague form up.

3) Attrition is simply about slowly whittling down your opponent, and making sure that your opponent whittles you down even more slowly. Not all necro builds will be able to do this. The necro builds that make an attempt at doing this are generally outclassed by other attrition builds / classes (in WvW, point defense in PvP is possibly a little different). That is because necro is not really an attrition class; necro just doesn’t have strong enough defensive tools to be one.

For what it’s worth, I like playing necro, because I am OK with hanging around in a WvW group, nuking stuff and getting lots of bags. I truly love looking at a stacked zerg and then dropping 7-10 AOEs right on top of it. But I don’t think you can force the class to be something it isn’t, no matter what the devs say the class is about. We don’t do attrition as well as other classes / builds, and it’s OK.