I guess I might have to dig out my craftbot mesmer to appease you xD. Although i do think my human mesmer looks amazing, my asura has a pretty special set aswell.
Exactly. This kind of trait works better with guardian virtues than it ever could on warriors burst skills. Burst skills are rarely useful so keeping the passive dmg is always best. Guard virtues are almost always useful and used, so having a dmg mod to make you really think about whether you need to cast the virtue or not is a nice addition imo.
You shouldnt compare to any select class/classes. You should compare all of them. Excluding comparisons with warriors and thieves just because they are supposedly op is the epitome of idiocy.
Warrior, ele, guard, thief, ranger and mesmer are all incredibly useful in dungeons. Engi is a good pug class due to its wide range of utility. Necro is just bad because its so selfish. So essentially 6/8 classes are very good in dungeons. Engi is ok and necro is bad. Ranger has some problems, mainly due to the sword auto attack but if you can work around that its a very strong class when played right. Mesmer is kind of a niche use class in speedruns and only worth taking if portal can be used to speed things up. But its a good utility class for casual runs providing a lot of reflection coverage, condi cleanse and control.
Right, because it makes perfect sense to use warrior and thief as the pinnacle of balance. Seriously, if your using this two professions and their functionality as examples to define a need for changes, no one can have a serious debate on this matter.
You cant balance a game without comparing classes.The idea of balance is to have all classes on a relatively equal footing and to have counters to each and every build. Atm necro doesnt have any way to counter stunlock builds in a practical way.
Something i threw together quickly. The idea is to get weakness and chill from weapons/sigils and utility rather than traits. CPC is a 12 second field which should be quite useful at keeping the pressure off on point. You want dagger offhand for the blind/condi transfer and the extra weakness. And dagger mainhand for the life siphon and lifeforce generation.
Yeah tbh I was kind of expecting the new heal skill to be something similar to warriors healing surge. Only it recharged lifeforce. But then we got that abomination called vampiric signet.
Hes a boss that wont allow you stay in melee. You have to dodge the key attacks and then do damage inbetween. Keeping him crippled etc is very helpful as you will often end up kiting him around. I havent tried him on guard but im sure its still doable even without cripple.
Make sure you fight in the centre area so you can use the blossoms to rally if you make a mistake. Also his gs throw that knocks down is a projectile so you could reflect that for some really nice dmg or destroy it with zealots defence. The only attack that cant be blocked and has to be dodged is the imob root which you need to get the timing right otherwise you need to cleave yourself out fast. Its pretty important not to waste dodges on laurent so make sure you can distinguish each attack very accurately. Hope that helps.
For weapons I would use sword/focus and then either scepter/focus or hammer for an extra root. But you could also probably make it work with GS + sword/focus. If you see him using healing signet thats a good time to burst.
Problem with that is that it removes the oppotunity play of saving burst and aoe to burst heal with life steal. But yeah id rather have lifesteal get retricted than have no cleave ever.
Personally I would only make it a stunbreak. But necros do need stability on a utility somewhere. The lack of active defence is disgraceful and having a class which can be completely stunlocked doesnt seem like good design. Being tanky doesnt help anyone if you are being used as a pinball.
A cleaving melee weapon for necromancers seems unlikely after all this time. But I’ve never seen an official response about it. I’ve always wondered what the official reasoning behind this decision was.
Probably something to do with balancing lifesteal. But thats not a good enough reason to force 1 out of 8 classes to be the only one without a melee cleave option. Plus lifesteal is still so bad that cleave isnt really going to unbalance it. And you pretty much never cleave consistantly in pvp where it would cause the imbalance.
Basically what Bhawb said. You do more damage by auto attacking with dagger (and its often more reliable in pvp). The channel time is too big compared to the damage.
Theres loads of really strong to semi strong burst skills in the game. Axe 2 isnt one of them. And 100b is only good burst in pve.
The only real problem with the axe is that the auto attack doesn’t do “enough”. If they extended the duration of the vulnerability the axe applied, it would make it more of a “attrition weapon” in that taking too much vulnerability leaves you open to be killed. They could also increase the damage a tad on the auto attack.
Axe 2 is good damage and the life force generation is solid. No real problems there.
Axe 3 is good in about any and all situation. Be it chasing, fleeing, group fights, or just trading blows.
They already buffed the vuln duration and the dmg slightly several months ago. It wasnt nearly enough.
Axe 2 isnt good damage. Its only good for lifeforce generation and it provides better damage than the auto. But its not good damage.
Axe 3 is fine but it should be a blast finisher.
are you kittenting me axe 2 is a total killshot i can rip half a players health away with it in a single shot tho blast finisher on axe 3 would be nice if not overkill since a necro can lay a darkness to apply aoe blind without any teamwork needed
Its not how high it hits. Its how long it takes to hit that high. 15k over 3 seconds is bad. Especially when warrior can hit 50k with a 3 second channel that cleaves. Other classes have similar skills aswell.
No no i misread. It was your comment about the start mobs (for some reason i thought you meant los alpha into the alcove and blind the little risen).
But expecting pugs to kill all of those start mobs at the same time is a recipe for a wipe. Should just pull the elementals first and then do the rest.
Meh i dont have the calcs and conditions i used anymore. But i assure you it was correct. Obviously it changes depending on the conditions you use. The point is its quite a bit more than 10% but not anywhere near 30% loss.
To calculate crit damage before and i after i totalled up the crit dmg/ferocity and calculated the crit dmg from the total ferocity. So there was no miscalculation in the amount of crit dmg i had. Im actually a little offended that you would assume I would make such a silly mistake. xD
Also doesnt help that you expect people to know completely pointless tactics for pulling. Much easier to tell a pug to cc to the wall or LoS in the corner (wtf is that thief pull for alpha). Most people who read the chat should be able to grasp that. But you should never expect any pug to do anything right.
30% lost from ascended gear. Some more from scholar. 10% lost from traits if you are using 30 in soul reaping. Banner of disc nerf, food etc.
And the dagger build did lose about 16%. I did the math to check. Most classes lost between 14-18% damage overall with the meta builds. Not the 10% the devs claimed.
5% dmg per passive virtue should of been one of the new grandmasters. Cant believe burn dmg increase and retal scaling from condi dmg was even considered.
I can’t believe you phaggerinos don’t support this. Phaggonite ore is kittening atrocious to grind, even before mega-yservers. Nowadays my only source of Phaggonite ore is guild challenge…
Necros arent the kings of control, boon removal or condition cleansing. Mesmers can do all that on lower cooldowns than necro and guardians have endless condi cleanse with light fields. Like i said, necros need more than just a pve rebalance to bring them on par. And a full pve rebalance wont happen so the only solution is to ask for better utility and cleave on new weapons and utility skills in the future.
And control is already heavily implemented in high end pve. The average player just doesnt understand this and spams cc skills randomly and doesnt remove defiant stacks ready for an interrupt.
Actually the DS build lost about 17% damage under normal conditions and the dagger build lost 16% damage under normal conditions. The ferocity change caused about a 50% crit damage loss.
The problem is you have sit in the karma train for a reasonable amount of time to get the dragonite. And the pvp isnt exactly fast either. The megaserver killed pve methods of obtaining dragonite for me. So im in full support of dragonite in dungeons or fractals (prefer fractals).
Sometimes they spin, sometimes they troll. But its been happening for months. I witness it atleast once every single dungeon i take my mesmer into. I believe, and sandy should correct me if im wrong, using feedback can interrupt the wardens and cause them to sync up.
Yeah i have no fast way of getting dragonite anymore. Luckily my dungeon group now takes a break to go do tequatl almost every day. So i can get a regular 40 dragonite + karma. And yesterday i got the mini teq, so 40 dragonite a couple thousand karma and 15g isnt bad for 40 mins of waiting around.
But finishing any ascended gear is a huge pain in the kitten now. I used to get my mats together and then farm bosses for a few days till i had enough for the vision crystal. Now im completely stuck without dragonite for weeks just to finish one piece of ascended.
My new ranger. Still not sure about the warhorn. I really want to use the tormented warhorn but the purple clashes with the red of the eyes and my armour. So I kind of need an alternative warhorn or ill just stick with howler. :P
Dont exaggerate Sam. A full solo takes just over 10 minutes. You then have to wait 5mins atleast to fill slots? So thats 4 runs in an hour. If you sell for 1.5g per slot thats a max of 24g per hour. But i suspect you have to sell for 1g to compete with the exploiters? You make 5-7g per 15mins which we can do better with other dungeons (including value of tokens). Its not as bad as i thought, but not great. Plus its boring and you have to deal with idiot buyers xd.
Ah you make good points — I set out that argument to kitten the validity of my claims you two make good points — I haven’t been in the game for many months.
@Drarnor — did you mean Necros are good spot for PvP? Or did you mean what I described is the ideal scenario but that the PvE environment shuts down that ideal environment?
I do still think Necros manage to provide some utility.
I also heard that Necros can output some of the most DPS through power builds.
I meant necros do very good things for PvE as well, the issue is that PvE is designed in such a way as to make that useless. They would be great, if it weren’t for current enemy design.
Not strictly true. Yes necro has good access to control conditions and if pve was better designed then this might be more desirable. But then you have to look at what control conditions other classes can bring and you realise the only advantage necro has is chill. But movement snares such as imob and cripple can be done permanently by other classes anyway and thats the most useful thing about chill seeing as many boss attacks arent effected much or at all by chills cooldown increase. With a different pve game necro could maybe be in a better spot but it would still need some more meaningful and unique utility to bring it up to par with the other classes.
TL;DR
PvE redesign wont happen and even if it did necro would still need some specialised utility or group buffing to put it on par with the other classes in pve.
Majority of ac sellers with blinks (thief, mes, ele & necro) including eles will more than likely have exploited the run. No idea why they even bother anyway its not like its even good gold per hour even when exploiting it.
The only real problem with the axe is that the auto attack doesn’t do “enough”. If they extended the duration of the vulnerability the axe applied, it would make it more of a “attrition weapon” in that taking too much vulnerability leaves you open to be killed. They could also increase the damage a tad on the auto attack.
Axe 2 is good damage and the life force generation is solid. No real problems there.
Axe 3 is good in about any and all situation. Be it chasing, fleeing, group fights, or just trading blows.
They already buffed the vuln duration and the dmg slightly several months ago. It wasnt nearly enough.
Axe 2 isnt good damage. Its only good for lifeforce generation and it provides better damage than the auto. But its not good damage.
Your mainhand would have +10% unless you are running force. You can put force or another 10% in your offhands if you want. But most groups who run with a necro arent going to perma cap might so strength is pretty nice for necro. Locust swarm + str runes work really well together. Its up to you what dps sigils you use.
I tend to only use my necro for solos so i only have offhands with energy sigils. But strength runes are a nice dps offhand sigil which will work well even in daytime dungeons.
Because it has the same general weaknesses as every other Necro build, plus you increase their chances to counterplay you by going melee and centering your damage around avoidable things. Not that its bad, or any worse than some builds I saw, but once you get into the better teams it seems like it’d be too easy to train you down before you do anything worthwhile (especially in a heavier bunker meta).
Yeah its really vulnerable in situations where you have no lifeforce or in some 1v1 fights. But I always assumed the teams that take necro always make sure they support it. Its a pretty effective build with good support from teammates. Has a hell of a lot more pressure in the current cleanse heavy meta than full condi and you dont have to go full melee to nuke someone (lifeblast, life siphon etc).
Surprised people havent been doing a dhuumfire, path of corruption power dagger build. Ive been using it recently and its incredibly powerful at nuking pretty much any class. The only classes it seems to be weak against is warrior and mesmer.
