bone minions still have a 3 second delay on blast finisher combos
I’m pretty sure they actually give 2 blast finishers: one on activation and one a second (or two) later when the animation finishes. I use this all the time with Well of Suffering to give me somewhat of a merger between Well of Suffering and Well of Darkness: the damage and vulnerability of Well of Suffering with 4 area blinds (not to mention, the damage from Putrid Explosion isn’t shabby either) gives you a very solid combo.
Actually no, for some odd reason your character also gets a blast finisher from himself. Then the delayed blast finisher comes from the minion.
In short I feel like AOEs shouldn’t scale off of the number of allies, but instead have a flat number as it shuts some builds entirely out of certain instances. To keep pet builds in check to avoid people running around letting the AI kill mobs I propose a “smart spread” system.
The best solution I can come up with is to make the AOEs have a flat number but make the AOEs have a “smart spread” depending on the boss. Bosses that simply have flat AOEs should send 20% of the AOE to allies and 80% at players. Since the AI will not try to avoid the AOE, that 20% will go a long way, but not completely shut out a build as there is a natural spread to most pet builds. Mechanic based AOEs will only target players (like lupicus grub summon) so as to not make pets completely detrimental.
A more ambitious approach would be to make the smart spread change depending on ally proximity to ensure that the AOE doesn’t go wasted.
Since most AOEs have a cap of 5 targets, As the number of targets increases, so does the likely hood AOEs target that location. If 5 allies are in one location 1 AOE is sent there as that’s the most effective ratio. If there are 6 then it will probably still only send 1, but if the number is closer to 8 or 9 then it’s likely 2 AOEs will be thrown there to guarentee the damage is maximized.
I am curious if anyone else shares my sentiments about AOE mechanics in many of the boss rooms. for bosses like; the moletariat mine suit in fractals (the one you dump molten liquid on), lupicus, Alpha, ect, the boss creates more AOEs depending on the number of allies in your party rather than basing it off of the number of players. I personally find this mechanic crippling for any sort of pet build, shutting some play styles out of dungeons entirely. As it is the default AOEs thrown around in dungeons can usually crush pet/minion/elemental AI due to the fact that they don’t bother to walk out of it or avoid it. So these scaling AOEs wipe them off of the face of the earth.
Even if we were to ignore the pets dieing, it also stands that the number of AOEs targeting players is also increased by this. Meaning that not only are the pets obliterated, but you can be causing allies to be completely wiped out by the increased number of AOEs.
I feel like this ramp up is completely unnecessary. Most pets in this game aren’t even that powerful outside of ranger builds that focus on their pet or the flesh golem. These usually die anyway as they run straight up to the big angry [enemy] who can crush you with his pinky.
There’s one key issue with your post though. It mostly praises wells, however the things people complain the most about aren’t wells but everything else.
-Minion AI is still bunked (not to mention the bugs along side it like the fact blood fiend still has it’s default health steal on it’s auto attack, bone minions still have a 3 second delay on blast finisher combos, flesh golem dieing in water, jagged horrors in general).
-Conditions have many caps in PvE despite little to none existing on power
-The life force trait line isn’t all that beneficial
-life siphoning is still messed up (the 50% increase trait only increases it by 9 instead of 16. However even if it worked transfusion would be better in all cases due to how much it can heal allies for.)
Each of these issues cripples a specific spec pretty severely.
This build would give 75 Power & 60% Might duration and would be very good at bursting down single targets whilst maintaining 15+ stacks of might pretty much perm. BiP would have only a 4.75 second downtime.
The thing about focusing on might so much, is that you can easily get shut down by anyone with a boon removal skill. The same goes for any bleed focus build. They easily get stripped of all of their damage by a single cleanse, the same goes for OP and boon removals.
In fact, I think might is one of the first boons removed by boon removals.
The part that you’re doing wrong is the part where you chose to do a MM. Minion AI is so horrible, it’s not worth using it.
And why is the minion AI is so horrible?
It was made that way.
Blood Fiend, being the ranged often attacks first and becomes the target in pve. There goes your healing (I would still find it not viable even after recent buff to blood fiends).
Actually the buff wasn’t implemented properly. In 90% of the zones it’s still the old value.
Meh, drop the bleed and make them instead have some kind of reverse retaliation so that they loose health each time they attack someone. That way they do not last forever, but are more reliable than they are right now. Should be simple enough to code i think.
I definitely think the Axe training needs to be moved down to either master or adept trait line. It doesn’t make any sense for a weapon proficiency to be a grand master trait.
I believe that Axe has that low damage because it attacks fast, and twice(x2).
Imagine yourself being able to hit for 300 raw damage each hit(so x2=600) and critting for anything close to 500, with a high chance to crit this would be almost 1k dmg per sec, while stacking vulnerability to the target.Now imagine using a build that stacks Vulnerability to the target,and giving you might(it’s the build I am using right now and it looks fun), you can easily get 20+ Vulnerability on the target and 10 stacks of might just by using BiP.
To sum it up, 1000 damage each time using the skill #1 , +20% from vulnerability + 10 stacks of might, giving an example number of 1400 DPS, wouldn’t that be a bit OP just by auto attacking?
Edit: if anyone is curius about the build let me know and I will post it
Actually, the value is 600/2 = 300, not the other ay around sadly.
The biggest issue with Axe is that even if you get the maximum maintainable vulnerability (10%) through just auto attacks you and your party get more overall damage from you simply wielding another weapon.
If Anet wants the axe to be a support weapon, they need to either make it easier to maintain higher stacks with the auto attack or change vulnerability mechanics.
If they want it to be a “ranged” power weapon they need to increase either the attack speed or damage.
It goes against a lot of Anet’s philosophies.
-RNG item drop on extremely important items
-RNG drop chance for ascended gear (and it’s the only way to get the rings)
-Community gating mechanic (fractal levels)
-gear gating mechanic (agony)
It is a pretty big slap in the face now that I’ve looked it in the eyes.
There honestly shouldn’t be any RNG when it comes to such big items for gear. A guild member of mine got 3 mist essences back to back while the rest of us haven’t even seen one.
I honestly am extremely disappointed that Anet decided to go back to the WoW RNG grind bullkitten.
I really HATE random drop chance. The token system is perfect in my opinion. I have always detested random drop chance, and it completely contradicts the design direction of the other dungeons.
We haven’t scrapped the old dungeons. We tried something new with Fractals, and so far it’s been very successful. I was on the team that built fractals, and now I am on the bug-fixing live team with a focus on our ‘old’ dungeons to fix bugs in there and see what I can do to spice them up a bit.
We’re certainly not going to just sweep the old dungeons under the rug. I will be working very hard on improving the dungeons.
That’s good news to me. My biggest concern (besides class bugs being fixed) is old content being obsoleted. I’m hoping y’all find a way to keep them important.
I’m having extreme difficulty finding a group for Arah. I can get 2-3 guild members but I can’t ever find a PuG player or PuG group. Is there a specific time frame I should be trying to find the group in? If it helps I’m on the maguuma server.
As a MM, I want the traits Flesh of Master (more health for minion) and Training of Master (more damage for minion) to completely disappear from GW2.
Instead minion’s health scale’s with master’s vitality; minion’s damage scale’s with master’s power.
Actually Anet for a while tried that, but found minions to be too strong by themselves.
@OP
I don’t like how you setup the blood tree. It basically turned it into a 20 point wonder for any build.
also,
“Grandmaster – Reaper of Grenth – Death Shroud becomes the Reaper of Grenth. Chill and Poison nearby foes every 3 seconds. (240 radius)”
This makes no sense in the blood trait line. . .at all.
a) how did it turn into a 20 point wonder?
Because you could get vampirism, transfusion, the 50% boost, and vampiric minions (essentially all of the guaranteed health siphons) in the first 20 points. Outside of very specific builds (like wells) there isn’t any reason to go further down the tree.
I think there needs to be a skill that bleeds us and heals the minions. So basically sacrificing our health for a short time to heal the minions. There was a skill like that in GW1 that I used all the time with my MM build. I forget what it was called, but basically it gave you -3 health degen and +10 health regen on the minions. Now of course the minions in the last game gradually lost health, so a +10 health regen was very helpful but not overpowered because they’d start losing health immediately afterwards.
Anyways, I also use Well of Healing instead of the healing minion on my necro and I tend to jump into the middle of my minions while they’re fighting and use the Well to keep them healed (and myself). Works pretty well for me and I also have tons of Vitality and Toughness to keep me alive while doing this.
The skill you’re thinking of was vereta’s sacrifice. It was an OK skill but it was outshined by blood of the master (which was core to minion army builds).
As for the main topic the things minions need are an AI fix, and for the blood fiend buff to be fixed.
2.Bone minion root to be instant cast
3.Minion master trait reduce the minion active cooldowns.
get 20 into blood magic (pick up transfusion and well cooldown) and then you probably want 15 into death magic (getting either greater marks or staff cooldown). Use the well of darkness, well of power, well of corruption, well of blood, and lich form.
Note that wells mostly benefit from power. If you want to do decently with wells you should probably use dagger/focus or dagger/dagger with staff on swap.
If you use signets I’m not sure as I never used necromancer signets.
And to the people who are saying that Vit is better for DS builds: I know that Death Shroud HP is based on Vitality, but surely armor still has an effect when it comes to damage reduction, so why not build toughness for DS?
Since life force is increased in percentages, you get more “health” per % of death shroud recovered. So in a way you gain not only base health, more death shroud health, but you also “increase” the amount of health recovered in life force and allow yourself to absorb more condition damage. Toughness only essentially increases the amount of direct damage you can take to your base health and death shroud.
For the record, it may be that rather than agony / conditions ticking for double damage, Death Shroud’s life force pool is half the size of your character’s actual health pool.
The logic is lacking, before Agony the damage is done over INTEGERS, real numbers. Agony does damage over a PERCENTAGE of the characters heath. Therefore if it depletes faster means you take more damage OR that it is really half the size of our health pool but Agony do damage over the real health of the player, but that wouldn’t explain why Conditions do double damage.
Agony deals percentage based damage, therefore if conditions double the damage, it doubles the percentage.
As a MM, I want the traits Flesh of Master (more health for minion) and Training of Master (more damage for minion) to completely disappear from GW2.
Instead minion’s health scale’s with master’s vitality; minion’s damage scale’s with master’s power.
Actually Anet for a while tried that, but found minions to be too strong by themselves.
@OP
I don’t like how you setup the blood tree. It basically turned it into a 20 point wonder for any build.
also,
“Grandmaster – Reaper of Grenth – Death Shroud becomes the Reaper of Grenth. Chill and Poison nearby foes every 3 seconds. (240 radius)”
This makes no sense in the blood trait line. . .at all.
The devs have mentioned that Jagged Horrors bleeding out so fast was a bug and that it was being looked at. (I believe his exact words were “they should be lasting about 11 seconds”.)
Did the recent patch that fixed Death Nova also make it so that Jagged Horrors trigger Death Nova on death? If so, they may be worth it for the free Poison fields popping up regularly, at least in PvE. I presume in PvP players would be smart enough to dodge out of the fields at once.
Death nova has always procced on jagged horrors. However they did fix bone minions/blood fiend not proccing it when you sacrifice them.
I like having the option to trait into death shroud in any trait line when there isn’t a trait that’s useful for me to pick up. (for example, transfusion in blood magic when I want vampiric minions.) However I don’t want to trait for death shroud specifically. If anything even in a death shroud spec I would go for spectral skills first and then buff up death shroud.
Both of them are quite useful. Considering Death shroud scales off of vitality as well, vitality benefits us more than it does other classes. So a good mix of vitality and toughness would be best in my opinion.
I cannot believe this actually happened. When I was fighting some mobs in mount maelstrom my bone minions sat in place. I figured I could just lead the enemies to the bone minions and explode them then. Sure enough, the bone minions both ran completely separate directions away from the enemies. On top of that, if I continued to lead an enemy to one that specific bone minion would continue to flee and the other would sit in place until I brought the enemy to it, and then it would flee.
This seriously needs to be looked into and fixed, I can deal with afk minions, but not minions actively trying to hinder me.
Reanimator would be cool if it summoned a jagged horror every time a minion died (no cooldown and didn’t summon off of jaggged horrors) however it would need to be made into a selectable trait or something.
I honestly really like one time events, even though I missed half of them this weekend. They make it much easier to have something really affect the world.
It’s my sincere hope you guys don’t get your wish of removing something so unique from the game.
blood fiend bone fiend, shadow fiend, bone minions, golem.
If you’re using death nova bone minions are a must as the bone minions are an incredible self combo. nuke damage->poison AOE-> self comboes for weakness.
If you aren’t using death nova the flesh wurm might be a better option as it still deals great single target damage from a long range. However you should keep in mind that it too self comboes with death nova.
For the Adept trait I think you should bring Reaper’s might instead. As a minion master you will be one of the last players to go down, so the might from death shroud is more useful and proactive.
I honestly loved the patch notes, sure they didn’t include a big fix to lich form/plague form killing minions, addressed the flesh golem/AI issues, but the changes they did make (outside of negative bug fixes) were good!
I’m going to retract my statement a bit, a lot of the stuff would have been good if it weren’t for the fact that half of it as buggy on introduction, 2 examples:
-blood fiend has had the auto attack heal increased to 200% of it’s original value.
Great! If it were consistent, it only increases it in select zones and in 90% of the other zones it’s still the default value. The times it is increased it’s mostly only up to 150% of the original value.
-Bone fiend putrid explosion and blood fiend fetid consumption activate death nova
Awesome! except the putrid explosion has a 3 second delay when activating it’s own death nova combo field.
(I don’t really blame them if they have only 2 people churning all of this out, but Anet needs a bigger bug fix team imo, even if it’s only temporary).
Nothing really glows or has animation, its all very bland and lacks excitement. I am talking about the vendors in lions arch where you turn in instance currancy for equipment.
-Ascalonio-an Catacombs weapons
-Twilight arbor weapons
-Cathedral of flames armor and weapons
-Sorrow’s embrace armor and weapons
-Crucible of eternity weapons
-Arah weapons
All of these pieces of gear have either a glow effect or animation. If none of these suits your fancy then you should try to get a different cosmetic weapon skins from the mystic forge or trading post (there are plenty to make). Guild wars has always been a game where the grind is for cosmetic gear, not stats. If you want a specific cosmetic, work for it.
What is so “interesting” about an enemy that behaves just like any other, takes minutes of kiting to kill but now only just takes three hits to kill you?
Rather than all of the enemies having to play by your rules from the get go, you need to fight the karka on their terms before you can have your way. Most of all it’s the adult veterans I find interesting. (I find the rest of the mobs in the area extremely easy to deal with).
-ranged multi target attack that roots in place
-“lob” ranged attack that leaves poison AOE
-barrel roll that MUST be dodged or you lose a chunk of your health
All of these are easy to avoid individually however work together with surprising synergy.
the karka are an interesting enemy, however I can’t quite follow their mechanics.
I am guessing that when their armor is on they are immune to cc as they gain stability if you get through defiant. However sometimes if I break their armor and then fear them they gain stability anyway? Is this a bug or are they supposed to just be immune to cc?
Otherwise I like fighting them. They’re well equipped for dealing with players which I think is nice, they supply a good challenge and are actually daunting.
The lost shore event was cool, going in and actually building the island. However the island itself is really quite small, I was kinda expecting it to be more along the lines of a full fledged zone’s worth of content.
Outside of events and enemies, the island is very aesthetically pleasing.Both the Island and the fractal instances are some of the most beautiful zones I’ve seen in guild wars.
It’s got a small semblance of usefulness if you have death nova. However the jagged horror from rune of the lich is far superior. (simply because it appears at a useful time).
I honestly loved the patch notes, sure they didn’t include a big fix to lich form/plague form killing minions, addressed the flesh golem/AI issues, but the changes they did make (outside of negative bug fixes) were good!
-The bone minion putrid explosion has a 3 second delay with it’s own death nova poison cloud combo field.
-The blood fiend’s heal isn’t consistent. In some areas it is more than 200%, increased to the proper amount in others, and some aren’t boosted at all.
Just talk to any necromancer trainer in a city to re-spec. and for PvP you might want to change death nova into the grand master trait that causes minions to remove boons on auto attack.
That or go 20 in spite, 20 in death magic, and 30 into blood so your minions draw conditions off of you.
Cheers guys, off to try Well of Blood right away! Even if I can just use it out of combat to top up the pets, or away from mobs to heal myself, should be better than Blood Fiend I guess.
Btw, is Lich form worth saving up/using up 30 points for a MM, given you lose all pets when you cast it? Does it offer a 3rd form for hard fights (blow minions, use up DS, then Lich…?), or is that not workable for some reason?
What traits would ppl recommend with a full compliment of pets…? DM is obvious – which other branches might have the best synergies? I use staff & daggers btw.
Pls keep in mind, my love of pets is a roleplaying thing, so I don’t expect to be competitive or uber in any way, just to have fun & have some mostly usable pet companions, even if they are as dumb as dogkitten on occasion!
As of right now lich kills all pets, however iirc an Anet dev stated this is only due to the changes they made to going in water killing minions and they plan on fixing it at some point. While you wait for the patch that fixes it yes, the golem is probably better.
In dungeons lich form is by far the best for bosses. Most bosses will kill most of your minions in one AOE, so lich form gives you good DPS and utility while you wait for them all to come off of cooldown.
Outside of death magic for a full pet build you want 20 into spite (for +30% minion damage) and 20 into blood magic (for minions siphoning health).
