Guild Wars 2

Neither the necromancer axe or necromancer staff can deal any form of damage to the three elemental turrets in the dredge fractal instance. I simply get spammed with “invulnerable, miss, miss, invulnerable, miss, miss”. It’s extremely frustrating having the two weapons I use as a necromancer be completely useless against them.

CHIPS.6018:

7) Rapid firing – I think most of necro’s skills are rapid fire. Scepter and dagger both attacks pretty rapidly. Channelling skills are all rapid fire. Marks and wells can be casted quickly and in succession. The only exception would be staff 1, which attacks pretty slowly. 9/10

I tend to disagree with this a lot. The necromancer as a class is most defined by his utilities, and those are on such long cooldowns that you will spend a lot of time auto attacking.

1.minion master suffers from sluggish minion AI and AOEs decimate most of your damage.
2. Well necros bring a small bit of support but little to no damage.
3. the spectral skills have some sort of use in PvP, but are all but worthless in PvE.
4. some traits are in lines that make absolutely no sense (targetable wells being in the condition damage trait line, wells don’t apply any condition damage.)

I honestly only skimmed through the discussion, but the possession of ONE utility skill people want the necro for in PvP doesn’t mean the necro isn’t broken. It means he is shoe horned into a very specific setup.

To say the necro isn’t broken, they need to want him for more than one very specific skill. The rez signet thing isn’t a necro fix, it’s a meta issue.

HiSaZuL.2843:

If you aren’t MM they are worthless… if they did bleeds on hit… They would get a bit more respect but not until bleed cap is gone, dots are affected by haste and can crit like all other sources of damage. But that will never happen… even bleed cap getting removed. They will never get bleed long enough to matter anyway. Same goes for bone minions unless you use their active they are worthless even if your full MM. Still don’t understand why all minions don’t have some sort of on hit effect. I’m still not sure if cripple is all that great on elite. It works for condition spec but for everyone else that cripple is a sad joke… w/o duration it might as well not be there anyway. Anyway none of it will change since its anet. So wishful thinking.

They do bleed on hit, I’m confused by your statement.

Finally got his Arah set.

Sarrs.4831:

Moonrabbit.1543:

This is a very insightful point. MM builds have limited access to AoE damage and are punished heavily by opponent/mob AoE. I would like to see an AoE-oriented minion (e.g., mini plague) or at least one specializing in cleave damage. I would also like to see a trait that would help minions withstand AoE attacks better.

Do they? I figure you can just throw on a staff, maybe grab the trait that makes your marks bigger, and blammo. You’ve got some nice AOE.

You would be sacrificing either 20% minion cooldown or +50% health for those bigger marks, which is a real dampener when it comes to minion mastering.

you should check the flesh golem if you can. I’m curious about his health.

I want to avoid the requirement of dead bodies whenever possible. That system in GW1 was very limiting when it came to dungeons, leading to most (human player) necros having to run spiteful spirit to be useful.

I also want to retain the command abilities as they keep the minion master highly active (as far as the actions he needs to preform).

SwickHobo.5096:

i like some of the improvements, however life of the master seems to good. 10% extra hp is kinda nuts. 10% extra vitality, maybe.

duly noted.

I don’t see many necros besides myself in high level play. It’s mostly guardians, warriors, mesmers, eles, and the occasional other class.

20/0/30/20/0 Is my preference. According to the SotG interview they plan on letting agony resistance transfer from the master to his minions, so you won’t need to worry too much.

I cannot believe they seriously think the necro is that diverse. I’m just shocked really. I consider necro one of the LEAST diverse classes in the game.

I legitimately think they don’t play this game at all now. Or at the very least don’t play the necromancer at all.

Talking with my guild mates we find that minions have very little to offer in dungeons for many reasons.

1. There are a lot of AOEs in high end dungeons, and many bosses have to spam constant AOEs to present themselves as a threat. This translates into minions barely getting time to deal damage, or spending most of their time dead.

2. Minions get in the way of a LOT of mechanics be it manipulating aggro or other effects. For example: summoning any sort of minion in the lupicus fight will make him heal himself a LOT due to his life siphoning AOE, they may get in the way of the Arah path 4 sparks boss, cause the moletariate/ice elemental to create additional AOEs, ect.

3.Minions offer extremely little as far as utility is concerned. You get one melee range AOE blind on a 20 second cooldown, a 4 second single target immobilize on a (50) second cooldown which doesn’t deal extra damage AND has a 1 second cast time (seriously?), and 2 passive single target 1-2 second cripples every 3 attacks or so on the flesh golem and bone fiend. The flesh golem charge, bone minion putrid explosion, and flesh wurm teleport are the saving graces here.

4. The Ai is still very iffy, the melee minions afk a lot, which hinders the ability to use the bone minions at all.

5.traits: the minion traits ONLY buff the minions themselves. This leads to them falling off a lot in the later level dungeons as they spend most of their time dead. By that point you will probably be better off putting your traits elsewhere to get more damage out of your abilities that aren’t dead.

All in all, minions die too easily and leave the necromancer wanting heavily while they’re dead. Minion traits or the minions themselves need to offer more while they’re alive or give the necromancer something when they’re dead in order for them to be viable for PvE, and they need to attack your targets on the spot to work in PvP to any extent.

note; all changes will be in bold text.

Training of the Master: increases minion damage by 30%. Additionally, increases the master’s damage by 2% per minion utility on cooldown.

Minion Master: reduces minion cooldown by 20%, additionally reduces minion command ability cooldown by 20%.

Flesh of the Master: increases minion health by 50%. Additionally increases the master’s vitality by 2% per minion utility on cooldown.

Vampiric minions: Minions siphon health. Additionally, the master also siphons health for his allies based on the number of minion utilities on cooldown. (if 5 utilities are on cooldown, then he siphons 25 health for each ally in range.)

reanimator: summon a jagged horror when an enemy dies or when a minion dies. (30 second cooldown)

Rigor mortis: instant cast time, 4 second root to the blood fiend and target, 40 second cooldown.

Haunt: 14 second cooldown teleport to target and blind adjacent targets. 3 second duration.

Flesh golem: Finally learned how to swim.

Lich form: No longer kills all minions.

Minions do better in PvP than PvE. The damage rates in PvP are overall lower, so I have a lot of success in sPvP. In PvE minions suffer greatly due to the over saturation of AOEs in high level dungeons.

For minions to be good utility slots they need to bring more to the table than the occasional 2 second cripple or the meager 5 second 240 AOE blind on a 16 second cooldown.

To add to this, traiting for minions sacrifices a lot of your own personal strength. It would be nice if the minion master traits also beefed up the minion master himself.

well I got kicked from 3 different potential Arah parties before the dungeon began for not being a guardian/warrior/mesmer, so take that as you will.

Scepter is by far our strongest weapon. It’s the only thing my guild mates can consistently say is easy to work with and make strong. However they spent a couple of days trying to make a build comparable using anything else and were just stumped.

corruption skills and minion skills are very good in PvE (overworld) as they do a lot of damage to multiple enemies with low cooldowns. You could also do a power focused dagger build focused on lifestealing with well utilities or signets.

If you use corruption skills use scepter+dagger/staff.
If minions use Axe+focus/staff.
If life stealing dagger+warhorn/Axe+focus.

I doubt they would give the pet commands to all pet users. It’s the ranger’s class mechanic. Though it would be cool if they made it so extra F skills are added per minion (f2-f5 added per minion utility and are their active skills, the regular 6-9 are simply the summon skills) however that really steps on the engineer’s toes.

We have a lot of abilities that increase our survivability. If anything I could see them make spectral armor more useful like a longer protection duration, add stability, or something else.

The 1 and 3 skills are both actually pretty strong. Being able to sustain your HP while downed is a bigger help than you think. The fear itself is perfectly fine too considering that most other classes have single target interrupts.

Fair warning, the sythe animation doesn’t line up with final rest wing for warning.

Necros bring a reliable source of chill/weakness/cripple/fear (all builds) vulnerability (power builds) and poison (condition builds). The only issue is that though we bring all of the soft control conditions, the big ones (fear and chill) don’t really do much in PvE.

chill has no effect on boss mobs unless they have long cast animations (most bosses have instant casts), cripple isn’t really useful outside of weaker mobs, fear has the potential to spread mobs out and is nerfed against defiant, and weakness suffers from being partially PvP oriented.

phase 1: stack on your allies and attack from afar using a staff, dropping marks on your party pile to kill grubs

phase 2: dodge when he’s close to popping out of his “spectral walk” to you.

phase 3: really depends on your build. if you’re running a death shroud spec then the 3 seconds of death shroud stability means you can walk right out of his doom bubble.

If you are not running a death shroud spec then you need to save death shroud until he drops the bubble on you. Use death shroud to absorb as much of the damage as you can. If you take 20% or so damage to your health coming out of it, use your heal skill and then focus on building life force.

During this fight the only elite you can really use is lich form. Flesh golem AI isn’t reliable and it would probably die to his numerous AOEs anyway, and plague form doesn’t really have much to offer over lich form since you don’t want to hug the ugly thing (and blind doesn’t have a real impact on him since most of his attacks are multi-hit). The stability it provides is also really useful for getting out of the doom bubble. Save lich form to get out of the bubbles.

you more or less have 2 choices:
1. condition build (corruption utilities)
2. wells on a power build

you could run a death shroud focused build if you wanted too, but you wouldn’t bring much to the table outside of vulnerability.

At first I hated the bone minions too, but they’re intimidating in their own right due to the massive burst damage they hold.

Budchgon.2108:

I have a Power Neco and wondering which Elite to use?
I was thinking Lich form but the abilities seem more orientated for cond builds…

lich form doesn’t deal condition damage outside of the jagged horrors, so you’re completely wrong there. It is most definitely a power build elite.

Rennoko.5731:

striker.3704:

Once thiefs register coming out of stealth properly (fixing the culling issue) it shouldn’t be as much of a problem as the thief would pop out of stealth as soon as they started channeling the fear.

Based on how cast time skills work on my mesmer in stealth, I do not believe the act of starting the cast breaks stealth, but rather right as the cast ends. I know for a fact in locations where culling was not a problem, that I have been feared by an invisible thief.

that’s what I’m saying though. the game simply doesn’t register thiefs coming out of stealth quickly enough on the [person who is fighting the thief]’s end.

The scepter is already argueably our best weapon, it doesn’t really need another buff.

I would also like to see staff one skill apply a bleed or some sort of DOT like the mesmers number 1 skill on their staff.

We probably don’t get any dots on the staff because we gain life-force on hit with it instead.

If I remember correctly a conditions build tends to be the fastest. It lets you tag multiple mobs, gives you a lot of AOE on short cooldowns (compared to wells), has synergy with one of the most powerful heals in the game, and deals some of the highest damage for necromancers.

Also make sure you collect most of the resource nodes around you and keep your crafting up to your level or more. Complete dailies on that character, finish any map you start, and do your personal story.

Panhauramix.2784:

Are their abilities affected by your crit chance though? I remember them critting, just dont know if they crit at 4% (base at 80) or at my crit chance.

Minions do crit but they don’t deal any bonus damage when they do, so I don’t think putrid explosion would deal bonus damage if it crit (the only instance where a minion deals bonus damage is when the flesh golem does his crippling attack which deals 1000 versus his normal 700). Even if it did, it wouldn’t be worth stacking crit as well/minion builds don’t have any effect on crit traits, and putrid explosion at most happens twice every 16 seconds. On top of that the bone minions idle somewhat often so you won’t always get both of your explosions.

in short it isn’t worth stacking crit in a minion well build as the build doesn’t really benefit from it as much as power.

Necromancers aren’t useless, they just don’t bring quite as much of anything specific as other classes do. You trade off the ability to deal as much damage as a warrior or the healing of a guardian for the ability to do a little bit of everything while being extremely durable (assuming everything works perfectly).

Once thiefs register coming out of stealth properly (fixing the culling issue) it shouldn’t be as much of a problem as the thief would pop out of stealth as soon as they started channeling the fear.

Bone minions are probably the largest damage source as far as minions go. Putrid explosion scales with your power, much like the blood fiend’s taste of death scales with healing power. however everything else is only affected by minion traits or vulnerability.

My minions work alright in PvP, but in PvE they tend to stand around far too much. The fact that they don’t attack whatever they please willy nilly is great though.

I get the feeling that when you have more targets, the minions become more confused as to what you attack. Especially since we have a lot of AOEs as necromancers.

tjistoogood.9416:

I tried a minion based neco in Spvp, and was pleasantly surprised. I used a combo of a few builds posted on the boards here, (spite 20, deathmag 30, blood mag 20 staff/ax-focus) used power/tough/healpow equip. all utils and elite where minions.

What I noticed is that when the pets actually attacked my target when I first used ax 1 (maybe a bit under half the time), I completely melted almost every person I focused(combo of pet dmg and my own). If the person did not kill the pets, there was almost no hope for them. The build was also quite survivable as well.

As a note, this is my very first stint at Spvp in this game whatso ever. I played a lot of rift PvP a while back, but a still new in GW2.

My recommendation for people having trouble is to kite people in 1v1 if they dont attack your pets. Use sigils that give energy back on weapon swap and roll when big attacks come your way.

Biggest weakness is condition removal. Died a time or two from a well placed root—>100 blades, or heartseeker combo. I just took this as par for the course as PvP generally has a rock scissors paper deal going on.

My only complaint for my first try at Spvp is the stealth. It seems like it lasts forever, and is up too often. Id survive a thiefs initial onslaught only to get him to 3/4 health and he’d stealth. Then come out like 10 secs later start his combo again, only to have me get him to 1/2 health then he’d stealth and disappear never to return.

actually conditions shouldn’t be too big of an issue if you bring fetid consumption or use staff mark 4 to transfer conditions, and death shroud fear should be a good way to “break” comboes enemies try. If a warrior wastes his HURR immune to cc 100b combo on you you should be able to tank through it. (at least I can with my vit/toughness combo when my cc removal is all off cooldown).

CHIPS.6018:

striker.3704:

Bhawb.7408:

CHIPS.6018:

4 problems with minions

1) Broken AI
2) Movement speed.
3) Damage
4) Dies in seconds in WvW zergs

1) They have fixed the over-aggressive AI, which was annoying. By now, they tend to do well, they work much better in tPvP where you will be 1v1 a lot, and I haven’t noticed them sitting around as much. It is still a problem on occasion though, and those occasions suck.

2) Flesh Golem has built in cripple every auto attack, both ranged can’t be kited, bone fiend has built in cripple and immobilize (immobilize needs fixing though), and shadow fiend has gap-closer.

actually, the flesh golem cripples every third attack. This attack also has a more exaggerated movement and hits for 1k versus the average 700~

In 1v1 the enemy will always move around. It take forever for that 3rd attack to happen. And even when it does it often misses. And even if it does hit, the cripple lasts only a few seconds.

And do you know that if your enemy kites away from your Flesh Golem long enough, that cripple combo chain was “forgotten” and never happens? This might be a bug but I had seen this many times.

I’m not saying it’s reliable, I’m just clarifying things.

Ranger is the pet class. The dev’s will never allow any other class’ pet equal or better usefulness. Minionmaster builds are supposed to be sub-optimal for most Necromancer play. For PvE farming, minions are there to make up for lower direct damage and burst capability. I have no problems using a pet or two on a conditionmancer variant to speed farming. I have tried minionmaster builds and run into the same limitations but firmly believe Necromancer will always be sub-optimal as a pet class. Look at the trait tree.

That is entirely wrong. Necromancers, rangers, eles, warriors, all the classes are designed to be able to play in different sub styles. One of the biggest points Anet tried to make was that you can play the way you want to. To say the devs intentionally designed minion masters to be bad would be insulting at the very least.

Disastro.4086:

If someone has a build that realistically works and i’m talking lvl 30+ Fractals and top tier WvW(probably roaming build?) I’d love to see it.

A better example instead of fractals would have been a dungeon that was heavily AOE focused. The only fractal minions don’t work is the moletariat one because the mole/ice boss both focus on minions so much (which is supposed to be fixed anyway).

Minions applying aura buffs to the party is far too similar to the ranger spirits. Also the bonefiend and flesh golem both cripple on attack as it is.

Wow those changes are massive nerfs to minion masters. You made it to where all of their actives kill them but left in all the traits that boost their damage and health (both of which are pointless with these changes) AND you removed the only trait that was beneficial to these changes (the trait called minion master).

training of the master’s 30% damage boost is not reflected in the tooltip.

Bhawb.7408:

striker.3704:

actually, the flesh golem cripples every third attack. This attack also has a more exaggerated movement and hits for 1k versus the average 700~

Thanks for that, I had wondered but didn’t bother to check outside of combat, and in combat there are usually enough conditions being applied/removed its hard to tell.

yeah, I figured it out when I was checking the numbers on training of the master. It doesn’t update the tooltips (which bothers me a lot) but it does increase the damage.

Bhawb.7408:

CHIPS.6018:

4 problems with minions

1) Broken AI
2) Movement speed.
3) Damage
4) Dies in seconds in WvW zergs

1) They have fixed the over-aggressive AI, which was annoying. By now, they tend to do well, they work much better in tPvP where you will be 1v1 a lot, and I haven’t noticed them sitting around as much. It is still a problem on occasion though, and those occasions suck.

2) Flesh Golem has built in cripple every auto attack, both ranged can’t be kited, bone fiend has built in cripple and immobilize (immobilize needs fixing though), and shadow fiend has gap-closer.

actually, the flesh golem cripples every third attack. This attack also has a more exaggerated movement and hits for 1k versus the average 700~

being able to command your pet is the ranger’s bit. Also it wouldn’t make much sense in the GW2 world for a necromancer to be able to directly control his minions.

Though the minion Ai is being progressively addressed, in the “perfect world” scenario when the AI is fully functional, minions will attack the targets you attack without failure, putting priority on the ones targeting you. As of right now you only have a 50% chance of the melee minions doing that.

Minions don’t suck [when they attack]. However since the shadow fiend, flesh golem, and bone minions go idle so very often it makes it hard for me to stay true to minion mastering.

shedim.8504:

No need to be rude. I didn’t bother reading the necro stuff in the patchnotes because I don’t play one. As for the WvW thing, we got in a fight with a Necro yesterday and one ally right next to me rallied as soon as the little undead trait-rodent exploded and there was nothing else around. Maybe it was because of something different but I didn’t see anything else around.

I haven’t seen a Necro in Arah for ages, so I didn’t know if they fixed the bug, but the last time we had a Necro with us, he fed Lupi stacks every time we killed a grub or locust swarm because of a forced talent and that was no fun at all.

Doesn’t change the fact that this talent is worth jack, still.

A number of bugs have been claimed to be “fixed” but took multiple passes to completely uproot (guardian 3 block as an example) so I wouldn’t doubt rallying off of jagged horrors/normal minions is still around.

The last time I did Arah (after the november patch) lupicus was still spawning grubs on jagged horrors.

The moletariat mining suit (boss at the end of the moletariat fractal) fires extra bombs (one for each minion) and extra on the player if minions are out.

5: deathly vigor: when you apply a condition you get the inverse boon for 5 seconds. (30 second cooldown)
This matches the well line’s condition/boon conversion and is useful to all necromancer builds since you can’t avoid applying conditions.

15: strength in death (the 5% toughness = power trait)
this is left as it is since condition damage only benefits necromancers who use damage conditions, while power benefits everyone. I moved it down the line to keep reanimator. (Not to mention the toughness = condition damage would make conditon necromancers even more “the best” than they already are. minion master’s need the boost not you)

25: reanimator: every time one of your minions die you gain a jagged horror (excluding jagged horrors)
The grandmaster major traits are both minion anyway so might as well go all the way with this one. Considering the fact that jagged horrors will die before all minions (except the bone minions) come off cooldown anyway, this will help make minion masters more consistent and their traits that boost minions as consistently beneficial as the traits of the other lines are.

(optional) combine protection of the horde with minion master. Protection of the horde synergizes with minion cooldown a lot as minion cooldown means you have the minions up more often meaning more toughness.

Protection of the horde is based off of the minion master rune you could use in GW1 that increased armor per minion, so I can see why the devs wanted to include it in this game.

though the patch was disappointing in the whole “re-balancing necros” angle, It was a huge patch as a whole.

I’m happy they fixed the flesh golem aggro at least, but I’m extremely disappointed they didn’t fix the issue of minions not attacking (or the other many numerous bugs with minions.)

It’s arguably one of the strongest heals in the game. If they made it a corruption skill it would probably be nerfed in some aspect as well.

Softspoken.2410:

striker.3704:

-blood fiend didn’t have it’s health siphon on attack properly increased to 200% of the old value as according to the november patch.

-bone minions still have a 3 second delay when activating any combo field.

-Warriors can vengeance res off of minions. (I consider this a bug with minions since it makes it impossible for a minion master to kill any warrior with the res on kill trait).

In order:
-I can’t put this one on, because I can’t in go back in time to test the previous siphon values and compare them to the current ones. If you see any discrepancy on the heal between the listed tooltip and the received value, or that the heal is changing drastically even in similarly-leveled zones, I’ll look into it.

-I thought I had already put this on the list! Thanks for reminding me.

-I’ve heard a bit on this subject, but was under the impression that it had been fixed? Would anyone else like to weigh in on it?

you can compare it to wiki values (they haven’t been adjusted since before the patch) and it’s the same heal value. However It’s impossible for me to provide evidence as you can’t screenshot tooltips.

As for vengeance I think the only thing people were debating was warriors ressing off of jagged horrors, but they’ve always res’d off of minions.