Guild Wars 2

So something I absolutely loved in GW1, EQ and early WoW (with the warlock) was sacrificing my health for some kind of cool benefit. Be it, sacrificing health to give mana/energy to others, sacrificing health to do more damage, sacrificing health to heavily debuff enemies or sacrificing health for some kind of utility such as moving quickly or regain health quickly for a set period of time. In GW2 there was a bit of playing with your health pool with the condimancer and plague signet, but it’s a really pale comparison and pretty trivial because the conditions can be ditched quickly.
In the coming xpack, and with some new utilities, traits and what not, and the possibility of a new specialization that takes life force and uses it as something other than a shield and different damage abilities, I’m hoping this old style of gameplay can be brought back.

Some ideas I thought could be interesting are:

• Utility that sacrifices health and/or life force for quickness.
• With the mention in the PoI about mushrooms shortening skill cooldowns, maybe some unique group buffing: new elite sacrifice or constantly drain health to give a buff to yourself and nearby allies to decrease skill cooldown by x%.
• Short cooldown utility ( < 5 sec) that sacrifices 10+ % max health to double the condition damage of the next bleed (or two bleeding applications).
• Sacrifice health utility skill that greatly increases (+50%) outgoing heals (possibly to also nearby allies)
• Drain health utility to increase the power and toughness of minions.

Then on an slightly unrelated note: The signet of vampirism reminds me a bit of the debuff applied by barbs. It’d be interesting if stacking debuffs like that could be applied that could have extra damage done scale with a stat like power or condi damage. The benefit of having that over something like applying vulnerability is then there is a controlled flat damage boost that makes it easy to balance around, and it can provide some interesting new synergies, like fast but softer hitting attacks (like the dagger aa) being able to provide harder spike damage, or less power heavy derived attacks still being able to trigger the boost damage without any loss to the debuff’s final output.

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

Hammer. Like guy in colossus fractal.

^ This.
2h swords would be cool for a death/shadow knight kinda set-up, but personally, nothing says BA like a gothic 2h mace. Make it slow, make it cleave, and do something new, give it an attack that consumes life force for extra damage!

I like the concepts. I’ve been quietly lamenting for the past few days that the blood line isn’t as vampiric and sustaining as it should be. I really like the Soul Feast trait idea, would synergize really well with dagger and staff.

Malchior.1928:

Please just give my axe Cleave Anet.

^ This, or make it stack up 25 vuln on its own in < 10 seconds. That’d at least give it use for a team. You personally may not be doing a whole lot, but the rest of your team got a 25% boost thanks to you!

Lorkmir.6580:

Personally, I think we don’t have enough weakness. Thieves are capable of easily 100% up-time on weakness with a spam attack. If the goal is for Necromancers to be powerful at attrition, lowering our burst while increasing overall effectiveness of conditions, buffing vampiric traits and abilities, giving greater access to weakness, and also buffing torment, would be steps in achieving that goal.

Putting in condi duration runes with the 30/30/x/x/x builds with a veggie pizza can easily enable a condimancer to juggle 100% weakness up time with the withering precision grand master trait. To top it off, it enables more up time on burning. Spread it with epidemic and you can always have weakness spread about on 5 players with other conditions as well. I don’t think that’s the real problem though. I think the real issue is that Anet is really out to tone down AoE’s and any excuse that can be given to nerf an AoE is an excuse they’ll take. Epidemic basically IS necromancer aoe, nerfing it severely cripples necro utility. Ignoring the bleed and burning damage it enables disabling conditions to be spread which is helpful to any necro.

Malchior.1928:

Honestly, I think The Crossing makes a better legendary than The Bifrost ;f

^ exactly this, just make a ‘The Crossing’ much better necro staff.

Bring Cantha back please
Ritualists too!

Kyskythyn.6471:

Try playing a condition build with epidemic and watch everyone melt to trident auto-attacks.

^This
Also MM builds aren’t “necromancer builds” as some sort of original, or coveted form of perfection for a necromancer. Yes necromancers are supposed to be spell casters that work through the dead/death, but that doesn’t automatically mean they have to summon armies of undead in order to be a “real” necro.

Minion Master builds are weak in PvP, period. You can make it work on land, but it’s subpar to running a power or condition based build.

At the moment condition necros are really strong underwater, they may even be borderline OP. The profession as a whole though is not inherently bad underwater, not after the december patch.

I could see this idea working, if the three minions used were bone fiend, shadow fiend and flesh wurm and instead of summoning long standing minions they just did their current activated ability.
Idea and theme being, you quickly animate the dead exclusively for a singular purpose, and once that purpose is over you discard them as quickly as they were summoned.
So you’d summon a bone fiend to root someone in place, then once the root lands the bone fiend dies. You summon a shadow fiend on top of someone, it explodes and they get blinded. Then you summon a flesh wurm and then travel to its location and it explodes.
The life force bar then doubles as not only a meat shield, but also like a psuedo initiative bar. You can trade damage/damage reduction in exchange for utility, but you can only get life force so quickly. So while a novice necro may use life force too haphazardly or not at all, an experienced necro will know what to use and when, depending who they’re fighting.

As for the lost minion utilities for the actual utility skills, meh.

lorndarken.3702:

a necros bad match up are including

mesmer
ele
thief
guardian
and now ranger

we can sorta do something to wars and eng , and of course other necros

power builds for the time being is about the only real option for a necro. conditionmancers like to brag about how they can do this and do that to people but chances are they are not facing many if any players that use condition removal .
minion masters are a good option if the pets were effective , and ds speced necros can be tanky and dish out a lot of dd but at the same time they lose out on the cc that they need for that mitigation .
necros just need to be looked at by the devs and then we can all see what needs help in some areas and where we dont need help in others .

I’ll agree on glass cannon back stabbing thieves and glass cannon warriors, everything else I call out on (in terms of what conditionmancers can kill). Guardians and Mesmers can be tough, rangers have also went from being roadkill to something that will noticeably hurt if you ignore it, but i no way are conditionmancers as poor off as you’ve made them.

Now onto the actual topic. Killing Mesmers.
A good mesmer will be a tough kill, but as a conditionmancer it is completely do-able, but it requires you to know how mesmers work. You need to recognize what weapons the mesmer is using, what clones he’s pulled out, so you know when he’s swapped places, or when he’s gained stealth and is hiding. Epidemic and smart aoe bleed applications are very useful in clearing out clones. If the mesmer is particularly good, save mark of blood to be used on clones near you, so that way you can gain the regen boon. Save life transfer for also clearing out clones, and if you have less than 10k health, never attempt to stomp the mesmer if they have clones out, just go into death shroud and keep hitting them until they die or the clones despawn.
Mesmers are all about subterfuge, so long as they can’t fool you, they can’t win.

I don’t think marks, wells or epidemic are going to get nerfed.
If you read/listen through the reasons for the upcoming aoe nerfs, the abilities they are going after are abilities that do aoe damage, but almost equal damage on single targets as single target abilities.
Marks, wells and epidemic don’t fit that description in the slightest.
Epidemic does nothing other than transfer a copy of conditions of a target onto other nearby targets. No reason to use it for a single target scenario, and it has no single target equivalent. The ability is exclusively for AoE.
As for marks, the actual damage from marks tripping is pretty kitten poor, the useful part of marks is the conditions they apply. Now just talking about the staff in general, the auto attack (technically a cleave/aoe because it pierces) is weak for single target if you have an alternative you use that instead of nectrotic grasp (or w/e its name is). Using Mark of Blood as your only source of bleed applications (for single target or aoe) is a really bad move, you have to weave weapons in order to get your bleed stacks up. So Mark of Blood is most likely going to be left alone. All of the other marks really don’t do damage, or have use beyond the conditions/mechanics so meh. I’d severely question Anet’s ability to critically think if they nerf marks as they currently stand.
So now onto wells. Most wells are like marks, useful for their condition application/mechanics. Well of Suffering is the only real contender that could be open for a damage nerf. At the same time though, the ability has an excessive cooldown, and the main use is once again the condition is applies. If they want to nerf the damage on Well of Suffering they’re either going to have to reduce the cooldown or increase the condition application. That being said, there really isn’t a “single target” alternative for Well of Suffering to be compared to. In fact most necro utilities are AoEs of some sort, that’s just how we were designed.

So until we see some patch notes, I think it is far too early to scream that the sky is falling. At the moment I think the intent is that abilities like hundred blades and meteor storm are just out of hand as far as Anet is concerned. They want to make it so you aren’t using those abilities to kill one person quickly. The idea is that aoe abilities kill lots of targets faster than a single target ability would be able to, but aoe abilities aren’t just a hair’s length behind single target abilities in speed to kill targets. Necro weapon attacks are pretty much single target by default, and we have utilities that then open us up to aoe capabilities.

After saying all of this though, life transfer may be something that gets a nerf in damage. Life transfer can put out roughly equal or more dps than life blast, although the trade off is that life transfer comes with a hefty cooldown, so hopefully it’ll be left alone.

At least you got that far, on Ehmry Bay the event chain is stuck very early and we can’t even get that far.

With obvious and terrible pun intended, welcome to a discussion of some shortcomings or issues I believe exist in our profession’s Well utilities; and a new place to submit community feedback on the matter.
Wells aren’t bad, but at the same time they aren’t “awesome”. When it comes to group play I often times have a very hard time arguing the reason to put a well on my utility slots, despite the combos dark fields present. (or in the case of Well of Blood, light field, wtf, why do we make light fields we’re necros! ‘Darkness incarnate’) Signet of Undeath, Spectral Grasp, Poison Cloud, Minions, Spectral Walk, Epidemic, these are all utilities that I will often have to mark hard choices on, when it comes to group play. “How do I want to function? What are other people bringing to the group? Will not bringing this make things noticeably harder?” Those are questions that display the utility value of skills, yet I never have such an internal discussion when it comes to Wells, despite a stern desire to bring them into groups more often. After thinking about it for the past month my biggest gripes are probably the need to trait their placement and uptime.

With Well of Blood I can live with dropping it where I’m standing without a trait, although it always feels nicer when I happen to be spec’ed into spite so I can drop it on melee; but with the other Wells, like Darkness, Corruption and Suffering, not always having the capability to toggle where they go is a huge detriment to their utility. There are plenty of situations where getting close together or getting in melee range of the target is suicidal. With those situations a plenty, that makes the Focused Ritual trait feel extremely mandatory in order to make Wells even start to become a worthwhile utility.

Uptime is another huge problem with Wells. They have long cooldowns and very short durations, and the Ritual Mastery trait doesn’t even feel like it makes much of an impact over cooldown times. 12 seconds off 60, while numerically significant, doesn’t feel all that great when during those 48 seconds, the Well only lasts for 5 or so. Either cooldowns need to be brought down substantially again, or durations need to increase. Personally I think shorter cooldowns would be more entertaining, as it makes the wells more engaging, and less passive.

In the end I think changes of this nature would be extremely helpful in making group play for the necro profession more dynamic. As it currently stand, group play feels very static and parallel to solo play. With a lack of combo finishers and most initiators being tied up to lackluster utilities. Changes like these would also open up for more build options and possibly even present whole new levels of group strategy that the community finds not only engaging, but useful as well.

So, thoughts, opinions?

Even if necros got their own unique class debuff that stacked and did damage, basically a necro-only bleed, that wouldn’t fix the issue. The issue is that condition damage builds are damage capped in group play due to how debuff stack, and that puts any condition based build at a severed disadvantage to regular direct damage based builds. This also puts gear that has only condition damage, but no power to supplement damage output, at a severe disadvantage.
Now personally I do love the concept of a new necro only debuff, for the sake of argument we’ll continue calling it the previously suggested name “disease”. Rather than making disease stack per application for an intensity boost, let it have one application stack per source. Then, allow a trait or something that enables either stacking condition damage, or solely boosts the damage of disease damage. So with each attack that applies disease you extend the duration, increase the potential damage per second you can do with the attack, and update the damage potential possible on your application of disease. By concept, I think that was somewhat the original intent behind bleeds, but they were tweaked around too much and their original purpose was lost to the mess we have now.

As to bosses melting super fast. I do agree to that to an extent. At the same time though, apart from a few Orr bosses, most world bosses melt in a matter of minutes at best, seconds at worse, and that is because more people are switching back to direct damage based builds, where artificial damage caps don’t exist.

The biggest issue I have with the clock tower is that Asura get railed hard on it because we’re at the very least a third as tall as everyone else, meaning we never get to see our character model for the first minute or so of that puzzle.
Asura only instances please.

TC and Mag aren’t in an alliance, they’re just both not attacking anyone but EB. Despite the fact that TC is still taking the lead heavily, Mag is still not interested in taking any of TC’s stuff. There’s no alliance here kids, obviously.

Grats Maguuma, Tarnished Coast played you guys for fools and made you buy into an Alliance, so that way you get stuck in skirmishes all night with Ehm Bay (which was nothing but a small low ranked server that happened to go up against two extremely low population servers in the previous week) while Tarnished Coast steals everything and stabs you in the back. Truly an honestly wonderful alliance, hope you guys have fun getting continually screwed over by Tarnished Coast for this whole match up. You’ve turned into the laughing stock of Tarnished Coast’s LA chat.