Guild Wars 2

You should shift Fractal Leaderboard team to Legendaries team.

/sigh

Looks like a bad, bad joke.
I am far from being a hater, but does all of this mean we are getting our VIP accounts for real money in the next feature patch?
Come on Arena Net, what are you doing…? -_-

Looks like a bug, really.

To be honest, looking at how detailed were the examples that wiki mentioned you’d really think someone tested that thoroughly. Maybe it initially was the case, but got changed in some ninja patch?

@Stx, maybe if you’re obsessed with raw power damage, but it’s a condition build.
It is also not a support build like many seem to imply, Nemesis clearly said that support is a secondary role and 30 in blood is for better survival, period.
I guess it really comes down to people’s playstyle, I used to play a Dhuumfire build for a short time and while it was OK I still like this one more.
And if I feel I want to play more power dependant class I get my warrior :P

…and then they revealed engineer Rifles, grenades, flamethrowers and stuff.

The least they could do is to make 25 stacks personal, so let’s say with 2 condimancers one couldn’t Epidemic 47 stacks of bleed AoE twice – that would probably be a serious overkill.
That said I completely agree with direct-condition comparison – damage is damage and since nobody restricts 30 zerkers fighting a champ, condition builds shouldn’t be restricted too.

Lopez.7369:

The biggest flaw with the video and build is the assumption that burning is useless in group settings. That’s simply false. Burning is prioritized based on the source’s condition damage, so a well-geared condition necromancer’s burning will usually take priority over burning from the rest of the group.

Which is apparently not true https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI_iXF03VHo (unless the necro lied about his or ranger’s condition damage).

Simply put, I wholeheartedly miss my necromancer’s Elite Scar Pattern from GW1, it was such a great armor.
I understand that with tattoos it may get tricky with charr’s fur, but since Demon and Skull Masques look okay maybe the idea is not doomed?
Please consider this, I think there are some cool possibilities out there

I took Nemesis’ suggestion and went with 30 in Blood Magic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QwiTyE5vqw
The heal you get may seem pretty low, but with Rabid’s high toughness it is noticable and makes a difference, especially during longer fights.

Well Andele, as you’ve done all of this pretty demanding stuff I guess necro’s survivability is close to warrior’s, regardless of lack of vigor, block, invul etc. All in all you somehow managed to do this by skillful play. Becase necro is really not that squishy as some other classes, it’s a different playstyle, right? As you play zerker thief and mesmer I guess you know the importance of their evades, dodges etc. But necro can be hit few times in a row and still be alive. Necro has some good pasive healing as well, just go into Blood Magic, and if you give it too much of damage mitigation it might become quite invincible in good hands, just a matter of finding some gimmick builds.

I also wouldn’t go to extremes and give examples when some boss is throwing one-hit-KOs after one-hit-KOs few times in a row – I can’t recall anything like this and even if, it’s not on regular basis because many more classes and builds could not withstand it and we’d hear a big cry already (like in Liadri’s case). In a typical boss fight we can run out of some AoEs, position ourselves in safer zones and use dodge if really really needed, get some help from the team because boss fights were not designed to be soloed and that’s all. Hard-hitting attacks usually have some sort of transparency so we can adapt to them. I think we can agree on this?

I’m really trying to be realistic and while I do agree that some sort of protection would be good for class equality’s sake (but not too much), I don’t think that old DS is really needed – apparently necro is managing quite well anyway. I’m doing good, you Andele is doing good, I imagine many other people are doing good as well and no one really calls necro an useless class that needs to be carried on, dies all the time etc.

@Kraag, by all means I’m not saying it’s OK that necros don’t have that any extra defensive options but that’s the point – options. Having DS in not an option, it’s granted without any sacrifice! You don’t have to sacrifice skills, traits of weapons to have DS, but all the other classes need to set themselves in that defensive way and sacrifice something else. So if we’re talking about true balance and fairness, necro should sacrifice something too to get desired protection, and this something cannot obviosuly be DS, because it’s a free and permanent feature. That’s my main issue. That and easiness to generalte LF.

@Andele, on condi builds scepter’s Feast of Corruption and Staff’s auto attack generate enought LF to enter DS on demand after its cooldown. Very easy to do.
As for other classes: thieves and mesmers are squishy pretty much regardless of their builds, necros are generally not unless they choose to. Their dodges, evades and invuls are not only needed to absorb one-hit-KOs, but also many other blows that wouldn’t hurt necro that much – that’s the reason behind them imo. I recently played my low level thief and mesmer and died way more often when compared to leveling my necro. I believe it’s also true to classes like elementalist, ranger or engineer. Actually elementalist is made of paper, that’s a common knowledge :P Guardian’s Aegis is not on demand, it’s random or has to fall under circumstances.

By the way, if you think about it minions are pretty good to absorb one-hit-KOs :P When I think of how many times Jade Maw targetted that poor Jagged Horror, Golem or some other pet it’s amazing.
And maybe that’s also some explanation to necro’s lack of additional defense – we can have an army of tanky (one of the last updates!) minions that will absorb a ton of damange for us and for the team, most probably one-hit-KOs too just because PvE bosses are stupid and target those low profile minons. I know MM is not a popular option over there but hey, it’s aparently possible.
And yes, mesmers can have their small army of illusions too, but as I said before they also need them for protection from even trash champs that otherwise could kill them in 3 regular hits.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

No actually it would be more like having Aegis. It only blocks one hit, and all the following hits still go right through to your health bar. The only difference is that you can’t use your healing while in DS, nor can you use it a second after leaving DS, due to the annoying skill recharge thing.

Aegis would be inferior for a very simple reason: it’s way more random so maybe it can absorb 100k damage or maybe just 1k. By all means I’m no guardian specialist, but from what I can see Aegis is mostly granted through Virtue of Courage every 45 seconds, so purely random thing, or by “Retreat!” with 60 sec cooldown… so how can you compare it with old DS? There are also some traits that grant Aegis but again, very randomly. Funny thing is that necro can actually grant Aegis AoE: with Well of Power while removing burning and that’s exactly the randomness I’m talking about – quite useless (unless you’re facing grawl shaman in a fractal, WoP is great over there! :P)
I will say it one more time: DS is a class mechanic that can be frequently used on demand. Don’t compare it to any skills or boons, because it’s like comparing apples to oranges.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

tazer.4982:

It wasn’t OP then, it could be OP now, since as you said they’ve improved our LF regeneration.

Keep in mind that we still need to build Life Force every single time we want to use our defense, and we can’t use healing skills while in DS. Other classes do not have this obstacle.

Gaining 10% LF is nothing, I repeat nothing difficult to do and that’s all it takes to enter DS. You fill it quite naturally without hardly any effort, so please keep it real and do not make up false obstacles. Other classes have longer cooldowns, require specific weapons, skills, traits etc. – they need to use specific builds to have that invul/evade/block and necro always has DS. Bind it on some extra mouse key and like I said before – we’d have a perfect panic button. Because it’s a class mechanic you always have to keep this in mind. It would be like gettning an invul on warrior’s burst or thief’s steal…

As I said before I wouldn’t mind having an invul on a skill, just like all the other classes do, but not on potentially spammable DS. I don’t think that devs wanted DS to be an actual invul when they were designing it – it always occured to me as extra HP to utilize when things go wrong (and I do use it this way*) and with that in mind old DS could really be bugged and unintended. Because even without invul it’s still a pretty kitten good mechanic, imo :P

*e.g. I’m low on health but my healing skill is recharging so I enter DS and buy myself some time, then exit, heal, and all is good again. DS most definitely saved my butt a coupe of times.

It wasn’t OP then, it could be OP now, since as you said they’ve improved our LF regeneration. 10% LF now? I think it’s as much as using Feast of Corruption or just a few staff attacks, pretty easy to do. As for if someone used this extensively… to be honest I wasn’t even aware it worked THAT good until they mentioned it in patch notes. What I know is that now I’d use it for sure – great panic button, available almost all the time.

On the other hand, are there any bosses that can one-hit a necro from full HP or at least 75%? Because in general necros are not that squishy as thieves or mesmers in the first place, unless you’re running some berserker build and you should expect that anyway. I dunno, personally I don’t have much problem withstanding boss fights and I run 20-30 level fractals with my necro. The only boss that could one-hit me was Liadri but that’s another story :P Haven’t tried Lupi on necro tho.
On top of that no one ever kicked me for being a necro, so I guess we don’t suck that much oO

Maybe what they coud do is to boost DS’s HP equivalent. Its base size is 60% of one’s max HP, maybe it should be 80% or even 100%? If my max HP is around 23k I guess someone would need to hit me with a truck to one-hit KO me while in DS :P At the same time it would take longer than those 10 sec of recharge to fill LF meter to some decent amount. I think it would be a good idea, definitely better that an invul with as little as 10% LF.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

[…]

• If you’re a necro and pop Death Shroud, doesn’t matter if you’re hit for an amount in excess of your health pool. You’ll negate the full imp…Oh, wait…right…that doesn’t work anymore. What’s more is, there’s absolutely nothing else in the necro’s repertoire to compensate for that loss. Nothing. We have absolutely zero mitigation against boss one-hit-kills or player burst attacks.

The extra health from Death Shroud is not compensation against one-hit-kills when that damage bleeds through to our regular health pool. The ability to use Death Shroud to absorb those kind of hits was our only defense against them; we have no access to block, evade, invulnerability, or vigor (vigor can be had in a very gimmicky set up that eats up a couple utilities and which nobody I know equips or uses exclusively for that purpose).

What’s more is, it was never a broken mechanic or OP to begin with. No one was QQ-ing on the forum, “Necros so OP because they can absorb a single boss one-hit-KO at the expense of all remaining life force.” It was an unjustified nerf of our lone one-hit-KO mitigation.

Now, if at the same time they nerfed our DS absorb ability, they had nerfed all other blocks, evades, etc. by giving them an internal damage cap such that any damage in excess of that limit would then bleed over to the player’s health bar, then…maybe…it could be called balanced. If Aegis was limited to blocking only 10,000 points of damage instead of an unlimited amount, for example.

But that’s not the scenario we have. Every class except necro has access to a skill or skills which grant immunity to all damage for their duration. That’s on top of their superior disengage and mobility when compared to necros. Necros have nothing; if we’re out of endurance and get hit by a one-hit-KO, we’re dead.

The thing with old DS, however, was that we could have that one-hit-KO protection basically every 10 seconds when DS was done recharging. We could block a ton of damage, 10 seconds passed and we had that opportunity again, on demand (which is an important issue). With necromancer’s high base health pool and condition builds pushing armor rating pretty high I’d say it was too powerful. Personally I run full condi build on rabid stats, have some sustained healing and regeneration and I’m already not that easy to kill.

That said I of course agree we should get some compensation, ideally with some skill changed to give us some sort of invulenrability. I hope the devs will finally see this as an important issue.

Kraits getting more active/stronger could lead to an explanation of why Tequatl became deadlier. Blood Witches?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

Queen’s Gauntlet will return, possibly as part of the activity rotation or even other events. In any case, you’ll be able to complete those achievements at a later date.

Good to hear, but any chances you could confirm achievements like Liadri with its mini-pet reward and 8 lights achievement possible to complete at later date? If I remember correctly it was said that Crabtacular achievement from Crab Toss would be possible to earn in the future (because it got bugged?), but there is no mention for this since Crab Toss went to rotation. Or maybe it is there, but hidden? As far as I understand Crabtacular was a part of Secrets of Southsun achievements so maybe that’s the reason why, and Queen’s Gauntlet has its own category, but if that’s OK I’d love to know for sure that I’m not in a great rush with Liadri.

By all means, I’m still trying to get this on this occasion, yet sadly I have significant time and hardware constraints for the nearest future

Thanks in advance!

Yorric Hunt.8214:

Blacktide is still one of the fullest servers. They just need to get their PvE community into WvW and we will get stomped lol.

BT is full of inactive players and WvW players are just severly outnumbered no matter the tier atm. It’s a real pity, I wouldn’t be surprised if T9 was too much for BT right now, because WvW is totally dead here -_-
Seriously, ANet needs to do something with inactive players, beacause now there’s even no hope for any ‘fresh blood’ due to false fullness of BT.

Blacktide did it ~30 mins ago, but we may be rather full

I think it can also be in My Documents\Guild Wars 2. Otherwise, no idea.

Not exactly what I had, but try deleting Local.dat file in your game folder, after last patch it went crazy for some people.

Delete Local.dat file in your GW2 folder

robber.4613:

I found a fix for me… Deleted the local.DAT file in my gw2 root folder. This resets your settings to default. Got in right away after.

Oh man, cheers for that! GW2 tech support should be ashamed now. Or hire you

Evan Lesh.3295:

It would be helpful to know if any/all of you had completed an achievement before the extra tiers were added.

The title and all achievements we working for me all the time, but if that helps I had Huntin’ and ToTs completed before the update. Didn’t have Carvings, thou.

Seems that some achievements just get stuck for no reason, my Skillful achievement is stuck at 202 points no matter how many more skill points I earn Reported this some time ago, but no change so far :/

Well, personally I don’t even mind the skin’s “plainness”, just saying that adjusting the blade would be great.

Hi there!
As we know, almost all necromancers’ staff attack animations create a foggy scythe blade, which is really cool. Personally I’m a bit dissapointed that the foggy blade doesn’t match with the skins’ blade and now we have this weird double bladed scythe.
Is it intentional? If not, wouldn’t it be better to update the skin so its blade covers in fog upon attack?
Share your opinions.