Guild Wars 2

Ohoni.6057:

Why? Some people like to do world completion, some don’t, why should those who like to do world completion be able to craft legendary weapons while those who don’t, through no fault of their own, are blocked out? What sort of sense dose that make?

I agree, none at all, so obviously there should be alternative ways to earn a Gift of Exploration, but for the time being, while that remains an issue, getting World Completion can be done in a tiny fraction of the time and effort involved in beating a single raid wing through your own efforts, especially if you’re running World Completion with nine other players to back you up, so the comparison is a rather weak one.

Seriously, it’s a legendary. It’s supposed to be hard, deal with it. I’ll prolly never raid, so I won’t get it, too bad.

I hope only people who work hard for a piece of legendary armour/weapons get them. They aren’t supposed to be handed to you on a silver platter. You should go out and actively work for them.

For the love of god, please change it to male variants! They don’t have human boobs, so precursor armour shouldn’t suddenly give them melons.

ArchonWing.9480:

You can buy memories of battle on the TP

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/71581

That costs 3.8 gold for 200, which is a drop in the bucket if you’re going for a legendary.

Hmmm, I knew I was missing something…

The memory of battle drops need to be boosted, by a lot:

you spend 40*500 = 20000 reward points on one track
this means that I spend 20000/575 = 34.78 ticks per track.

I require 200 memory of battle and I get 15 of them per track
200/15 = 13.333 reward tracks

which means I spend

34.78* 13.33 = 463.73 ticks or 77.28 hours

seriously, about 80 hours for my nevermore staff?
I am mainly a PVE er and sometimes PVP, I don’t think this is a reasonable amount of time spent in a game mode I’m not really that interested in.

Or am I missing something?

Seems to fit the corruption theme and the DMG does seem in line with the other classes. I like the idea! Would you leave the aoe range as it is?

Also, a reaper that takes decimate defenses and is in a good raid group that stacks perma fury and 25 vuln only needs 30% more crit chance. He can drop some berserker gear for some Cavalier, and the only loss in DPS would be that toughness is the main stat over power. It’s basicly made for it! If you can get perma prot and chill you already take 43% less damage, then take a blood/spite/reaper build with dagger/wh and GS and you’ll be quite survivable with Dagger 2 and WH5 healing for big amounts. And in the burn phases your GS2 will still be top DPS wise.

Yes please, I enjoyed having to stay awake in open world.

Malchior.5732:

Anchoku.8142:

Quarktastic.1027:

Axelwarrior.9084:

Gender?

Male.

That’s not very progressive but understandable. ;-)

As opposed to the 10 billion female and barely clothed Human/Norn/Sylvari everywhere?

10/10, would read truth again.

striker.3704:

I’d honestly say remove the trait and make only half of it’s benefit baseline. Then give soul reaping another trait that boosts death shroud sustainability like:
(new) vital persistence: increase the bonus life force from vitality by 25%.
This would make death shroud beefier but not necessarily last longer, so it wouldn’t stack obscenely with other traits that extend deathshroud duration (unholy martyr for example).

Cool idea, I wouldn’t mind this, but it would only make us more tanky then we already are, I’d like some ideas to make it less tanky, more bursty. Or would you not like this?

Siva Mira.3546:

I was going to make a topic about LF but I think I might as well just dump it here.

I think we all agree LF has some problems and it can be serious in some situation.

I am not going to suggest something that will fix everything because that is not possible. But I am suggesting a fix to the core fundamental of LF that Necro and also the other classes have been dealing with until now. In some situation Necro starts the fight with 0% LF but in other situation Necro starts the fight with 100% LF. The first situation does not favour Necro in anyway but in the second situation where Necro starts with 100% LF this makes it seems like Necro is a broken class. I can say more but telling the same story again and again does nothing.

My suggestion:

• Necro should regenerate LF to 20% when out of combat at the rate of 2% per sec.
• If a Necro has more than 20% when out of combat he will degenerate back to 20% at the same speed of 2% per sec.
  (Just to be sure, this only work out side of combat which mean this won’t change anything in combat)

Why should we go with this?
It is for the balance purpose on both side of the coin. No Necro want to start the fight with 0% LF and nobody want to fight a Necro with 100% LF either.

This lead me to my second concern and suggestion:

The losing of LF in Shroud, at the normal rate it is draining 4% LF per sec in Shroud. I think I am losing my LF in Shroud way faster than I can build out side of Shroud. This leads to people wanting Vital Persistence in every of their builds. Right now without Vital Persistence, if you want to fully casts Dark Path you will need to spend at least 8% of your LF just to casts this one skill and quickly ends your Shroud. This does not account any damage you take while doing so. So yes, in general, Dark Path costs me 8% LF to casts while thinking LF is my second heal bar. I firmly believe that sound a bit pricey to me.

My suggestion:

• While in Shroud, LF should drain at the speed of 3% per sec. Vital Persistence will only decrease degeneration by 33% which still leads to what it does now 2% per sec.
• LF will not drain at the first second after Necro enter Shroud. This would mean the first second does not count and you will start seeing your LF drains only after 2 seconds after entering Shroud. LF is still draining every second but this will save you 1sec or 3% LF for every time you enter Shroud.

Don’t say it in percentages, I need my vitality on my valkyrie to do something usefull!

Blue Jinjo.2603:

Well it would suck against bosses with a break bar, sure. But I doubt every single boss in future content will have a break bar. Which means against bosses that allow you to blind it, it becomes a 20% damage increase with the use of smoke wall (thief) or well of darkness. And if Anet does decide to give every trash-mob veteran and their raid-boss master(s) a break bar I think I might just quit the game.

Well, things that are perma blinded are basicly just boring since you never have to dodge, you know?

Blue Jinjo.2603:

If the degen-reduction from vital persistence did become base line heres what I would do:

Move speed of shadows up and merge it with the other half of VP so you now have an all in one trait for death shroud cooldown reduction at the master trait level.

Then add a new adept trait:
Unforgiving assault: Increases damage against blinded foes. (20% increase)

This would be a mirror of the guardian’s unscathed contender trait. And would incentivize necros to use well of darkness.

I think it would suck for PVE use, since bosses don’t actually get blinded, to add a pure dps increase trait without having it working on PVE bosses would suck, HARD. Also, doesn’t increase the use of our class mechanic, which I was going for.

Silverkey.2078:

the noobiniser.7465:

Silverkey.2078:

As for the replacement suggestion, I think this is the right type of mechanics (loosing sustain to gain damage) to make necro balanced in PvE.

Yeah, that was what i was going for, We ARE insanely tanky even when not built for it, and that is probably why we aren’t allowed to be super DPSy atm (PVP balance and such). I think the only way to up our damage fairly is to make tradeoff traits, there are some in the game (retaliation depends on condi dpg instead of power is a simple example) and I think there should be more, because they provide a HUGE difference in builds

The closest thing i could compare it to was methamorphosis in WOW for demonology warlocks. You stack a certain force (demonic fury/life force) and when high enough, release it for,a transformation(meta/shroud) that lasts a short amount of time where you are a lot stronger. Then go out of it again and start restacking that recourse.

Yes indeed. On the other hand, one thing bugs me a little with the idea that “we are not DPSy because we are tanky” is that some of the traits seem to be designed to make this worse. For example, instead of giving us damage multipliers, we get crit chance increases. We can reach 120% crit chance without precision gear, which allows us to go for Valkyrie and get more sustain without loosing damage. So those crit chance increase our DPS if we are tanky, but not as much if we are glass cannon (where we already have high crit and just go way over cap). This is like the worst design idea ever for necromancers…

If they changed Death Perception to a 25% damage increase while in shroud, it will be as good as Death Perception for a build without crit nor ferocity, but allow full glass cannon in PvE to actually deal decent damage in shroud too!

Hmm, I do not agree, i don’t think it is a bad thing, on the opposite, it is a very good one. Say we get power/ferocity/condi damage gear, only we would be able to Use it to it’s fullest, whilst not losing any crit chance if you still take enough berserker gear. Also, if we were playing a tanky build with full valkyrie or even soldiers, we will still do quite nice DPS, it will be one of our best points i think.

Silverkey.2078:

As for the replacement suggestion, I think this is the right type of mechanics (loosing sustain to gain damage) to make necro balanced in PvE.

Yeah, that was what i was going for, We ARE insanely tanky even when not built for it, and that is probably why we aren’t allowed to be super DPSy atm (PVP balance and such). I think the only way to up our damage fairly is to make tradeoff traits, there are some in the game (retaliation depends on condi dpg instead of power is a simple example) and I think there should be more, because they provide a HUGE difference in builds

The closest thing i could compare it to was methamorphosis in WOW for demonology warlocks. You stack a certain force (demonic fury/life force) and when high enough, release it for,a transformation(meta/shroud) that lasts a short amount of time where you are a lot stronger. Then go out of it again and start restacking that recourse.

I think there should be an extra mechanic that causes the chill/slow/weakness/blind to be on the boss, but besides reducing the breakbar, each one of these should lower the boss’ damage by a percentage. Though they don’t have their usual effects, they still debuff the boss.
It would balance out since chill, slow and weakness are a full time job to keep up, and the same can be said about blind, since it gets removed with each attack the boss does.

This would make CC’ing the boss actual controlling, keeping those debuffs on the boss would require some people to actually pay attention to it. Make people actually care about a CC spec, instead of letting them just throwing random debuffs on the boss to lower the break bar and calling it a CC spec(which would still be a thing).

It’s designed to be this way. Either we keep our slow attacks and lack of gap closers and stay a niche class. Or we get gap closers and get a huge nerf on our skills.

It needs to stay balanced people, let us have our niche, don’t try to make us one of the many alround builds.

Tim.6450:

I don’t get it, around half our utilities already work during death shroud. What makes it so different that you can activate them while in death shroud?

Nah, i don’t think that is the philosophy, also they wouldn’t be able to implement shrouds with extra skills in future specialisations!

Nope, but the signets should indeed work in shroud.

Artemid.3925:

…have you guys seen his older videos and their forum threads?

The ones where he was way, way more polite in the video and especially in his posts?

He pretty much received the exact same reactions, from the same type or set of people.

If his tone doesn’t actually matter, why not go poking some bee hives for more traffic?

That’s true, but I did like his videos with a friendly tone a lot more tbh, it feels like he stays above the haters when he just doesn’t interact with them or mentions them.

Blue Jinjo.2603:

Instead of messing with the base degen rate of deathshroud I think they should add another degen-reducing trait. maybe get rid of soul comprehension and replace it with another 50% degen reduction trait. meaning you can trait death and soul reaping to get 1% degeneration (4% base, 2% if just soul reaping or death is traited, 1% if both are traited). this gives flexibility in builds since you can opt to trait death magic instead of soul reaping for built in degen-reduction. or both lines can be taken for a super-tank build.

That would mean you can stay in death shroud indefinetly whilst traited in both those traits? could be a thing.

It’s just that i mostly PVE and i can see no use for the death traitline atm, for obvious reasons…

jacim.5904:

I will point out a couple of things and then finish with kind of a conclusion
1_ Taking Decimate Defenses and Death Perception is not a good choice, my reason for it is that you get a 100% crit chance from it making buffs like banners spotter fury and other traits go to waste.
2_ They have said several times that the way necro benefits its party is by doing dps, so sticking strictly to what they said there is really no point in taking any other gear set than zerker.
3_ Spite and Soul Reaping trait lines are kind of mandatory, spite is a huge dps increase (awesome trait line) and sould reaping makes your shroud reach its potential ( not that great of a line)
4_ Decimate Defenses is a better choice for PvE while Deaths Perception is better for PvP, reason for it is that DD affects your gravedigger and seeing how easy its to stack vuln now its always benefiting you while DP only affects you while on shroud but the fact that it doesnt require anything to work makes it realiable in every situation no matter anyones build (condi removal for vuln)
Conclusion:
Seeing how the intention for necros is to dps there is no reason for us not taking zerker gear which ends up giving us a 50% crit chance aprox. As a result we should just stick to using one crit chance modifier and Decimate Defenses is clearly the better option for PvE, also as I said before taking 2 modifiers is pointless. What ends up happening is that the soul reaping grandmasters then become come kind of useless, Deaths perception is overkill, Foot in the grave isnt that great for PvE and Dhuumfire is just usefull for condi builds which in all honestly necro arent good at.
So I think they should really consider changing the Sould Reaping trait line PLEASE ANET.
Suggestions:
They could add things like “While in shroud you deal X% more physical and condi dmg” or something like what warrior has “When you use shroud deal X% more dmg for X secs”.
Please leave your opinions below.
Sorry for my english im from Argentina.

Also: my suggestion for making vital persistance baseline and a trait that makes DS shorter but deal 30% more dmg:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/vital-persistence-change/first#post5473414

jacim.5904:

Tim.6450:

I disaggree, zerker may be optimal but if power/condition damage/ferocity is introduced it might become the (part of) norm (you just take enough zerker pieces for 100% crit and the rest increase condition damage or if the math allows it go full power/condition damage/ferocity). We then can boost dhuumfire,blood is power or epidemic.

You might be right but they have never announced it being added to the game and if it is we should test and see how usefull it is.
EDIT: Also as I said before the fact that you can get by youself to 100 crit chance makes makes many buffs banners fury etc go to waste.
Thanks for your opinion.

I’m pretty sure Valkyrie is a great choice once you reach 30% crit chance. It also increases your life pool you know? vit = lf

Zantmar.5406:

It’s not gonna happen, there’s no way this trait will be base line for necro, it may become base line for soul reaping for in no way it’s gonna be base line for the entire profession
Look at warrior fast hands for example

That’s also something i thought about. But they want to increase build diversity, forcing you to always take that trait tree if you want to have some use from our only class mechanic seems stupid. no other class’ mechanic is balanced around always taking that one trait, as far as i’m aware.

Also I try to increase diversity in adding a trait that overhauls the use of DS completely, making it a short burst mode that basicly removes most of it’s survivability uses but increases it’s damage over our weapon sets, increasing it’s usability in a DPS perspective.

Skoigoth.9238:

Talking about insults… like kitten, motherkittener and kitten?
(Edit: kitten you automatic censor function! Well, if you´ve watched the video in question you know what I mean)

Seriously, if you want to get a point across and add some entertainment value to your content, you don´t need to make excessive use of slurs to do so. All that does is distract people from the actual content and stir up turmoil, even if you flag it as “parody” beforehand.

So, Nemesis, I can see and appreciate the work you put into your videos and I think you have a point there, but the way you try to deliver that point is cringeworthy.
I really doubt that the gross your followers (especially the vocal fraction of them) actually get what you are trying to say, because they are too busy jacking off listening to you “shoing dem filty eltistz meeta zerkzz lololol!!!11”.

Listening to you on Teatime when you where on the other day did a way better job of getting that point of yours across, while simultaneously being less vile. Maybe you should take that into consideration for future content.

He is correct nemesis, I stopped watching you for a while whilst I was taking a break from GW2 and rediscovered you in tea time where you were discussing with brazil.

That was a good discussion, please do keep your videos more constructive like that. Suggesting people to do stuff ( like suggesting brazil to try LFG as a necro because of the meta culture he helped creating).

I Felt like you were attacking the meta community as a whole in this video, instead of the sheep that think they are better in a “meta LFG” (which is just total bull).

Please keep making fantastic build videos and calculations and such, I really like playing your builds and even played the hybrid build for a few months when it came out. But also try to go in discussion with the “meta” builders instead of lowering to the haters’ level and straight up insulting them.

Wethospu.6437:

JoaoFA.8475:

It’s funny to see people in the topic saying they don’t care about Nemesis’ video, saying that it’s not worth it to reply to him, while replying, insulting him, etc. They really have nothing else to do with their time, poor sad fellows Let’s all have a minute of silence for them.

Let’s have a minute of silence for you.

Yes, please give him a minute of silence. Please give us a lot more silence if you plan on being a prick to other people without adding to the discussion.

guildabd.6529:

Make it baseline. Necro is too weak without it.

And what do you think about the suggested replacement trait?

Sigmoid.7082:

You can’t replace something practically mandatory with something else also practically mandatory. Though the baseline of VP I can agree with.

Mandatory for a direct damage shroud dps build yes, for non shroud builds or condi builds it would be useless. That’s the point, it would have uses in certain builds, and probably change the meta of PVE necro builds in that specific niche.

A spectral scythe weights nothing, so why would a necromancer make it small?

Hello fellow necromancers, as you might have noticed before. Vital persistance is in a bit of an odd place. Unless you only use 1 to 2 skills in death shroud or use shroud for a quick toggle, it comes mandatory within the soul reaping trait line and is making that trait line mandatory in PVP for survivability, whilst the other traits are also contain quite a few good reasons to pick this traitline. It is pretty much mandatory to take this trait to make our class mechanic usable.

I suggest that the decrease in lifeforce decay whilst in this trait becomes baseline: Every necromancers life force would only drain half as fast and the people get some freedom in their building.

Now the trait needs replacing, why don’t we mix in something that makes PVE death shroud builds a thing? what about this:

Quick demise: lose life force 3 times as quick in death shroud, but also deal 30% more damage whilst in death shroud.

this makes you lose life force at 150% of the current rate (3 times 50%) but makes your death shroud damage increase by a large amount. Taking this trait changes your death shroud from a defensive cooldown into an offensive cooldown that protects you a lot shorter, but deals more damage then your normal attacks outside of death shroud. It would be build defining, so might be a good idea to make it switch places with death perception(so it is a grandmaster, and death perception is a master trait.)

What do you think, would you pick this trait and make a death shroud PVE build? Or would you drop soul reaping from your PVP build and switch things up?

Nope, I mained a necro through it’s bad days, I get to be a reaper quick. You get your current main classes elite specialisation quick, fair deal.

It’s ideal in my eyes, Having it can be somewhat of a status symbol and proof of your proficiency at that class. Unlocking them all at once would remove some replayability on different classes.

ronpierce.2760:

I agree it’s my least favorite of the skills. It has some use, but the damage certainly isn’t there with it, and GS could honestly use a bit more anti-kiting mechanics due to its slowness. I hope their work on Gs isn’t totally over yet because it could certainly use some changes.

Things like:
- GS 1 (first attack) also cripples for 1 seconds Up LF generation to 1/2/3
- Gravedigger could possibly use a tiny damage reduction (pvp burst purposes) but go down to a 1 sec cast with less aftercast.
- GS 3 needs more damage overall just seems like it should be a bit scarier, but maybe not too terribly much. 300 range would be nice.
- Night fall, god if it could follow you, all Lich King esque, (like warrior torch 5) that’d be great!!!
- personally, I’d rather this become a skill to shadow step one enemy to you and chill them (and a .25 second daze so it still interrupts) on a 25 sec CD, so it was more reliable and not so janky.

This would be my dream weapon.

Edit: in regards to Bhawb, still not sure how I feel about all of the Lf on GS being per target. Some, maybe, but I feel like it puts the weapon in a weird spot for 1v1 already being slower than dagger.

You are the kind of guy that can play cele DD ele atm and say it’s underpowered.

Oldirtbeard.9834:

I’m not feeling it, I kept getting downed by humanoid Mordrem in the intro PS, there was this cave with killer mushrooms that kept making me their plaything, the only places I seemed to do well in were the Amber Fort PS instance, and the Faren chain with eventual Wyrven fight. I’m wondering if it was the gear they gave me Celestial, or the utilities which were wells instead of the shouts.

This sucks because I really wanted to like this as it seemed like a throw back to WoWs Deathknight when it was new.

That’s easily explained, everything in verdant brink kills you, it’s the australia of gw2, reaper is awesome, but so are the mobs there. They rek you….

Moodrich.1093:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Did it not occour to you that Reaper is primarily direct damage-based? Having a ton of condi clears doesn’t help as much to prevent their damage.

I’ve played against Reaper’s with other classes and different builds but it just seems that I can’t find a way to go about any of their burst reaper skills completely draining my health on not just one, but several characters with my different builds. Thats all.

Have you tried not being in the face of something that is supposed to be themed after a killer monster? Or did you even consider dodging that 2s animation with that 3m scythe? range it, it dies. Let it come close, you die.

Donari.5237:

Coulter.2315:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I have no issue with raids having its own set of unique rewards, including a legendary gear set. I am; however, peeved that raiding is the only way to obtain a legendary gear set.

You don’t know what 2 of the words in this sentence mean. (unique and only)

I think you misunderstood Lanfear’s point. She’s cool with there being raid-specific loot. But not with an entire game mechanic being gated behind raid loot. So she wants there to be other game sources (possibly just as difficult but not needing nine friends for a long commitment) for legendary armor, but with different skins so people can tell the raiders from the others.

Also, They specificly stated it needs to be crafted. So i’m VERY sure EVERY gameplay type but SPVP will be very much involved again, just like the legendary weapons we have now.

Supreme.3164:

why keep playing ele?

Be reasonable,
PVE = LF2 more eles
SPVP = 4 ele teams win the tournament
WVW = excelent backline support and dps

Eeeeeh, why would anybody NOT play ele? They are a jack of all trades at any gamemode and the best of all trades as well. you don’t even need to trait into some mechanics for them to be better than other classes that revolve around those mechanics. (reaper chill vs ele chill)

What is a kind of raid encounter you would want to see? point to other games, or just make up a wall of text: like i do here
I play a necromancer, so i will be focussing on what we would be able to do, since we are kind of left out in PVE now, feel free to ignore those parts.

1) Husk and teragriff encounter. This would effectively split the group in 2 parts, similarly to 2 dungeon groups. 1 boss would have a weakness to conditions(husk) and require debuffing and 1 boss would be weak to direct damage and require hard CC to counter. The bosses would be more dangerous the closer they get and also each have an attack that is devastating unless debuffed correctly.

Husk: Weakness: condition damage, like all husks
stampede: has a very low cd, and does devastating damage to the whole raid. does fatal damage when not debuffed. a Healing focussed build(lots of classes can do this)is necessary to survive even if correctly debuffed. weakness takes a chunk of it’s damage and chill increases it’s cooldown. Vigor is an alternative to chill since it increases dodge recharge. a condition necromancer specced to weakness/chill is a viable debuffer, combined with a guardian for slight healing, another example of a viable combo is a daredevil (weakness) and ele (chill and healing).

teragriff: Weakness: direct damage
charge: similar to the charges other teragriffs do, but this one is much more devastating, doing downs on everyone hit. Can be prevented by immobilizing the teragriff in the right moments. an aegis might also be a good alternative to survive the otherwise fatal damage. Any class that can immob while doing direct damage would be viable to cc this boss. This would however cause the 2 bosses to (maybe) get closer to eachother and get more dangerous.

2) Mordremoths bloom (looks similar to the silverwastes final boss we never really got to fight) This boss encounter would be more AOE and tank focussed. requiring a single person (valkyrie reaper/cavalier warrior/etc) to tank the blossom(by being the only one to attack it, the boss would also keep targeting the same person until that target is DEAD), being kept alive by teammates that occasionally drop a heal near him.
The boss would spawn various adds all around him that would require to be AOEed and CC’d down before they overpower the raid group.
The boss would occasionally do a devastating attack that requires the raid to go to one side of the room. Making the tank the only one to stay there, since the boss would turn around with him and kill the group if he would also change sides. The boss would keep casting this attack in rapid succession, this can only be stopped by breaking it’s break bar, making some of the other group members focus on finishing the break bar by CC-ing, some others on healing and buffing the tank, and a last group to burst down the adds and control those.
This would require AOE builds, CC builds, a single hard tanky build, and supporty builds that heal and provide various survival buffs. Each one of these roles can be filled by most of the classes.

What do yo think? What kind of encounter would yo like to see in GW2? what encounters did you like in other games?

act.6302:

Hmm, I like the idea that elite specs will bring new styles of play to GW2. So introducing dual swords with quickness just seems to be too similar to other classes as far as I can see. What would make us different?? (Personally i think that if you want quickness and mobility you should just play another class, that is not what a necro is). I like how perma evade is now a viable for thiefs. I would like to see necros get better boon corruption, minions and/or life siphoning (as these are what I consider our points of difference/strengths) or preferably new mechanics added to the game.

That chanting is really cool. Great new mechanic, it could be really interesting. Could be quite a high skill cap to actually get the right combos to be effective. I can see a lot of people just spamming them aswell… (I think it could also fit in with the revanant as an elite spec? As they use energy and are vaguely related to ritualists as well??)

Also, I dont see why the chanting state has to/should use life force as energy, why not just keep it the same as shroud, a second life bar?

You could do that really, but I do think if you’re going to have 5 words and 5 ways of releasing a chant, necro would be the class to get it, since they are the only class that is really based on the 2 states (normal/ds) kind of gameplay that this would require. It wouldn’t work out with replacing weapon skills and such. changing your whole bar of skills would be a must or it has to be dumbed down to something like 4 words/1 release skill

Introducing the voodoo chanter: use conditions like never before and combine different words and release spells to consume your lifeforce with powerful chants!
Would still use normal health pool whilst in chanting state tho, and would use “puppet minions” that chase down your foes whilst pulsing aoe burn, that only last a short time.
Also, torch with burning skills and minion summons and totems that only grant you or your team buffs or effects when they can put conditions on enemies. (give and take)

Might have to zoom in a bit to be able to read it…

Why toughness?
life force pool is 80% of health pool ( or 70 without soul reaping). So taking vitality might be better damage wise… You might take more damage, but you also have more death shroud to take that damage. skills that generate lf also generate a percentage, so more life force pool = more life force gain.

Basicly:
toughness = take less damage, easyer to heal, normal life force gains.

vitality = take the same damage but on a bigger total pool, harder to heal up fully, but you also gain a lot more life force, since 80% of 30k is a TON more then 80% of 18k…

I’d think that if you know the high damage boss phases and can go reaper shroud on those, then the vitality increase might be better, by a lot.

So basicly, take chest and bottom berserker (or another one you already have,to save you some money) to get to 30% crit chance, and let fury and decimate defences bring you up to par with a full berserker build. then stack p on valkyrie

This makes you equal to a full berserker reaper, but with 23k health and 18.5k Life force instead of 19k health and 15k life force, which let’s you dps in ds a bit longer.

or am i looking at this the wrong way?

Defenitions of the words and changes:

bleed: mainly uses for bleed dps, big lifesteal on third word

agony: debuffing in general, with overall poison, cripple on second word, and boonstrip and added torment on 3d word. can be traited to blind (with icd)

frost: the CC word, always chills, blinds on second word/immobilises and summons a short ice field on the third word. can be traited to interrupt (with icd).

Soul: always deals direct damage and restocks life force, weakness on 2nd and 3d word. Also teleports you to your target on hit on third word.

Possession: always summons a puppet,2 on the third word. On 2nd and 3d word aoe might.

Release skills:
lance is a spammable single target attack, so this one inherits traits from life blast.

enchant is a 40s cd that activates about 4 times over it’s duration. inherits from dark path. great for boon corruption when traited, or you could use 3x agony for the same effect.

consume is a 30s cd so it inherits from life transfer. Great with transfusion.

I also changed the totem of burdens so it still deals cripple, but now also transfers a condition from allies in it’s field each tick. (1 foe takes 1 condi from 1 ally every tick)

I don’t think a lifesteal enchantment would work well with the current bloodline already delivering major lifesteal to allies.

Hmmm, i’ll remove some numbers and clearly state on the image that a full chant takes 2s in total to chant.

I’ll try to add more diversity overall to the spec and change up some of the words so that the things they do actually vary more, i’ll try to fit in more necromancer-esque effects, and try to remove some condition damage and replace it with minions(possession) and straight dmg (soul). I would like to keep it mainly oriented around condition damage though.

I’d really like to keep the chanting state idea as it is, Since it would enforce the duality of charging up life force and using it methodically in chanting state. Without it being interrupted by things such as using it to tank. Give me a second :p

Riot Inducer.8964:

Over all I must say I really like the idea of the chanting state, building different chants together and applying them in different ways sounds really cool.

That said, the condition focus of the spec is rather overwhelming, you say there’s room for minionmancer, but the puppet minions themselves are basically just more condition bursty versions of jagged horrors. It could work for a condition based minion bomber, but I do feel they would be more of an afterthought than a focus.

It also has a bit of a support/boon generating angle with the totems, but none of the traits or chanting abilities support this focus so it feels more like an afterthought.

Likewise with the chanting words themselves, with the exception of the chill one all inflict rather hefty stacks of damaging conditions and makes the abilities feel very same-y. It really works against the cool combining effects idea that the chanting state is built around since all the things you can do with it are literally “inflict damaging conditions” with some bonus effects if you stack several of the same chant.

It’s a very cool system you’ve thought of here but I really feel the abilities need to be more varied and versatile to make it actually interesting and appealing.

For example why not have one chant that say transfers conditions? Corrupts boons? Lifesteal focused? Use the whole of the necromancer’s toolkit for the chant skills and you could do some really cool things with it.

True, true, but the heavy condition stacks that they apply are because of the rather slow nature of the chanting state, each word takes 0.5s to cast and the same goes for the release. So a blood/blood/agony lance would take a full 2s to cast.

What you say about versatility is true, but i felt like the spammable natureof the chants(only when you can activate chanting state tho), is a bit hard to place cc on. I’ve tried to keep the “cool stuff” on the cooldown inducing tripple same word abilities (lifesteal, boonstrip, minions…) to keep them from being spammed, else you could be lifestealing all day…

Maybe weaker extra effects and lowered condi’s on the 1 and 2 word effects of a word might increase versatility somewhat, what would you suggest?

About the support, true story, might’ve forgotten that in the traits :p

the minionmaster you’d build with this spec would probably be a condition focussed one, since the chanting state pretty much focusses on conditions, and the puppets are indeed extra conditions, that benefit from minion traits. I wanted to make minions that required minimum AI (folow the current target), and were very spammable.

Hey guys i’ve been working on this idea of mine for a while now:

The voodoo chanter that utilises:
-burning puppets(new minion) that chase your enemies and burn them while near to them.
-totems that grant benefits whenever they apply conditions to foes.
a replacement of death shroud: chanting state utilises magicka like elements where you combine powers to create different spells! Check it out!

You could go full minionmaster with this build, or go crazy dps on condition damage, beware tho, no direct damage is to be found here!

edit: new version here with less OP conditions (removed numbers and replaced them by x, 2x, 3x,… to still keep clear where the words increase in power). More info on changes down below

Hey people, I have a suggestion/idea for the next necro specialisation, please hear me out, it’s a condi specialistation that uses lifeforce differently.

We have gotten 2 “shrouds” so far, the idea is great, and I would like to expand on this “2 mode” kind of gameplay that the necromancer has mastered by now. Only this time, instead of uing the lifeforce as a second life pool, we use our lifeforce for chant spells, and don’t use the lifeforce as a second life pool. When you activate your F1 skill, you would go into a chanting state, which still uses your normal health pool, but allows you to use life force to chant.

So, if you’ve ever played magica or games with similiar gameplay this idea will probably be familiar to you, you combine different elements to unleash them in various ways, I would like to incorporate this into a speciallisation. You have 5 different “words” to combine in your chant, and have 5 different release skills that replace your utility skills. You can use up to 3 words in a chant, before you release it. 1 word takes 0.5s to activate, so for instance, if you were to lauch a frost lance (3x frost word + 0.5s lance cast) it would take 2s. quite slow, but the chants are more effective the longer your chant(more words = more awesomeness). also, your enemys can’t exactly predict how you’ll release your chants. Quite handy, but your enemies can see the words you chant (every one of them appears as an orb flying around you.)

The words: replaces your weapon skills while in chanting state:

blood: this word revolves around bleeding and lifesteal, adding more bleeding every stack, and a significant lifesteal on the third. 2 stack ones would be used a lot to fill gaps in dps rotations.
1 stack: 2 stack of bleeding for x secs
2 stacks: 5 stacks of bleeding for x secs
3 stacks: 8 stacks of bleeding for x secs + a significant life steal

Agony: focusing around more sinister rituals, this word inflicts poison, cripple and torment upon your enemies
1 stack: 3 stacks of poison for y secs + a cripple for y secs
2 stacks: 6 stacks of poison for y secs + a cripple for y secs
3 stacks: 6 stacks of poison for y secs + 8 stacks of torment for x secs and removes 2 boons

Frost: this is a bit of a quirky one, this one is mainly CC, but, similiar to agony, adds a significant amount of condi dmg at the third stack through frostbite (burning stacks)

1 stack: 1s of chill
2 stack: 3s of chill (aka, more then permachill)
3 stacks: 5s of chill + 7 stacks of burning for x secs

Soul – this is the one you’ll be using to reap souls and chew bubblegum, deals torment damage mainly and generally is used to gain extra lifeforce, this is the one you’ll be using to sustain your chanting state, and chase your enemies when needed.
1 stack: 2 stack of torment for x secs + 2% life force
2 stacks: 5 stacks of torment for x secs + 5% life force
3 stacks: 8 stacks of torment for x secs + 9% life force + teleport to target

Fury – this is the one that makes people burn, and, strangely enough, makes your allies hit harder. use this to support your group through might stacking.

1 stack: 2 stacks of burning for x secs
2 stacks: 4 stacks of burning for x secs + 2 stacks of might for x secs
3 stacks: 5 stacks of burning for x secs + 5 stacks of might for x secs

You might think, why would I not just use a 3 soul word chant all the time? easy, using a word multiple times in a chant will inflict a cooldown on the word, using it twice will inflict a 1.75s cd (basicly, 1 full chant without that word), and using the same word 3 times in a chant will put it on a 5.75s cooldown, making you unable to use it for 3 chants. This way, you will have to use multipple different words and chants in your chanting state rotation.

The releases: these will replace your heal, utility and elite skills while in chanting state:

Now , you might think, that is great and all, but how do I use these chants?, quite simple, really, you use one of the 5 release spells. There are 5 different releases, with 2 basic ones and 3 stronger ones on a cooldown, with one focused on healing, and one focussed on making your enemies run/dodge for their lives. (think churning earth on elementalist)

Lance: fire a projectile that strikes your targetted enemy and applies the chant to the target. uses minimal lifeforce.

Symbol: carves a symbol on the ground (ground targetted, think staff) that will be activated by enemies on top of them, applies the chant to all enemies standing on top of the symbol when it activates. uses 2x the lifeforce of a lance, to trade off for the aoe aspect

enchant(40s cooldown): enchant your weapon for 20s with the chant, making your weapon activate the chant periodicaly on your enemies(z s internal cooldown on the activation) uses 4x lifeforce of a lance, but it’s worth it, especially when you’re nearly out of life force and about to go into your normal mode again.

consume (30s cooldown): replaces your heal skill while in chanting state, activating an AOE attack around yourself that applies the effects of the chant at double effectiveness and heals you for ??? uses 4x lifeforce of a lance. Whirl finisher

Channel (60s cooldown): replaces your elite skill. Channel the chant through your own body, imobilising yourself and activating the chant 4 times over 2 secs (every 0.5 seconds, a aoe applies the chant around you) and adds an extra based on the first word in the chant, also eats up all remaining life force, to make sure you don’t use it without thinking. Blast finisher at first activation

First words:
Blood: Heals allies in the vincinity for ??? on the last activation
Agony: removes 5 boons from the enemy on the last activation
frost: become immume to everything while channeling and deep freeze everyone for 2s on last activation
Soul: Has a bigger AOE, and fears everyone on the last activation(do remember you teleport to your target every activationif you use 3 soul words, It makes you understand why it fears )
fury: taunts all targets on first activation for 1.5 s

The rest of the spec:
I don’t know what weapon i would add to the proffesion though, probably a sword, and when it comes to utility skills i would probably add something like glyphs since it leans in pretty closesly with this idea, or poisons perhaps. For the elite i would probably add a skill that would fill up your life force and refreshes all cooldowns on your chanting state, on a 120 or 180 s cooldown.

For the talens, Please help me out. The first minor would probably be:
Doomsayer: doubles your life force pool and gives you acces to the chanting state. You can use (utility skills) and (weapon).
the double life force pool makes you able to reap big ammounts of life force before chanting, but do remember chanting costs a lot of lifeforce to pull of! especially if you use special releases! A full life force pool = HUGE dps/support or CC, but filling it requires time.

Thanks for reading, and please comment your ideas and suggestions.

So, what I am getting from this forum about condition damage is mostly this:
Pve condi damage is still mostly underwhelming (unless it’s burning, man that’s cray)
PVP/wvw condi damage is over the top strong
All the mobs in PVE die too fast due to increase in power to all players

My idea is to increase the vit stat of all mobs by a percentage (trial and error), so they die more slowly. But ALSO increase the toughness stat for all the mobs by a percentage (they can do that, look at the husks).
This way you can balance how fast they die (vit) and how condi damage is scaling to power(toughness). Maybe they can even apply that to players as well! (separate sliders then mobs) or have a separate formule for the effect of vit and toughness for mobs and players. and adjust those formulas. Maybe do this for other stats as well and increase power for some mobs so they require more tanky builds.

This way they can just focus fully on ssPVP/WVW balance and when they notice pve has an imbalance or meta that CLEARLY favors condi or power builds, adjust those sliders a little. I don’t know how hard it is to implement though.

Discussions and more ideas are very welcome. I hated to see players at eachothers throats because someone was playing another gamemode.

So, what I am getting from this forum about condition damage is mostly this:

Pve condi damage is still mostly underwhelming (unless it’s burning, man that’s cray)
PVP/wvw condi damage is over the top strong
All the mobs in PVE die too fast due to increase in power to all players

My idea is to increase the vit stat of all mobs by a percentage (trial and error), so they die more slowly. But ALSO increase the toughness stat for all the mobs by a percentage (they can do that, look at the husks).

This way you can balance how fast they die (vit) and how condi damage is scaling to power(toughness). Maybe they can even apply that to players as well! (separate sliders then mobs) or have a separate formule for the effect of vit and toughness for mobs and players. and adjust those formulas. Maybe do this for other stats as well and increase power for some mobs so they require more tanky builds.

This way they can just focus fully on PVP/WVW balance and when they notice pve has an imbalance or meta that CLEARLY favors condi or power builds, adjust those sliders a little. I don’t know how hard it is to implement though

Discussions and more ideas are very welcome. I hated to see players at eachothers throats because someone was playing another gamemode.

Dabel.5692:

I am not sure if it’s available everywhere, but I prepurchased with paysafecard. It works as a prepaid card and you don’t need to give bank information.

I did the same thing, go to the paysafecard site and look where you can by it, safest bet is a place where you can buy prepaid cards, pay 45 euros and they’ll give you a ticket with a code that you can use to buy HoT!

Good luck!

JonPeters.5630:

Just getting these out there so we know we are all in agreement:

1) Conditions seem a bit strong
2) World bosses are currently too easy
3) There are some bugged skills and traits
4) There are some overpowered builds

We won’t fix it all at once but these are four large topics we are talking about. In the meantime keep the feedback and bug reports coming, and I guess farm up some world bosses. We are dedicating time towards these issues and are intending to resolve them as quickly as possible. As we have said before, the live environment differs too greatly from anything we can reliably simulate internally so big changes like today’s build will cause things to sometimes change at an alarming rateTM.

Thanks for your patience,

Jon

Well, I think this is just balancing,

Pve conditions are still weak compared to the zerker “meta”, pvp conditions (burning especially) are too strong. I think the problem is that you can’t gear against condi damage like you can against normal damage.

Why don’t you make all players more resistant against condition damage and even increase bleeding damage a bit? you can increase PVE bleed damage whilst reducing PVP condi damage.

Or: Just make (world) bosses and pve mobs get more toughness if you don’t plan on making players more resistant to condi damage. That way normal damage gets toned down and condi may be viable in meta

Either way is fine for me: make players more resistant to condi damage or PVE mobs resistant to normal damage.

Thank you everyone for not making this an anti arenanet thread and actually helping me give the people doubting a more positive thread about the xpac to show.

Arenanet hasn’t yet revealed all they have to show for the xpac, and I believe they will make the xpac as worth the money as the core game. (and not because that comes with it)

What the hell guys, calm yoselves

45 euros for the xpac isn’t that much of a hastle.

We got a triple A game (try to deny me, you play it as well) for 3 years that has offered us TONS and TONS of free content post-release, a revolution in mmos and many other things, this is the only mmo i keep returning to. Now we get an xpac, and you guys freak out.

why would any of you think we won’t get another bunch of free feature packs on top of the expansions promised content? weren’t the feature packs we got enough of an example of what they will give us post HOT-release?

The only thing I can slightly understand is the hate over the “favoring” of new players (with the add of the base game to hot without adding something for vets). But I do think they will sort that out.

Please do discuss with me why you think this xpac isn’t worth the 45 euros.