Curse

Arri · Aug 04, 2005, 07:07 AM // 07:07

Exactly what Skel said, its not the class that sucks just because someone can't survive in PVP, it's the PLAYER playing the class that's messing up..I had a Me/N is PVP and my team (random PuG arenas) one around 11 times in a row...Even though once I ran out of energy, I was basicly begging for my energy steal skills/spells to recharge so I could get more, im pretty sure I wouldn't have that problem with N/Me, I wont cast as fast as a Me/N can, but I could probably outlast him with SR...

sino-soviet · Aug 04, 2005, 07:37 AM // 07:37

When you are getting thrashed by the other team, or are thrashing, soul reaping kicks in to maximum effect at a much higher rate than you can use the energy. But the problem therein lies the fact that if TOO many things are dying, you're not gaining energy after you hit max... With soul reaping at 10, you need a couple things dying over a long period of time in order to get it's full usefulness. Which doesn't happen. Meanwhile ES gives you energy to use fresh off the bat, 33 in most cases. With that 33 + 50 or so energy, you can cast away and deal some serious damage before having to regenerate. In most ocassions, I'd expect you'd want energy to use to gain some sort of advantage rather than wait until the momentum has been established. Since I believe in energy storage being an overall better primary attribute, I like ES more. 'Tis all.

The Red Knight · Aug 04, 2005, 12:07 PM // 12:07

yeah because we all know putrid explosion/tainted flesh/lingering curse are terrible =[. Oh depending on your build a primary death necro can reap huge rewards from soul reaping in pvp

Yukito Kunisaki · Aug 04, 2005, 04:12 PM // 16:12

If you need to burn through your energy THAT FAST in pvp to make soul reaping viable. Then, why not?

I do believe it is true that death soul reaping necros probably do the most ignorable damage in the game...

I run a N/E using the Eruption to Virulence {E} combo. Thankfully, when a fight gets heated and both teams are up close and personal to a degree, Virulence WILL nail somebody. Also, since most teams run at least one form of condition applier, I just watch for that little shadow arrow pointing down to know someone's ready to be virulenced. Tanking a warrior using Armor of Earth and then striking with Virulence {E} into plague touch usually means a lot of degen down the warrior's throat. Since I can't spike the warrior hard enough, it's better to ignore his armor and just stand there relying on Armor of Earth.

Necro's Primary, Soul Reaping, is probably THE MOST dependant on teammate's ability to kill, OR die... ^_^ What I think some people underestimate is that Soul Reaping gains energy when anything dies. I will definitely believe spirits don't die fast enough in pvp for anyone to give a damn but thankfully, spirits don't have much armor so damaging the crap out of them for a death summoner isn't that hard.

You want to be death necro? Then make sure you're always in those areas where bodies will stay in your range... At any rate, I just use the corpses to generate Bone Minions. At 11 SR, that's 22 energy gained from their deaths which I use to nuke things. But yes, SR is NOT good for a primary unless your teammates are up to snuff...

ComMan · Aug 04, 2005, 04:14 PM // 16:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Red Knight

yeah because we all know putrid explosion/tainted flesh/lingering curse are terrible =[. Oh depending on your build a primary death necro can reap huge rewards from soul reaping in pvp

Curses are hexes, they will get Nature's Renewal'ed every 5-10 seconds in PvP. So yeah, Lingering Curse and Tainted Flesh DO suck under the circumstances. And yes, Lingering Curse will still remove enchantments, but Nature's Renewal was doing that for you anyway so that's nothing to get excited about.

Putrid Exploison, like other necro skills, is highly circumstantial. Plus, as someone already pointed out, Mesmers can use it more effectivly than Necros, so that's still no reason to be a necro primary.

There are some good necro skills but there's still very little if any reason to the the Necro PRIMARY.

Kishin · Aug 04, 2005, 04:42 PM // 16:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yukito Kunisaki

If you need to burn through your energy THAT FAST in pvp to make soul reaping viable. Then, why not?

I do believe it is true that death soul reaping necros probably do the most ignorable damage in the game...

I run a N/E using the Eruption to Virulence {E} combo. Thankfully, when a fight gets heated and both teams are up close and personal to a degree, Virulence WILL nail somebody. Also, since most teams run at least one form of condition applier, I just watch for that little shadow arrow pointing down to know someone's ready to be virulenced. Tanking a warrior using Armor of Earth and then striking with Virulence {E} into plague touch usually means a lot of degen down the warrior's throat. Since I can't spike the warrior hard enough, it's better to ignore his armor and just stand there relying on Armor of Earth.

Necro's Primary, Soul Reaping, is probably THE MOST dependant on teammate's ability to kill, OR die... ^_^ What I think some people underestimate is that Soul Reaping gains energy when anything dies. I will definitely believe spirits don't die fast enough in pvp for anyone to give a damn but thankfully, spirits don't have much armor so damaging the crap out of them for a death summoner isn't that hard.

You want to be death necro? Then make sure you're always in those areas where bodies will stay in your range... At any rate, I just use the corpses to generate Bone Minions. At 11 SR, that's 22 energy gained from their deaths which I use to nuke things. But yes, SR is NOT good for a primary unless your teammates are up to snuff...

I wouldn't call Putrid ignorable damage. And you'll never get a chance to make Minions in Tombs with a Putrid spammer around, flat out. Good luck beating a Putrid cast by trying to raise Minions, as Putrid is the fastest corpse exploitation spell.

Furthermore, why on god's green earth are you using Virulence as your Elite, and comboing it with Eruption? Nobody is going to stand in Eruption long enough to be blinded by it, and even if they are, the effect of Virulence is damn near negligible. Its a little bit of degen and Weakness, which can basically be ignored on 4 out of 6 professions. Furthermore, neither are difficult to remove. Its a terrible elite outside of 4v4 Fragility builds, IMO.

Arri · Aug 04, 2005, 05:39 PM // 17:39

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kishin

I wouldn't call Putrid ignorable damage. And you'll never get a chance to make Minions in Tombs with a Putrid spammer around, flat out. Good luck beating a Putrid cast by trying to raise Minions, as Putrid is the fastest corpse exploitation spell.

Furthermore, why on god's green earth are you using Virulence as your Elite, and comboing it with Eruption? Nobody is going to stand in Eruption long enough to be blinded by it, and even if they are, the effect of Virulence is damn near negligible. Its a little bit of degen and Weakness, which can basically be ignored on 4 out of 6 professions. Furthermore, neither are difficult to remove. Its a terrible elite outside of 4v4 Fragility builds, IMO.

have you tried it? No? Then don't comment on how "bad" it is...You do it, and I mean for MORE than 1 terribal PuG PVP round, then get back to us

Zeru · Aug 04, 2005, 07:24 PM // 19:24

You don't need to try a build to know that it's terrible.

For instance I know mind wrack blows beyond belief without ever having purchased it just by examining the skill description ingame and thinking logically about it.

Secondly, fragility builds are terrible under renewal. It takes forever for the fragility/ppain/virulence chain to actually get casted and there's a very high chance your fragility will get removed before the 4sec cast time of ppain finishes. Fragility is interesting as a partial teambuild without renewal, but as a solo char build within a teambuild outside of arena? Forget it.

And for those who think that necro primaries are actually good and that it's the player that matters, please try to get a better understanding of how pvp works before you post trash like that. Not all classes are made equal, that should be a given. Necros are both unbelievably good in pve and horribly limited in pve. They have a few key spells like rend and putrid (in tombs) but nec primaries are only used for very specific teambuilds (ala biper, order spammer) outside of a putrider in tombs.

Calibretto_9 · Aug 05, 2005, 02:41 AM // 02:41

This is just a respone to those who were referring to my post - This is a threat about choosing a PRIMARY necromancer, is it not? Therefore, I can say that any skill you listed (Considering soul reaping has no skills in its lineup) can be used by another class. Now, that being said, you have plenty of other options primary options to use that would be much more useful in pvp than a primary necromancer.
I'm really itching to make some specific call outs to people who inferred that I the player was sucking up the class, but I think I'll leave it to you to get into some serious pvp and watch as all of your curses are stripped every 5 or so seconds by natures renewal, or watch as the same happens to your blood hexes. Not to mention that they're going to take you twice as long to cast afterwards, so its' going to be a losing battle to keep any form of debuff on the enemy. Can you say wasted team slot? I'm still standing with the belief that necromancers are gimped in organized pvp, and should be used only as a secondary unless you have an extremely specific role (BiPer, etc.) Just too many reasons to choose another primary.

Skyro · Aug 05, 2005, 03:25 AM // 03:25

I'm quite stumped why people think soul reaping sucks. It is one of the best mana engines in the entire game because it offers huge amounts of mana in the right situations and doesn't have cast time nor does it waste a skill slot. In some situations it isn't very good like 4v4 (who cares about 4v4 anyway...), in the right situations it offers you a virtually limitless mana pool i.e. with the current metagame being heavy spirits it triggers soul reaping whenever a spirit, not just a player, dies.

And a necro primary putrider is better than a fast cast mesmer because of soul reaping. It pratically allows the necro to ALWAYS have enough mana to putrid the instant the corpse appears and also allows for chain putriding on the hill, which is the main reason people pack putrid outside of starving the other team of corpses. And I've tombed a lot, and won HoH a lot, and I rarely (in fact I think only once) where I ever had trouble putriding with a fast cast mesmer. And seriously, specc'ing that much in fast cast for putrid is a really, really horrible use of a character slot/attribute points, which is probably why I've seen so few of them around.

ComMan · Aug 05, 2005, 04:00 AM // 04:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zeru

You don't need to try a build to know that it's terrible.

This is the dumbest thing you could ever start a post with. Didn't you pay attention in English class? You're supossed to open by establishing your credibility, not destroying it!

Zeru · Aug 05, 2005, 04:46 AM // 04:46

Quit trolling and posting such retarded stuff it's wasting everyone's time.

Theorycrafting is perfectly valid to determine the general effectiveness of most builds if you understand how the skills work. It is not completely valid to determine how to play the build (at least for harder builds); that requires ingame experience.

Ensign · Aug 05, 2005, 07:41 AM // 07:41

If I had to spend my time testing each and every horrid idea that I see before I could dismiss it as the utter trash that it is, then I'd never actually get anything accomplished. Separating the ideas worth testing from those that are clearly not going to pan out is a valuable skill that you should develop.

Peace,
-CxE

panfist · Aug 12, 2005, 10:46 AM // 10:46

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

Separating the ideas worth testing from those that are clearly not going to pan out is a valuable skill that you should develop.

Pwned~!

Krack Jacker · Aug 13, 2005, 04:56 PM // 16:56

in pvp now with natures renewal symbosis spamers and all that, the only thing necros are good for is purtird

ComMan · Aug 13, 2005, 10:43 PM // 22:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zeru

Theorycrafting is perfectly valid to determine the general effectiveness of most builds if you understand how the skills work. It is not completely valid to determine how to play the build (at least for harder builds); that requires ingame experience.

This is contradictory. "Theorycrafting is perfectly valid....it is not completely valid."

You haven't thought of everything. If you had, then there wouldn't be a flavor of the month. There would be your build and that's it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

If I had to spend my time testing each and every horrid idea that I see before I could dismiss it as the utter trash that it is, then I'd never actually get anything accomplished. Separating the ideas worth testing from those that are clearly not going to pan out is a valuable skill that you should develop.

Peace,
-CxE

More valid, but still not entirely true. If Spirit Spam builds had come up while Warriros were the flavor, then people would have dismissed them out of hand as "trash." However, they beat the spike builds that killed off the warrior builds.

Knowing the way the game works is one thing, but what works and doesn't work depends entirely on what the other team is doing.

A lot of Magic players don't rely on creatures, because they're too easily countered. That trend caused some people to rotate their anti-creature out of their decks. Why run it when creatures aren't that widely used? Those people are going to lose to the "trash" creature decks that they're not prepared for. At the end of the day you can't be perfectly prepared for everything.

Last note, if your ideas always worked out then you wouldn't need to test them at all. There's your theorycrafting at work.

Ensign · Aug 14, 2005, 12:12 AM // 00:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComMan

More valid, but still not entirely true. If Spirit Spam builds had come up while Warriros were the flavor, then people would have dismissed them out of hand as "trash."

We ran an Oath Shot guy during the first month of retail when Warriors were in vogue. Our selection of spirits was different than what is used now, but we ran them nonetheless.

There are ideas that are good but simply unviable given the current metagame, and then there are ideas that are just plain bad. There's a huge difference between the two.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComMan

However, they beat the spike builds that killed off the warrior builds.

Spike didn't 'kill off' Warriors. The "Warrior builds" were always terrible - people liked playing their Warriors, they made tombs teams, whatever. It was really just random with Warriors being more brainless. Air Spike was the first popular 'real' build.

Builds that functioned well under Fertile Season were a natural counter to Air Spike, and started to flourish because of it. "Spirit spam" didn't come into vogue until Nature's Renewal was fixed, and Air Spike was pretty much out of the picture by then.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComMan

Knowing the way the game works is one thing, but what works and doesn't work depends entirely on what the other team is doing.

Oh, that's not true at all. Sure, matchups and what you expect to face come into the equation when tuning a build. But there are strategic niches in this game, and within each niche there are clear tiers to the options available. There are just fundamentals of the game, like hit point capacities and the map layouts, that make certain strategies better than others. Then you have the barely conditionals, like 'conditional on your opponent trying to deal damage', or 'conditional on your opponent using skills', which while not quite absolute are still pretty fair assumptions.

Of course when you start tuning metagame concerns come into play, but there's simply no substitute for playing fundamentally powerful strategies.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComMan

A lot of Magic players don't rely on creatures, because they're too easily countered. That trend caused some people to rotate their anti-creature out of their decks.

Sure, and that's relevant on the level of 'do we bring specific counters to spirits or not?' But when talking about counters to spirits there are some good counters, some halfmeasures, and a bunch of options that just don't stack up.

There's a difference between saying that creature removal is a poor metagame choice (as it sometimes is), and saying that a particular selection of creature removal is poor. We can acknowledge that removal is neccessary, but even then you have to explain to me why a given option is better than Plow/Bolt/Edict. It isn't just metagame concerns that make skills and builds bad - the other options available can be an even bigger constraint.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComMan

Last note, if your ideas always worked out then you wouldn't need to test them at all. There's your theorycrafting at work.

All ideas need to be tested, or the first try is the test. Again, the difference is in separating the ideas that are worth testing from those that are not.

Peace,
-CxE

Lampshade · Aug 14, 2005, 02:23 AM // 02:23

/dance

JoDiamonds · Aug 15, 2005, 04:34 PM // 16:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by ComMan

You haven't thought of everything. If you had, then there wouldn't be a flavor of the month. There would be your build and that's it.

Not if Arena has done its job right.

In theory, there should always be something along the line of Rock-Paper-Scissors going on. No one should be able to find the best team build, because there shouldn't be one.

Each build will have a nemesis build that can defeat it, and the nemesis build will also have a nemesis build.

Though the object of much derision, the "flavor of the month" is the metagame, and vital part of the health of Guild Wars. If we ever have the flavor of the year, then something is wrong.