Curse

Kunder · May 23, 2012, 07:31 PM // 19:31

Whether or not the AI uses OoU right or you are bringing EBSoH is irrelevant, as I've already stated:

Quote:

That leaves melee that can't use EBSoH on minions quite that well, but MMs put out more damage than MBs even without EBSoH/OoU anyway.

I can give a detailed numerical comparison but the fact is that Death Nova is absurdly weak in the hands of a hero. Anyone who pays attention to their heroes should realize this.

Quote:

I'm not a big fan of the MB, but you are badly understating its usefulness. DN is usually pre-cast on most or all minions. That's why the MB hero lags behind so much, but the minions usually begin the fight with DN on. At 16 DM you're getting 105 armor ignoring damage everytime one of the little guys blows up, not to mention poison. Throw in dwayna's sorrow and you're also getting a great source of constant, party wide healing.

The problem with the MB is not lack of damage, it's that your necro hero becoms a minion babysitter, constantly casting minion supoport or raising minions, not to mention the lagging behind problem. With the MM you can add utility or other damage which he'll actually use. I have bitter chill, deathly chill, and deathly swarm on mine, and he's always in the fight using those and his utility sttuff. It's very effective since the HM update, and the MB is less effective, but not as much less as you're saying

I've already said that it is powerful in that situation. The problem is that no one intelligent has the patience to wait 30s before each mob to spam death nova on every minion.

=XM= · May 23, 2012, 08:22 PM // 20:22

A bit off-topic but...

I'm also in the MM > MB crowd. EBSoH might not work on melee for this purpose but it's extremely easy and quick to place on top of bone fiends for a caster. Definitely worth the slot. Heroes are pretty good at spamming OoU if you don't cram their bar with a too many long cast-time spells, it's similar to how you'd design the bar on an orders hero by taking cast time into consideration due to the requirement to cast every 5s. And in a low corpse area MMs are better as they don't need to use up as many corpses for bombing.

As I mostly run AP-MoP on my necro, I don't need more adjacent range damage than 2x VoS and Splinter to trigger MoP, so Death Nova is superfluous and the opportunity cost of its cast time is too much. Not to mention the annoyance of the MB lagging behind if you don't continually flag it forward. I just need extra damage to clean up what the ball insta-nuke missed and extra bodies to confuse the AI.

This then leaves things like:
1) AotL+Shambling+Masochism for pure minion wall (500 hp and 80 AL at 18DM, a bit more if you micro AotL). It's only 2 minion related skills (no BotM) and they spend very little time/energy casting them, so they have a lot of spare energy and cast time to run expensive utility, much more so than a MB. Sometimes I run this so I can stick things like SoH or dark fury or other expensive support skills on it. I hate waiting for minions to catch up, get raised (or recharge on spirits between groups...) so this is the least annoying combination of minion skills possible.

Some pros and cons and quick number crunching (hopefully no mistakes!) below for those who are tempted to try OoU MM on a hero.

2) OoU+Fiends+BotM+Masochism for pure single target DPS and clean up. At 18DM, compared to melee minions, Fiends have 480hp and 60AL but 40% IAS. Including EBSoH, it's an easy (11/1.86)*(19+15+38) = 425dps (vs 60AL), 315(vs 100AL), 260(vs 140AL), 200(AL-ignoring only). Add another 100dps for barbs against bosses or if a poor pull makes them lock on an off-target and makes the casting time on barbs worth it.

So that's 300 AL-ignoring dps (200 without barbs) and another 0 to 225 depending on mob AL, cracked armour etc... for 6 skill slots. A useful comparison is SoS+Bloodsong+Painful Bond and a full SogM rit (typical 5 spirits+sogm+boon) if all 9 spirits are hitting a target under painful bond and sogm was activated after all 5 communing spirits were up. That's about (32+21*3+21*2+5(21+10))/(2*0.66) + (21*3+26+21*4)/2 = 310 AL-ignoring dps for 10 skill slots. 185 dps without Painful Bond. Add a bit if you include paragon shouts that affect ally attack skills (envy mainly). Mostly, it's SoGM rits which are a waste of space if you already have some minions and/or spirits to confuse mob AI. The secondary effect of the spirits are not good enough to justify 6-7 skills on a hero bar and having to micro SoGM if it is to be used after all spirits are up.

For those of us necros running AP-MoP it's more physical damage packets per second than a 25% IAS VoS derv if they could have splinter on them permanently. Of course you can't force fiends to pick targets so it depends on how you pull, including at times using MoP on the target most likely to take the first fiend volley (462 adjacent damage per volley).

However, an OoU MM has very little spare energy to run any utility that's expensive, I stick to FF and withering aura, SoLS and something else. GoLE if you want to just get a couple of fiends and move on quickly after a mob has died. Once at 11 minions it's not needed tbh, due to SR gain from minion cap if they raise a 1 or 2 of minions as you are moving to next group. Aegis is fine but not PS for example (recharge time too low). After the great Soul Reaping nerf of 2007, the genius skill balancers at Anet never changed the cost of animate skills except for Flesh Golem (lol) so SR stopped acting as a store of energy and an indirect reduction on the cost of animate skills. Thus, 25e is limiting and bone fiends should not be allowed to die easily, e.g. from DoT AoE since they tend to clump together. Consider ST+Shelter to keep Fiends alive (worth it) or something that heals allies like Avatar of Dwayna if it fits with the rest of the team build. Decent mesmer disruption should be mostly sufficient.

I usually run a dwayna derv for healing, pious restraint and SoH, so I don't run vamps on the OoU and the sacs are not an issue. Any other team build that doesn't keep healing to an absolute minimum shouldn't really need to waste dps on vamps. Without some external healing, an OoU MM with BotM will unfortunately need vamps or a self-healing skill however.

Hopefully this is enough info for some to experiment with ditching MBs (and maybe damage spirits with stupid recharges...) and try OoU MMs.

Kunder · May 23, 2012, 08:48 PM // 20:48

Nice wall of text thar.

One thing I would suggest: If you run two MMs both Necros will have a lot more energy available. Double minion healing strength means you need to animate less minions per Necro, more targets makes individual minions less likely to be focus-fired and die (requiring even fewer minion animations). With that energy, there's no reason you can't stuff Protective Spirit or Spirit Bond in there somewhere. Especially if you go 1x OoU (fiends) + 1x AotL (horrors). AotL MMs have tons of energy and cast time available for Protective Spirit/Spirit Bond/etc, and once your OoU is loaded up on fiends his energy problems are gone (still a bit short on cast time though...)

Cast time is by far the most important resource for MMs that run support btw. It's another reason I /facepalm when I see the MB builds with Death Nova + heal/prot spam skills. Just because you never run out of energy doesn't make a build good, your other resource is time. Time-efficient skills are an utmost priority. 2.75s for an adjacent 100ish damage nuke (that might not even hit anything) is just sad. At least Deathly Swarm is always 1 hit and usually 2/3, even if it only hits about 25% less damage per target. And I still wouldn't use DS unless going for a gimmicky spike along the lines of Discord.

And yeah, SoGM rit heroes are just painfully bad unless you have time to spend pre-casting stuff before battle. SoS is still great though because the spirits don't occupy much bar space and make for a great energy generator that powers SW/Restoration/Smite support. Painful Bond completely optional.

Daesu · May 24, 2012, 02:48 AM // 02:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

Whether or not the AI uses OoU right or you are bringing EBSoH is irrelevant, as I've already stated:

I know that having melee bring EBSoH for fiends may not work well. But like you said, it can still work for caster classes. Therefore, there is still value investigating if the AI uses OoU right or not.

Kunder · May 24, 2012, 07:27 PM // 19:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daesu

I know that having melee bring EBSoH for fiends may not work well. But like you said, it can still work for caster classes. Therefore, there is still value investigating if the AI uses OoU right or not.

Again, that is irrelevant. Without EBSoH and without OoU, a MM still outdamages a MB, which means your previous post that said heroes can "only" run MB is completely false. A half fiend half horror MM standing around doing nothing deals out well over 150 DPS before other bonuses are added in. Bone Minions do 50 DPS, and even dedicating 100% of your time to Death Nova spam you will only add at best 30-50 DPS under the most perfectly optimal circumstances (more like 15-20 DPS in most cases).

Daesu · May 25, 2012, 03:40 AM // 03:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kunder

Without EBSoH and without OoU, a MM still outdamages a MB, which means your previous post that said heroes can "only" run MB is completely false.

Hold on, I don't follow your argument. Are you saying that because you think a MM outdamages a MB, automatically implies the hero AI must be able to work well with a non-MB MM build?

There have been many good builds for players that the hero AI could not work well with unless you micro them yourself.

Amy Awien · May 25, 2012, 04:42 AM // 04:42

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daesu

Hold on, I don't follow your argument. Are you saying that because you think a MM outdamages a MB, automatically implies the hero AI must be able to work well with a non-MB MM build?

Can you not read? Neither his post nor the context it was placed in could lead to an interpretation that it made a statement about the hero-AI.

I have already answered your question regarding the heroes using OoU when I offered you my heroes to train yours. If they were ever poor in using OoU, they are not now, they use it, but whatever else you put on their bar does matter.

Quote:

There have been many good builds for players that the hero AI could not work well with unless you micro them yourself.

Irrelevant.

There is nothing for us to investigate about the effectiveness of MM compared to MB's, we run them because we found them to be more effective in the field. Not only will any MM outdamage a MB, the increased lifespan of the minions means you can run dual MM's.

Relyk · May 25, 2012, 05:07 AM // 05:07

MMs outdamage minion bombers? Is this a joke, because it's not funny.

Daesu · May 25, 2012, 05:15 AM // 05:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Can you not read? Neither his post nor the context it was placed in could lead to an interpretation that it made a statement about the hero-AI.

Uh...can you not read? I have already asked you to post your build so we can try it out, but for some reason you shyed away from doing so.

And I have already said that I tried OOU on a hero before and it did not work well, although I admit it was a long time ago.

I am not still not convinced that the hero AI would run a more successful OOU build than a MB build. If you want to convince us, enough with the theory crafting and show us a build.

Running dual MMs is a joke that is not even funny. In most areas, you don't even have that many corpses to run dual MMs but maybe in areas like the Vizunah Square mission. In most cases, you would see both MMs competing to animate the same corpse with of course one MM failing at the end of his cast.

Jeydra · May 25, 2012, 12:26 PM // 12:26

There've been like ten different discussions in the past on how SoGM Rits and MMs / MBs slow you down, and ten different times nobody provided any hard proof that they really did. No times, no superior builds with all skills / stats listed, etc.

This is fast shaping up to be the eleventh time this happens.

PS: I tried using OoU MMs with Fiends a lot. They were pretty bad.

Kunder · May 25, 2012, 01:11 PM // 13:11

Quote:

And I have already said that I tried OOU on a hero before and it did not work well, although I admit it was a long time ago.

I am not still not convinced that the hero AI would run a more successful OOU build than a MB build. If you want to convince us, enough with the theory crafting and show us a build.

Please pay attention. A MM does not need OoU to be better than a MB. All it needs are Masochism, Animate Bone Fiends, and BotM. Heroes obviously handle these 3 skills near-perfectly, and this alone beats even the strongest MB hero builds in DPS. Having OoU on the hero bar is just gravy on the top. They don't need it to do more DPS than MB, all they need is to have 11 Bone Fiends and not die.

As I said though, I tend to run 1x AotL 1x OoU:

AotL/Masochism/BotM/Bone Fiend/SoLS/Spirit Bond/2 open slots

OoU/Masochism/BotM/Bone Fiend/SoLS/3 open slots

AotL generally gets PS and SoA (micro), and can slot/unslot Bone fiends if you care in place of anything else. OoU can handle Dark Bond and Rend/Rigor Mortis (micro). These are highly changable though depending on area. For easy stuff just bring 2x Fall Back.

Quote:

Running dual MMs is a joke that is not even funny. In most areas, you don't even have that many corpses to run dual MMs but maybe in areas like the Vizunah Square mission. In most cases, you would see both MMs competing to animate the same corpse with of course one MM failing at the end of his cast.

No, it works almost anywhere 1 MM does. It requires somewhat more startup time, but you don't actually need more corpses because your minions last much longer. With the right skills you can go literally entire areas without needing to replace a single minion. Bone Horrors simply do. not. die. to most things when they have nearly +100 healing per second, prot from spirits, and distribute the damage properly. I've done nearly every HM mission/vanquish/elite area and 2 MMs stay at near-max capacity almost the entire time.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeydra

There've been like ten different discussions in the past on how SoGM Rits and MMs / MBs slow you down, and ten different times nobody provided any hard proof that they really did. No times, no superior builds with all skills / stats listed, etc.

This is fast shaping up to be the eleventh time this happens.

PS: I tried using OoU MMs with Fiends a lot. They were pretty bad.

Jeydra being bad again and ignoring obviously posted DPS comparisons. How unexpected.

Amy Awien · May 25, 2012, 02:57 PM // 14:57

Quote:

Originally Posted by Daesu

Uh...can you not read? I have already asked you to post your build so we can try it out, but for some reason you shyed away from doing so.

No you didn't. But anyway, Kunder gave you builds and for this one I quote myself:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

... All they have to do to be good MM's is cast minion making spells when corpses become available, cast OoU frequently and cast BotM when neccesary. ...

to deduce a MM bar from that, Animate X, for instance, Animate Bone Fiend for or Animate Bone Horror, or both on separate bars if you're running dual MM's. Then Blood Of the Master, it helps, even with an ST prot-rit. Then, since the thread is about Masochism, Masochism. And since we were discussing it (and Necro's have no real must-have elite's anyway) Order of Undeath. The rest is for utility, depending on area.

Quote:

And I have already said that I tried OOU on a hero before and it did not work well, although I admit it was a long time ago.

I am not still not convinced that the hero AI would run a more successful OOU build than a MB build. If you want to convince us, enough with the theory crafting and show us a build.

I don't know about a long time ago but it works just fine recently. I don't babysit my heroes to see if the're using a skill right, I make something up, then I try it in the game. Then I tweak it, if necessary, or abandon it.

The change from Minion Bomber to (dual) Minion Master brought a very noticeable, positive difference in the speed with which you roll through PvE.

Quote:

Running dual MMs is a joke that is not even funny. In most area's, you don't even have that many corpses to run dual MMs but maybe in areas like the Vizunah Square mission. In most cases, you would see both MMs competing to animate the same corpse with of course one MM failing at the end of his cast.

How could you possibly make such a statement if you never even use Minion Masters yourself, let alone dual MM's? Contrary to Minion Bombers, who's minions are supposed to die fast, a Minion Master's minions survive longer and maintaining a minion-army requires less corpses, or, given the same amount of corpses you can generate larger armies, or run dual MM's. Of course, not using animate bone minions it takes a bit longer to build the army.

Kunder · May 25, 2012, 03:55 PM // 15:55

One additional note to add to my prior post (and the EBSoH + OoU bonus stacking discussion): GftE is actually ridiculously good when using MM (doubly so with dual MM). Minions hit hard but slow, its not hard to make Bone fiends and Bone horrors crit almost every attack. This adds a cool +12ish damage per hit on average, or +260ish damage from a single usage of GftE with 22 minions up.

For those keeping track, this means minions can deal over 80 damage per hit with a properly built team (EBSoH + GftE supporting the OoU MM).

Jeydra · May 25, 2012, 04:49 PM // 16:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

No you didn't. But anyway, Kunder gave you builds and for this one I quote myself:

to deduce a MM bar from that, Animate X, for instance, Animate Bone Fiend for or Animate Bone Horror, or both on separate bars if you're running dual MM's. Then Blood Of the Master, it helps, even with an ST prot-rit. Then, since the thread is about Masochism, Masochism. And since we were discussing it (and Necro's have no real must-have elite's anyway) Order of Undeath. The rest is for utility, depending on area.

Kunder's style is to post nothing except theory. Wake me up when he actually posts something useful.

If you're serious about proving that MMs > MBs, give a full teambuild (including all seven heroes, together with preferences for the player), an area to test it on, and some times to compare with, with restrictions if necessary (such as no mob skipping, must pick up loot, etc). Without it, we can dance around with words until the sun goes nova, and we won't do anything constructive.

I'll tell you I ran three MMs (one MB, two OoU Fiends) in Nahpui Quarter HM and they were utterly underwhelming. Sure, it looked impressive when there were 25+ minions running around, but in terms of kill speed? Uh-uh.

paranon · May 25, 2012, 05:23 PM // 17:23

This isn't going anywhere, if you have a point to make then post a build and make it properly, if you don't then stop arguing over everything.

Jeydra · May 25, 2012, 06:53 PM // 18:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Why don't you waste your time and prove us that MB's>MM's, including full team-build please, thank you.

Easily done. Screenshot here:

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/8236/gw135s.jpg

Post Invoke nerf replace Invoke Ele with EA Fire. Exact build is this: 16 Fire, 10 Energy Storage, 9 Command. Rodgort's Invocation, Fire Attunement, Elemental Attunement, Immolate, Glowing Gaze, "Fall Back!", Liquid Flame, Fireball. Exact skills on every other hero are visible, spec available on request. In today's world I'd probably try to squeeze more power from the UA Smiter (lol) and replace the UA with a more offensive Mo/Me, switching up other builds as well to keep the 3x Fall Backs, but let's leave that build for now and concentrate on this one, which has timed screenshots behind it. In case you're wondering the area is obviously Raisu Palace HM, and the time was achieved with mob skips, no celestial skill, Danika + Cynn, and no picking up of loot.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Amy Awien

Try ST and SoS Rits, the two mesmers (Panic and Ineptitude), two MM's (build-idea's were provided above, complete their bars with the regular curses and prot stuff) and the standard N/Rt healer. Bring EBSoH on the pc and actually try to make it work.

I don't really have to prove anything, I know what MM heroes I run and how it compares favorably to the MB I used before. You're welcome to give Minion Masters a try, be it single or dual. Or not, whatever you want.

Give area too, and full builds because otherwise it's easy to say inferior builds were used. For example, if I put Barbs + MoP on one MM @ 11 Curses, someone might say you need more Soul Reaping and the bar is missing SoLS, or that Barbs isn't worth it because targets die before the 2s cast finishes, or whatever. Or I might bring a build through Forgewight HM, and someone might say there aren't enough bodies in the dungeon or whatever. And then there'd really be wasted time.

If you say "perhaps tactics are suboptimal" then you'll have to put in the effort to getting times yourself. No other choice.

Give full builds + area. What you've given now is suggestive, but no more. And while you might think it's a yes - no question, the whole point of testing with times is to make it not a yes - no question. Unless you say now that "I care more about completion + stability without deaths or wipes instead of time taken" or "it works for me, that's good enough" or something like that, whereupon I rest my case.

EDIT: ... lol? What happened to the posts?

=XM= · May 25, 2012, 07:55 PM // 19:55

I find it somewhat amusing that some of you get so emotive about a simple discussion but anyway...

Dual MMs: Minions used to be uncapped and when the cap was introduced people argued about whether it should be raised to 30 and begging Anet for 20 minimum. Dual MM works fine (with BotM and no bombers) in most explorable areas and dungeons (unless it's full of mostly non-fleshy foes obviously). Foe damage has increased since those days of massive minion armies being imba, but so has mass healing/prot/shutdown due to power creep with each expansion.

Dual MMs before 7 heroes was great due to bad hench bars, but since 7 heroes I think one is enough, unless you really make the minions central to the team build which I cannot be bothered to do. Pretty much any non-retarded playstyle can be amplified with 7 heroes to build around it. Why do people find it surprising that dual MMs would work too? GftE spam does indeed boost minion damage quite a lot, although minion crits don't do max damage. Once again to me it depends on whether you are building around minions, unless GftE was already there for another reason.

MBs can do good damage but my problem with them is that if you are running enough adjacent range damage skills (adjacent has way more skills than any other ranges) then Death Nova starts becoming superfluous very quickly. There are a lot of better sources of adjacent range damage that don't take as long to cast and don't have so many conditions to maximise the damage. Without any other AoE, MBs are arguably better than MMs or spirits which are all single target but the more AoE you add, the less DN looks attractive.

As for MBs and non-SoS, non-ST spirit spam slowing teams down, with 64 skill slots, nobody's overall team build will (I hope) ever be bad enough that half the wasted bars on 1 or 2 slow heroes will screw up their mob clearing speed. But it's also true you could swap those slower bars for a bit more damage/buffing/shutdown/healing/etc. You can argue about the 30s spirits maybe but no one is bad enough that they take 45s between every single group... Maybe a full spirit army for a hard pull or against a boss serves the same purpose as barbs on my bar: something that isn't useful most of the time but becomes important when you need to use it. It just annoys me to know I have no control over the availability of the spirits or with having to flag the MB forward. I'd rather only flag as I pull. I'm pretty lazy and I like efficiency.

I might give the Raisu thing a go. I do 10mins without skipping mobs or speed boosts so 8 might be doable without too many annoying changes. OoU MM or melee buffing AotL. And frankly Jeydra could run exactly the same bars but swap the MB for a MM and it's not going to make much difference since it's a small, non-central part of the whole team build. There is no minion buffing, there is no physical damage dependent spell, and a lot of non-minion damage mitigation. I'd like to see the dual MM guys running dual MBs instead though. That would be an interesting comparison.

Kunder · May 25, 2012, 09:23 PM // 21:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeydra

Easily done. Screenshot here:

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/8236/gw135s.jpg

Post Invoke nerf replace Invoke Ele with EA Fire. Exact build is this: 16 Fire, 10 Energy Storage, 9 Command. Rodgort's Invocation, Fire Attunement, Elemental Attunement, Immolate, Glowing Gaze, "Fall Back!", Liquid Flame, Fireball. Exact skills on every other hero are visible, spec available on request. In today's world I'd probably try to squeeze more power from the UA Smiter (lol) and replace the UA with a more offensive Mo/Me, switching up other builds as well to keep the 3x Fall Backs, but let's leave that build for now and concentrate on this one, which has timed screenshots behind it. In case you're wondering the area is obviously Raisu Palace HM, and the time was achieved with mob skips, no celestial skill, Danika + Cynn, and no picking up of loot.

Choose most heavily biased mission -> Profit? Let's see, MMs can't skip mobs, MMs lose all minions after Danika (or was it Cynn?) cutscene, Fiends can't fire in the very close quarters with LoS blockers.

I also note that you have no in-mission pic, so you could certainly have used a celestial skill. Coincidentally, eles have one of the more imba celestial skills. Heck, you could have even done it in NM and then set HM afterwards. You could have used cons. Considering that you should have easily known all of this ahead of time and taken an end-of-mission screenshot, I can only assume that you intentionally cheated for the purpose of deceiving us. You therefore have negative credibility here.

In any case, time trials are irrelevant because they are 95% dependant on pulling and enemy mob reacting in the optimal fashion. Everyone who has played GW knows that. The only meaningful way to compare DPS is to actually compare how much DPS a build outputs. The only way to meaningfully compare survivability is to compare how much damage a build can absorb. That is all.

Xenomortis · May 25, 2012, 09:54 PM // 21:54

This is getting silly.