Curse

Riotgear · Dec 14, 2007, 05:49 AM // 05:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

The only real exception to this is a Minion Master, which is a decent vacuum cleaner for all the retards in the format, but loses badly to the occasional competent player who shows up.

I'd disagree on that. There's not much you can do to a N/D who's farmed your bad teammates to get a minion army short of interrupting Dark Bond or stripping the enchant stack.

Quote:

Certainly not on the build level. I wouldn't touch a hex Necro in AB these days; anything it can do, a Mesmer does better now.

With a good team, perhaps, without one, Mesmers have godawful survivability and get mowed. There are plenty of things you can do to screw people up with a Mesmer, but few of them are going to stop somebody from killing you faster than you're killing them, which is what counts more than anything in AB.

Ensign · Dec 14, 2007, 07:34 AM // 07:34

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

There's not much you can do to a N/D who's farmed your bad teammates to get a minion army short of interrupting Dark Bond or stripping the enchant stack.

Yeah, so interrupt the Dark Bond or strip the enchantment stack. You do have an interrupt or a strip don't you?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

few of them are going to stop somebody from killing you faster than you're killing them, which is what counts more than anything in AB.

You're going to be running Empathy on a Dom guy and Imagined Burden and/or Clumsiness and friends on an Illusion guy. Sure you're going to blow up in a mob...is that a problem? Are you dying to casters on a Mesmer?

Riotgear · Dec 14, 2007, 08:12 AM // 08:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

Yeah, so interrupt the Dark Bond or strip the enchantment stack. You do have an interrupt or a strip don't you?

Dark Bond lasts 36 seconds at zero spec, which is a long time to camp one skill against a target which invariably has an army of minions already. A stack strip is the only real way to immediately dispose of it.

Quote:

You're going to be running Empathy on a Dom guy and Imagined Burden and/or Clumsiness and friends on an Illusion guy. Sure you're going to blow up in a mob...is that a problem? Are you dying to casters on a Mesmer?

The problem is that Ether Feast is bad, and energy restraints (specifically, going for Inspiration or going /E) make it difficult to bring something better. Ether Feast forces you to stay in harm's way to push your red bar up, which makes degen and interference both overly effective.

Illusion does not have a whole lot of ways to deal with casters by itself, unless you run one of those Migraine/interrupt things, in which case there is still the problem of how to make them actually dead.

Dom can get enemies dead quicker, but has to tank everything until they're dead, and if they don't, the dom stuff doesn't really work.

As opposed to Curses, where Reckless Haste + Price of Failure makes melees die while hitting little but air, Corrupt/Reaper's+Faint makes casters cry (among other things), you can pack a stack strip to deal with people running tank builds so your dumb teammates will move past them, and you still have 8 attribute points to throw around and a free secondary, including better red-bar-go-up.

Discussing AB in a thread about how to fix necros is some major LOL material.

Syntonic · Dec 14, 2007, 08:40 AM // 08:40

Does anyone remember why Anet changed chilblains in the first place? I know this topic is getting derailed and my question does little to help things but I'm fairly curious now.

Riotgear · Dec 14, 2007, 08:47 AM // 08:47

Quote:

Originally Posted by Syntonic

Does anyone remember why Anet changed chilblains in the first place? I know this topic is getting derailed and my question does little to help things but I'm fairly curious now.

Because it didn't really have any use.

Basically it was used for cockblocking Shadow Form in select instances, and annoying Drok's runners when used by Grawl Crones.

Div · Dec 14, 2007, 09:12 AM // 09:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Dark Bond lasts 36 seconds at zero spec, which is a long time to camp one skill against a target which invariably has an army of minions already. A stack strip is the only real way to immediately dispose of it.

If you have to "camp" someone for a 2 second cast, there's something wrong. Go do other stuff for 20 seconds, come back near him and spread degen, waiting for him to use it. Click his name and fire dshot. Simple.

Plus, why do we care about balancing stuff around bad AB/PvE players?

Riotgear · Dec 14, 2007, 09:22 AM // 09:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by holymasamune

If you have to "camp" someone for a 2 second cast, there's something wrong.

I mean in the sense that it's not something you can really do anything about immediately, and it's something that is going to be a problem until you have a shot at it. Hanging around them, given equal numbers, is generally a bad idea.

Quote:

Plus, why do we care about balancing stuff around bad AB/PvE players?

It just came up incidentally. That is, the fact that Dark Bond does not need a buff.

Longasc · Dec 14, 2007, 10:05 AM // 10:05

The thread goes more into changing the whole Necro class rather than talking about Soul Reaping alone.

I agree that Soul Reaping is the prime reason for Necros in PvP and that they are not used for much with their own attribute lines, if they are used at all. On the other hand they rule in PvE and can compete in more corpse-heavy pvp environments.

But changing most necro attributes and skills?
I think you cannot do all this in GW1 anymore. This is more stuff for GW2.

You could not stop with just changing necros, classes affected by Necro melee-hate the most (read: Warriors, usually the predominant damage dealers) would also have to be taken in account. I am not happy about the game being so much about warriors and how to stop them, or the many gimmicky builds making use of a bunch of players of the same profession.

Ensign · Dec 14, 2007, 11:04 AM // 11:04

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Dark Bond lasts 36 seconds at zero spec, which is a long time to camp one skill against a target which invariably has an army of minions already.

They don't cast it in transit. Ever. Close to even odds that Dark Bond isn't even up when they approach a shrine, and even on what's left that it drops within 10 seconds. Get in their face early on the off chance they're smart enough to try and cast it right before engaging, interrupt, dead. MMs rarely recover once they're wiped out, unless it's a crazy mobbing situation where they're largely superfluous.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Dom can get enemies dead quicker, but has to tank everything until they're dead, and if they don't, the dom stuff doesn't really work.

Basically: Necros are better at fire-and-forget, solo-farming retards in AB. Mesmers are better at outplaying the decent players in AB.

You can't outplay a decent player with a Necro. You can farm retards with anything.

At least that's my experience with the two.

Riotgear · Dec 14, 2007, 12:14 PM // 12:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ensign

Basically: Necros are better at fire-and-forget, solo-farming retards in AB. Mesmers are better at outplaying the decent players in AB.

No shit? The players in AB are bad. I killed an Earth tank THREE TIMES in one game with INEPTITUDE. If you're facing that level of stupidity, you may as well bring something that exploits it well.

Quote:

You can't outplay a decent player with a Necro. You can farm retards with anything.

The problem is not dealing with lone retards, the problem is dealing with a variety of threats (at the bare minimum, DD caster builds and persistent melee), and not falling apart the instant you get engaged by more than one person. Damage is very sticky in AB, which is why I say Backfire is better than Diversion in it. Shutdown bars are useless if your health bar is still dropping and theirs isn't.

Corrupt messes "decent" players up too.

Wasteland Squidget · Dec 14, 2007, 07:16 PM // 19:16

This discussion would be great if this were the Alliance Battle forum.

Andrew Patrick · Dec 14, 2007, 08:15 PM // 20:15

I personally find Soul Reaping to have one of the best inherent effects of all primary Attribute. It gives passive E-management to Necro's that would require another profession to use one, maybe even 2 skill slots to match.

Last Izzy said, he is happy with the way Soul Reaping is currently working. The original functionality was simply over-powered. And that goes for both PvP and PvE. I have used a Necromancer in both myself, before and after the change, and I cannot through any stretch of the imagination claim that the current functionality is under-effective, or unfairly disadvantaged compared to other primary attributes.

We will keep on listening to your feedback on the issue, but last I heard, Izzy feels it is working the way it should right now and does not have any changes planned.

Dominator1370 · Dec 14, 2007, 10:25 PM // 22:25

The idea of passive energy management is... interesting. Energy management is great, energy management that handles itself is dangerous. Skills like Attunements, Energy Drain, or even Glyph of Lesser Energy are great for energy management, but Energy Drain requires at least some competence on the part of the user, Attunements have moderately long cast times and long recharges, so you're screwed if it gets stripped, and I often wonder if GoLE isn't broken, but at least you have to cast the thing. Passive energy management is, well, passive. It dumbs down the game.

Now, I'm not saying passive energy management can't work. I think it's tough to get it just right, though. Rangers are an interesting example of passive energy management: a Ranger without Expertise is near useless, but only because of the innate cost of the Ranger's skills. It's kind of strange that you have to spec points into Expertise to use skills in Marksmanship, and it seems like it might be a design oversight, but whatever. Expertise, however, only works on a small number of skills, so it isn't much of a problem. However, Expertise still opens up things like Touchers and Thumpers. Touchers at least are generally considered undesirable, and Thumpers are kind of an annoying concept in my mind at least.

A Necro's problem is similar to a Ranger's: it needs more energy than it has. This might be as a result of nerfs from Soul Reaping abuse, I wouldn't know. I was a PvE noob for a while and didn't pay attention to that kind of thing. Regardless of why, it does, hence Soul Reaping. Soul Reaping really is a cool idea: Necromancers deal with death, so it makes sense in some deliciously evil way that they can harness energy from the souls of the dead. It's poetic, it's clever, it's beautiful really, except that it doesn't play. In many games, death is a rare event, and so Soul Reaping is next to useless. It would have to provide a huge boost per death to make any difference. In other games (especially games with various past gimmick builds), death happens all the time, in one form or another, so the amount of energy per death needed to make Soul Reaping useful becomes incredibly unbalanced. It's one extreme or the other, and maybe there's some magical balance, but I don't see it happening. I think Soul Reaping, in it's current form, needs to be scrapped.

What should replace Soul Reaping is fair game, but there have been enough problems with Soul Reaping that it should be clear that it's broken. Sure, the timer mitigates some problems, but it's only because no one's creative enough to come up with ways to exploit it, since there are plenty of existing ways to achieve whatever end is desired, be it farming fame or what have you. At the very least, minions need to be exempted from Soul Reaping. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with a gimmick build that takes advantage of minions without using Jagged Bones. Whether or not they work remains to be seen, but there must be a few that do. The problem is, if you do that, Minion Masters take a huge hit, and lets face it: MM's are one of the only reasons to play a Necro. So to compensate, you reduce the costs of MM spells. That only fixes MM spells, though, and only to an extent: they can summon minions at about the same rate, but they can't do anything else. I like taking things like Heal Party when I'm PUG'ing on a MM so that I have something to do in case there's any downtime and to add a little utility. That won't be an option. However, the problem still remains that if things aren't dying, the Necro is going to have a hard time being as effective. This means we'd need to start cutting costs of all kinds of spells. This would probably result in a nightmare of balance issues that would then have to be resolved. In the end, we'd get a Necro that might work almost ok, might be reasonably balanced, and would still have a dead useless Primary.

So, hopefully by this point, we agree that there's a problem that needs to be fixed, and we have a pretty good idea of where the problem is coming from. Honestly, I'm not sure what the answer is. I think a pretty attractive option would be to add some active energy management skills to Soul Reaping. Either toss in a few new Core skills or move a few old skills and rework them. You can keep the conditional passive e-management, just tone it down a bit to compensate. That way, you'd have a reliable source of energy without some uberly imbalanced massive energy engine thingy. I think it would be a better idea to expand on that: add active e-management to Soul Reaping and rework the passive ability. I've heard people throwing around the idea of energy for using a skill on an enemy with less than 50% health. I think, provided that there's some stable (active) energy management, this could have some potential. Rig up some kind of "tolerance" where the first "soul" you "reap" gives you X energy, and the second gives you X-Y, the third X-2Y, etc. It could regenerate over time.

However, if we actually have sufficient active e-management in Soul Reaping, we could even make it do something else. For example, for every X points you have in Soul Reaping, you steal Y health from target foe every time you cast a spell. You could expand it to steal from a random nearby foe and open it up to spells cast on party members for more possibilities. That's just one idea that feels "Necromancer-esque". Maybe there are better ones. I just hope we can find one soon.

Gigashadow · Dec 14, 2007, 10:31 PM // 22:31

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Dark Bond lasts 36 seconds at zero spec, which is a long time to camp one skill against a target which invariably has an army of minions already. A stack strip is the only real way to immediately dispose of it.

The problem is that Ether Feast is bad, and energy restraints (specifically, going for Inspiration or going /E) make it difficult to bring something better. Ether Feast forces you to stay in harm's way to push your red bar up, which makes degen and interference both overly effective.

Illusion does not have a whole lot of ways to deal with casters by itself, unless you run one of those Migraine/interrupt things, in which case there is still the problem of how to make them actually dead.

Dom can get enemies dead quicker, but has to tank everything until they're dead, and if they don't, the dom stuff doesn't really work.

As opposed to Curses, where Reckless Haste + Price of Failure makes melees die while hitting little but air, Corrupt/Reaper's+Faint makes casters cry (among other things), you can pack a stack strip to deal with people running tank builds so your dumb teammates will move past them, and you still have 8 attribute points to throw around and a free secondary, including better red-bar-go-up.

I agree with you here, a necro with Corrupt Enchantment or Reaper's plus a bar full of curses is potent. An Illusion mesmer also has degen, and has the alternate utility of snares and some nasty anti-melee (e.g. Ineptitude if you are using that elite), but doesn't have the necro's AB advantage of ridiculous energy income.

I don't see how you are going to interrupt dark bond if he casts it at the last instant before enemies even get into interrupt range. It lasts for 43s with 3 points in blood + 20% enchanting.

TaCktiX · Dec 15, 2007, 12:17 AM // 00:17

My main character is a Necromancer. Yet, I never play one in anything other than AB because of how pointless it is to bother. Since a lot of people have taken the "how to fix the Necromancer" angle instead of the "how to fix Soul Reaping" (which I think is fine, personally), I'll post generalities on that one.

Blood Magic
- In general, change the damage caused to prot-able Shadow damage (still armor-ignoring, still DD before prot), and edit the skill description so that you gain health equal to the amount of damage dealt.

Ex. Vampiric Gaze 10e/1c/5r
Target foe takes 18...60 shadow damage. You gain 18...60 health.

Now that all those "zomg we can't prot this, it's so broke" is fixed, how about let's fix how broken the damage of the skills is (they're really pathetic).

Curses
- Drop off the reliance on fire and forgets. Edit hexes to end on trigger, but have a much bigger effect.

Ex. Insidious Parasite (my favorite non-elite Curses skill; turns every Necro into a self-reliant tank if the enemy is weakened)
For the next 1...6 seconds, target foe is hexed with Insidious Parasite. The next time target foe successfully hits with a melee attack, you steal 50...120 health. Clumsiness with DD, but no interruption of the attempted skill.

Death Magic

Is fine.

Soul Reaping
- Modifying what was said by someone earlier: If you cast a spell on a foe who has less than 50% health, you gain 1 energy for each 3 points in Soul Reaping. (4 at 12)
- In general, 1 energy for every 2 ranks of Soul Reaping. (6 at 12)

Andrew Patrick · Dec 15, 2007, 12:34 AM // 00:34

I just ran into 3 HA groups comprised of mainly Necromancers. I'm sorry, but I think there are quite a few people who would disagree that Necros are only good for AB...

wuzzman · Dec 15, 2007, 12:43 AM // 00:43

IV spike and N/rt build that is useless but shows the retardness of the Ha community because they STILL can't deal with a half shit healer bar.

Dominator1370 most players, you know the ones that rip the class, have no "recognition of a problem". If there is a problem then it should be blown out of existence to the point that it shouldn't be seen again till GW2. They will complain how shitty midline has become and why warriors all of a sudden do more damage, till the game because 4 monks, 3 warriors, and 1 rit. Then the game will be active as hell.

just sign the petition to remove necros from pvp, this is starting to get painful.

Dominator1370 · Dec 15, 2007, 01:48 AM // 01:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andrew Patrick

I just ran into 3 HA groups comprised of mainly Necromancers. I'm sorry, but I think there are quite a few people who would disagree that Necros are only good for AB...

I'm really not trying to be a jerk, but that's kind of the problem... If a group is composed mainly of Necromancers, it's probably some quirky gimmick. How many groups had one or two Necromancers playing a respectable midline role? I'd guess not a lot.

You can try running something like IVspike, or you could conceivably try to put together a team build to try to keep exploiting Soul Reaping (BiP Necro to provide initial corpses and energy [before the gate opens, even], everyone carries a Golem, Taste of Death it for heals/energy [time it to trigger with the SR timer, if someone can Taste of Death their Golem every 3 seconds, they can go for 24 seconds, Animate Golem is a 30 second recharge, almost constant energy], provides a corpse for a new Golem, use it to spam whatever skills you want, rinse and repeat? not sure, might work).

Other than that, there isn't much you can do. Most Curses are long cast, long recharge, high cost, have some strange health sac requirements, or a combination of the above. Blood and death damage isn't enough to cause much pressure unless they're part of some gimmick. So, what do we do?

People want to use Necros. They're an interesting character with an interesting backstory and interesting play possibility. I used the word interesting three times. If a Necro had a hope of finding a place in something other than a gimmick build, people would use Necros. Let us.

Ensign · Dec 15, 2007, 06:12 AM // 06:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dominator1370

How many groups had one or two Necromancers playing a respectable midline role? I'd guess not a lot.

A majority of teams that win and hold halls on a consistent basis run a Death Necromancer.

jayce · Dec 15, 2007, 08:29 AM // 08:29

as mainly RA/PvE player, i think that this thread is interesting, as i wouldn't disagree too much with some shuffling around of some skills here and there, especially into Soul Reaping if that attribute undergoes some serious change. but what i will disagree with is with changes to key skills and mechanics such as life stealing, health loss, etc. they were never meant to be protected against and is really only a problem when you're up against a team full of necromancers using Soul Reaping to its fullest extent. focus on the issue at hand first, which is Soul Reaping in which even i can agree that should not be exploitable by manipulation.

now for my suggestion:

Soul Reaping
For each point in Soul Reaping, whenever you use a Necromancer skill on a creature, you gain 1% energy of that creature's current energy level.

what it does:

1. remove the so-called shared effect
2. active management instead of passive
3. problem for minion cost and maintenance
4. doesn't abuse secondary skills

i know some tweaks would have to be made, maybe every two points instead of each point. obviously, a change like this means revamping the skill cost of most necromancer skills, perhaps increase for the most part or maybe even removing one of the necromancer's regen pips. i haven't had time to throughly crunch the numbers in the most common or extreme cases, but i will work on it.

Jayce Of Underworld