What do you think makes Scourge strong?

There are a number of threads, and comments within them, that suggest Scourge is too strong.

In just a few words, what are the one or two attributes of the Scourge design you think make it strong.

Please do not debate others' opinion but you are welcome to revise your own at any time.

6 Condi applications per pulse, and Zero Condi clear on Barrier Due to Broken Abrasive grit. Ony class in game that can counter the condi clear is Firebrand. Fix Abrasive Grit, and Reduce Condi application per pulse so normal Condi Clear / Transfer can handle Scourge Condies and its fine as is.

@"Anchoku.8142" said:There are a number of threads, and comments within them, that suggest Scourge is too strong.

In just a few words, what are the one or two attributes of the Scourge design you think make it strong.

Please do not debate others' opinion but you are welcome to revise your own at any time.

easy

the thing that makes scourge so strong, is not scourge itself. but condition mechanics

conditions ignore all armor. and theres very few traits that directly reduce dmg from condition dmg(and i beleive only 3 classes have them). so its extremely good at dealing dmg.

as for condition cleansing. not all classes have condition clenses plentiful enough to deal with the condition spam scourge can lay down.

a class like ranger can sure, its heal removes 2 conditions per secound for up to 8 secounds. this is extremely useful.add to that its survival skills can be traited to remove 2 conditions each.

but a class like thief, not only has only a few skills that can remove conditions, but many of those skills can only remove certain KINDS of conditions. not any condition like ranger. so say you get spam crippled, stealthing wont work, that trait only removes certain damage conditions, so unless you have one of the 3 skills that can remove it (not referign to daredevil here), you have nothing that can. (and if u took one of those 3, 2 of them wont work on damage conditions.......onyl signet of precision is "Remove any". and its limited to 3. so if it takes off the wrong 3. rip you)

could also look at necromancer. this class was the condi class.......but cleansing conditions, it can't. oh sure it can cleanse all at once, but then it has a cooldown in which those conditions will be reapplied fast and stack like mad.

for all the ways to deal with power builds, theres very few viable ones to counter condition spam. Scourge jsut happens to be the king of condition spam (though mesmer with confusion/torment spam is equally as deadly)

this wouldn't be such an issue if Anet hadn't spent the past year restricting what conditions skills can and can't remove.

fixes would be to make it so armor works to reduce condition dmg.

or maybe healing trait reduces condition dmg.

or condition removal skills are mroe common or apply to all conditions, not just 3 specific types.

and in WvW where you can have 50+ scourges......no ammount of condition cleanse is going to save your own zerg. no ammount of healing, blocking, bunkering, etc.

and when you go down to 25 stack of torment doing 1k dmg repeated. downed state isn't going to help you at all. cause its gonna continue to tick on you, despite the caster having moved on long ago. you can't use your heal when downed due to the conditions persisting

Instant aoe skills with short cool downs and a piled up effects. That's what make scourge strong, otherwise it's not really worth taking it.

nothing really. subpar dps, nonexistent defense, zero mobility. its like reaper except worse

People unable to change their playstyle when expecting all necro forms to be ez kill, then melting on the spot. Thats what makes them especially deadly.

Condi puking fanktanker that can instant cast garbage on your face even while CCed, pbaoe, no-tell, ranged on-point attacks, melee to 1000+ range.

Even minimal support makes them monsters because every necro wants their class balanced for 1v1 when it is clearly a team player offensive class.

Curses traitline makes Scourge strong (3 corrupts + 2 transfers + bleeds + weakness). Scourge itself is just torment, cripple and a few burns.

But corruptions and weakness is a key defense mechanic for all necro specs. If you nerf Curses you nerf even Power Reaper. Yes, even on Power Reaper the traitline is stronger than Soul Reaping in most scenarios - esp. in teamplay as all that fancy stuff mentioned above is AOE. Compared to Curses the sustain improvement of Soul Reaping is negligible since the day it was nerfed to the ground.

If ANet gives us baseline 2% shroud degen and baseline 8s shroud CD, then they can think about reducing the debuff-impact of Curses (and buff barrier numbers for compensation - this would shift away the spec from condi nuke to condi support - does not sound that bad).

Barrier is strong. But you wont have a proper uptime of it. Sto thats not it.

Condition spam. Well its a necromancer what do you expect from the undead? Love?

The problem is: it does to many conditions.Thats what mlst people think

Möööööp. Wrong.

It does exactly 3 on shade use. Burn,cripple,torment.

Abd the most other conditions it will fo are non damaging conditions. And that shall be strong?

Well i dont know. For zergs in wvw its good.Doing anything solo its garbage.

the fact that it's really hard to see what an enemy scourge is doing is what makes scourge strong. the visuals are a mess

Boon conversion, absurd aoe spam that is also bound to character movements.pressing all the buttons without any consequence.That.. And nerfing Reaper/core Necro to the ground, taking away their main damage mediations and condition applications to make room for the abomination that is scourge.

Remember those stacks of bleeds that necro applied trough chill and blinds that, a reaper had to build up, everyone was oh so upset about?

Well....Now it's 15 stacks of torment and a lot of other conditions that are just automatically applied by clicking all the buttons and running around without even attacking a target.

applause*

Curses Scourge's F2 causing 5 unique conditions (6 with unyielding blast) every 6.5 seconds.

@Crinn.7864 said:Curses Scourge's F2 causing 5 unique conditions (6 with unyielding blast) every 6.5 seconds.

I do not know where you are getting this info from, maybe it is me as I haven't been on Scourge for a while.

F2 skill on scourge is conditions converted to boons and traited with path of corruption it converts 2 boons to conditions. The numbers don't match up, as its 5 seconds without the cooldown reduction and 4 seconds with the cooldown reduction.

Unyielding blast is on the F1 skill and not on F2. So if your going to argue your point and be taken seriously it might be worth fact checking your stuff. Even if you mean F1 the numbers still do not match up as the cooldown for the count re-charge is 10 seconds and the only f-skill that has a 6.5 second cooldown is F3 skill sand cascade. That skill is the barrier application skill and has nothing to do with firing off conditions onto people.

So what Scourges F-skill fires off 6 conditions (with unyielding blast) every 6.5 seconds? As to me it cannot be the F2 skill.

@Scarran.9845 said:

@Crinn.7864 said:Curses Scourge's F2 causing 5 unique conditions (6 with unyielding blast) every 6.5 seconds.

You do realize that whenever you use any Shade skill (F2-F5) you will trigger a shade autoattack which includes all the effects listed under the Manifest Shade tooltip.

So when a typical Curses Scourge presses F2 they will apply the following:

• Torment and Cripple from the shade auto
• Burning from Dhuumfire
• Vulnerability from Unyielding Blast (if traited)
• 2 boon corrupts

That's 5 condis right there. (6 with UB) Oh and shade autos include strike damage which means they can potentially proc Barbed precision in addition to any sigils.

Scourge is a turret class and players in this game hate to play against turret classes.

Turrets are best in conquest. Oh, and WvW and Pvp are both conquest.

Scourge isn't even strong and has many hardcounters, but players of this game will hate on it as long as Scourges exist and use shade. That complaining isn't even evidence that Scourge is good, as the same complaints exist about minions, elementals, engineer turrets, gyros, and ranger pets to the extent that those are used.

@nekretaal.6485 said:Scourge is a turret class and players in this game hate to play against turret classes.

Turrets are best in conquest. Oh, and WvW and Pvp are both conquest.

Scourge isn't even strong and has many hardcounters, but players of this game will hate on it as long as Scourges exist and use shade. That complaining isn't even evidence that Scourge is good, as the same complaints exist about minions, elementals, engineer turrets, gyros, and ranger pets to the extent that those are used.

Anything other than boomspammer e perma stability stacks will have complaints, and then later they complain about lack of diversity.

@Crinn.7864 said:You do realize that whenever you use any Shade skill (F2-F5) you will trigger a shade autoattack which includes all the effects listed under the Manifest Shade tooltip.

So when a typical Curses Scourge presses F2 they will apply the following:

• Torment and Cripple from the shade auto
• Burning from Dhuumfire
• Vulnerability from Unyielding Blast (if traited)
• 2 boon corrupts

That's 5 condis right there. (6 with UB) Oh and shade autos include strike damage which means they can potentially proc Barbed precision in addition to any sigils.

I will admit I did not know this as I mainly play Reaper and hardly played Scourge as I cannot stand it, so maybe its me that shouldn't be taken too seriously lol. So I will apologize to you for me being mistaken.

So let me get this straight incase im muddling things up again, on a 4 second cooldown skill when traited I can proc the F1 skill's effects every 4 seconds? I can see where your coming from and I feel that maybe they need to exclude the shades that are meant for utility from proccing.

Keep in mind the shroud skills consume Life Force in addition to having cool downs: No LF - no F#. Charging the LF bar and spending it wisely is as critical for Scourge as it is for Reaper. It works kind of like Initiative except that it does not passively regenerate.

While my Druid, DE, P/P vanilla engi and Mirage and Scourge can beat them, the issue is the mass barrier they can stack as well as the condi sustain. They can pump out the most amount of condis in the shortest time, and keep them going.

Im not saying they are OP as they do have their obvious counters, however they still need to be balanced a bit.

Should be said that it wouldn't be as bad if half as many people played scourge. But its stupid easy to play and so...MOAR SCOURGE MOAR GOOD!

Well. They could just put an icd on f2 corrupts. Like 10 seconds? That wouldnt affect people in pve and for wvw it would be a little bit better.

If you want more nerfs, ok. But then you need to nerf every other class as well. It cant be, that ele does 6to 8k crits on a 3.3k armor and still have 500 healing every seconds with almost 17k health.

That doesnt seem balanced as well.

Not to speak of the ae burst he can do. Its easy to almost instakill a whole group of 5 people

Scourges are strong because they prey on boon spam builds by design, and those are everywhere.

Also the usual issues with idiots running headlong into AOEs, dying predictably, and crying to Anet, like with DH traps.

@dceptaconroy.7928 said:People unable to change their playstyle when expecting all necro forms to be ez kill, then melting on the spot. Thats what makes them especially deadly.

Someone give this guy a medal, this is by far the best answer we will ever get in this thread.If only people used at least half a brain and treated scourge as they should (and played accordingly) we wouldn't get this stupid necro hate every xpac.

@Ziooo.8932 said:

@"dceptaconroy.7928" said:People unable to change their playstyle when expecting all necro forms to be ez kill, then melting on the spot. Thats what makes them especially deadly.

So your logic is that despite Scourge being the most prolific class in pvp for over 4 months now, people somehow haven't "adjusted" to Scourge? Do you not realize how preposterous that conclusion is?

Yep crinn i agree theyre out there but i still see derps in the majority doing silly stuff. Ps im a power reaper so im not invested in scourge other than its nice to see necros in some form causing issues to the other classes. !Buff the Reaper!