Updating Necro MH Dagger and Focus

Necro MH Dagger and Focus have really been left behind when it comes to weapons and should get some updates. One really major and simple update to them would allow Life Siphon (dagger 2) and Reaper's Touch (focus 4) to be cast without facing the opponent. Dagger can already Life Siphon without facing the target but it cannot be started while facing away.

But we got useless cd-reduction last patch. What else do u want?

Auto: Speed up the chain to put in line with thief dagger. Add a life steal to the final hit in the chain.Life Siphon: Now shares the healing with up to 5 allies within 360 radius.Dark Pact: Reduce cast time to 3/4s. Increase range to 750.Reapers Touch: No longer a projectile. Instead single hit (like spinal shivers), dealing 12 vuln stacks + increased damage (between double and triple current single hit) and granting an offensive boon if you hit.Spinal Shivers: Decrease cast time to 3/4s. Remove damage per boon removed and replace with highest tier damage baseline.

How about oh dagger? Cast times so slow...

@"Lahmia.2193" said:Auto: Speed up the chain to put in line with thief dagger. Add a life steal to the final hit in the chain.

Actually. The tooltip already shows exact same "casttimes" of autoattacks.But still necro autoattacks feel slower. Is there some aftercast? I did nver look into that.

Life Siphon: Now shares the healing with up to 5 allies within 360 radius.Dark Pact: Reduce cast time to 3/4s. Increase range to 750.Reapers Touch: No longer a projectile. Instead single hit (like spinal shivers), dealing 12 vuln stacks + increased damage (between double and triple current single hit) and granting an offensive boon if you hit.Spinal Shivers: Decrease cast time to 3/4s. Remove damage per boon removed and replace with highest tier damage baseline.

@"Nimon.7840" said:Actually. The tooltip already shows exact same "casttimes" of autoattacks.But still necro autoattacks feel slower. Is there some aftercast? I did nver look into that.

Yes, there are massive aftercasts on mh dagger. The total time the whole chain takes is 2.04 or 2.02 seconds, don't remember which

Necro dagger auto chain takes 2.04 seconds to complete. Thief dagger auto chain take 1.68 seconds to complete.

@Lahmia.2193 said:Necro dagger auto chain takes 2.04 seconds to complete. Thief dagger auto chain take 1.68 seconds to complete.

The biggest offending part there is the aftercast of part 2 of the chain. Part 1 has almost no aftercast, but part 2 is something like .4 seconds.

Never liked dagger in necroBeen playing dagger war horn since launchThen gs came and went down the drain directlySo I went bloody stick and dagger like the meta demanded.anything cool looking for necro is useless...

Dagger needs a redesign. I love it but it tries to fill the same niche as greatsword. Here's why GS is better:

1. Ranged CC
2. AoE boon corrupt and blind
3. On-demand LF generation
4. Chill

In comparison, dagger's advantages are:

1. Faster AA so overall better damage
2. More LF from AA
3. Ranged immobilize, which is barely relevant to a melee weapon (better to have a melee immob with a low casting time).
4. Small, negligible heal.
5. Condi transfer
6. Slow-casting ranged boon corrupt and weakness

From a power melee perspective, MH Dagger has the better AA and a condi transfer. That's it. I really don't understand why people want buffs to the AA, it's fine, what necro really needs on dagger is a teleport. Necros don't have Blink or Lightning Flash or Shadowstep or Judge's Intervention, so we need a gapcloser to be able to maintain pressure with the AA. If we got something like Polaric Leap but with a built-in snare, dagger would be equally as threatening as GS. But as it stands, the pull on GS 5 is what makes it work better than MH Dagger.

It definetly needs buffs to autoattacks or better to say to the whole kit.In PvP modes you cannot even use those autos, while enemy is alive. Only on someone who is downstate.

Why?Because aa doesn't do that much dmg. Sure it has the same numbers as a thief's dagger. But you have no evades to back those AAs up.

You will get way to much dmg, while using dagger mainland AAs. And long channel dagger2 doesn't help there either because it's way too easy to interrupt.

3 seconds is just way too much. Casting it is basically asking to be interrupted by your enemy.

Dagger3 well. It's okayish. But I'd like it more if it was a 600 range leap that applies immobile and corrupts when hitting.Being a leap it would also justify giving it 0 casttime. The distance traveled would be the casttime.

As for dagger2. I don't know. Maybe make it a 1 second cast instead of 3 second channel and let it debuff the enemy.So you cast it. It does dmg on impact and then siphons health over the next 2 seconds. So this would basically be a 33% nerf to the healing you receive but it would feel a hundred times better to play.

The thief auto sequence has a duration of 1.68 seconds and the necro sequence of 2.04 seconds.

In the patch where ANet buffed thief dagger auto damage (must have been in the end of 2015) they removed the aftercast of auto skill 3 which was 0.36 seconds (2.04 - 0.36 = 1.68). On necro after completing the sequence you suffer the 0.36s delay while on thief you immediately restart with skill 1.

The damage values of thief and necro dagger have been different before.

But that's not the main reason why thief dagger feels stronger (or felt stronger untill the recent damage nerf, now it feels poor). It's the way you attack. On thief you engage from distance via shadow shot (blinding teleport) -> auto or steal (daze) -> auto. This easily allows you to complete a whole sequence until your opponet is able to fight back. After completing a sequence you can "Dash" out of melee range easily to shadowshot -> auto again when your target switches to a ranged weapon. At this point you had basically won the fight before the last nerf. It's much more difficult now for thieves but they can still chose when to engage and when to disengage.

On necro you have to walk to your opponent. On your way you already eat a lot of damage which you can't outdamage anymore when you arrive. You have to stay on your target for a whole sequence (2 whole seconds) to deal significant damage which is difficult till impossible without mobility or a defense that lets you attack at the same time. Necro defense is shroud where you can't use dagger.

GS outperfoms this because you can precast while walking to your traget or CC and then only need to land one hit which is devastating as every GS attack has huge damage multipliers. The GS5 -> weapon stow (to kill the aftercast) -> Grave Digger or Spectral Grasp -> Grave Digger combos are much more effective than messing around with dagger 3 immob and dagger auto. The immob on 15s cooldown lets you set up your auto chain more often now, but the GS/Spectral Grasp combos are still much better as these are twoshots for most classes. One hit and your target is forced into defense and needs to recover. Now you control the fight. On top of that GS gives you AOE, sustain (blind) and more LF gain. On GS you can win fights where you are on 5% of health while your target is on 60% of health just because of the insane burst. Impossible on dagger.

Focus is fine besides the fact, that the bouncing skill 4 scythe has only 600 range, which is dumb.

I'd love to see a dagger overhaul. But it's been asked for for a long time now, so I'm not holding my breath.

Great review, KrHome; I liked it.

Thief's use of dagger is just as you say while Necro's dagger is supposed to offer more support in face-tanking. Arenanet's dagger buffs support the tanking method by further encouraging the DP -> Siphon rotation but there is still too little movement restriction on targets.

My impression of MH dagger's intent is to force opponents into having to face-tank Necro back, so combat becomes a contest versus Necro's sustain in close range or else escape. Escape seems too easy for opponents right now, though. The tools to restrict opponent movements are there. They just seem under-powered.

So I am not sure if dagger dps is an issue in PvP. Insufficient target movement and action restriction may be the real culprit. PvE is another issue as enemy AI generally does not are about such things or can easily out-sustain playing characters attempting to face-tank.

Dagger is both not as bad as it gets credit for, and not good enough to be competitive. Life Siphon can hit like crazy with complete setup (enemy bleeding > blood spec > spite spec > 50% or less health) but it's way to niche and easily countered by a dodge or just bad luck.

IMO, it should be the necro's Mobility weapon. We don't have one and are far too weak for that to still be justifiable as part of the core design.

Shadow,

the problem is youre actually thinking about gameplay.Arenanet doesnt. Theyre extremist casuals who barely tweak a number half a year.

Actual counterplay, clunk and reliability, hitboxes, targetable vs non targetable, LOS, Facing, PBaoes etc... That level they never cared about even at its peak.Its always random 12-20% dmg and CD changes, with flavor of the month getting 100% increase.Once a year an impossible clunky skill get actuall animation change.Once per 3 year a whole weapon may get reworks to fullfill its actuall purpose.They do not care about high level matchups and how a 3/4s vs 2/4s cast time may affect a crucial meta duel.

Its been shown in videos, the devs are clickers who duel on keep with mystic builds.

Base necro needs something that makes it not complete trash in comparison to Reaper and Scourge.

ALL core builds could use a review.

Paying customers deserve better quality builds and that is why the elites are more impressive but there are enough other ways to encourage FtP customers to buy the game and updates than to have core builds be inferior to elites.

This topic could use a bump.

How about adding a 0.25 sec bind to Necrotic Stab?

i would like to see change for reapers touchif you cast it nad swap weapon, projecile will disappear. that would be nice.

Change the dagger auto-attack to be a ranged attack like axe so its more reliable, increase the bleeding and life siphon on it. Change skill 2 to be a tether like in death shroud but make it pulse and siphon health every second off your enemy. Skill three should be something a bit more nasty because what it is now just sucks and does so little in the grand scheme of things. I would prefer if they changed it too I don't know something more occult like you summon some bone claws around your enemy and it causes them to be rooted, or perhaps some demonic circle that locks them down without causing us negative effects.

Focus needs some work, maybe making it more of a burst/ annoying weapon and make it just slap you with condition damage. When you break their boons have them all change into condition damage similar to one of our utilities? I am not sure how you would go about changing and fixing said weapon. But Dagger/focus is as iconic for a dark spellcaster as staff as a whole. And it's sad to see that dagger sucks both as a mainhand and an offhand and focus is not that great as a whole (Though its not terrible by any means)

Necrotic Stab (auto#2) grants Resistance for 2 seconds (10-12 sec cooldown?).Life Siphon is good.Dark Pact - reduce cast time to 0.5s

@TheAgedGnome.7520 said:Life Siphon is good.

From pve perspective maybe. But it should share the heal with allies. In PvP it's horrible. Basically asking to get interrupted

@Nimon.7840 said:

@TheAgedGnome.7520 said:Life Siphon is good.

That said you can turn away (once you get the first hit off) and it will still do damage and healing, unlike other channeled attacks.

They could make dagger a lot better by just giving the AA a stack of bleed and cut the attack speed aftercasts to match thief's as to let life siphon have some synergy. As of now it may as well just have the same 15s cooldown as the immob.

In the PvP modes, the necro's dagger hits substantially harder than the thief's per hit as far as coefficients go. The thief's recent dagger changes also dropped the first two hits of the chain by well over 30%. What makes the thief's dagger hit harder is the traits thief has: It can stack % damage modifiers into insanity which are multiplicative, while the necro instead deals with flat power gains via might that take longer to build up. Thus I'm not sure about just buffing necro's dagger's damage. It's already got decent damage. It's just there's no good way to deliver it. The aftercast cuts would help this, but I think the bigger issue is the lack of OH weapon synergy.

I'd say Dark Pact is fair right now as far as cast times go. 3s ranged Immob + corrupt is really strong. I think I'd rather see it go to 900 range so dagger can work as an option to Axe's midrange, as axe was buffed from 600 to 900 which is what really made it viable.