So, dumb question concerning balance

Would necro be OP if you had a high CC reduction in shroud? I mean, I'm a deadeye and all I have to do to kill most necros of any stripe is spam spotter's shot for the immob, pretty sure you guys are more acutely aware of the problem than I am.

If you ignored/heavily resisted most CC in shroud, you'd still be slow, there would still be a clear window of opportunity for other players to CC and spike when you leave shroud, you'd still have the great damage potential that necro has always had, but you might actually be more of a threat than a liability in a group. Also limiting this to shroud specifically as to not buff scourge (that should be building defensively if it's support anyways) but boost core and reaper a bit. Thoughts?

necromancers have way more weak Points than any other classes. lack of mobility, stability. lack of sustain skills (like blocks, invuls, dodges or invis). all that due to necromancer cannot negate dmg.also core and reaper cant get healed while in shroud what brings them in a bad Position in Group fights where their own class mechanic sepperate them from the other teammates.and finally while they cannot negate dmg, and cant hardly get healed by other classes his own heal is nearly 0.

removing just 1 of this weak Points would help a lot but,

e.g. reaper had already nearly perma stability after HoT release, to that time power reaper was very viable. but anet decided to create a new weak Point at that time to necros because they thought all the other weak Points Arent enough (People complained About reaper, because they didnt used his weaknesses like slowliness and lack of Sustain skills). and anet nerfed nearly all stability out of that class. the old plague skill lost its stability (that killed core necromancer), RS 3 lost a lot of stability+ way higher cooldown (that killed power reaper), some Patches ago they already nerfed plague of signet ( an important stunbreak of that class).

so anet WANT necro as a punching bag that is unable to hit back.

would necro be OP? no, because necro is supposed to be a class that pushes slowly, but Steady, ignoring cc was his base design. but there are too many People in the game that yolo push a necro stay next to him and wonder why the get down due to that...so there is no Chance we get something that Looks like a buff….

^^Necro is weak to both ranged/kiting and control effects so, yeah, double-weak.

There is a trait called Foot in the Grave which provides Necro with the only regular stability for a moment after entering shroud. It is not always chosen and is hidden behind the shroud transform cool down. There is an even more unpalatable response to CC called Fear of Death that proc's fear, once, when CC'd. It is an awful trait no one sane would use.

So I have to ask what you mean by "high" because Necro has never even seen "medium" CC defense in ranged attack. Do you feel OP, yet?

Access to stab has always been very low. Necro does have a few of stun-breaks, if selected as utilities and for the shroud transform, but they can be used up if not conserved for positioning attacks.

Shroud, the infamous second health bar, is used as a thumbs-up for designing Necro to burn through more health than any other profession. That means allowing CC-chaining. Would Necro be OP with more passive counters to control effects? That depends upon implementation.

While the question is indeed interesting, I'm affraid such a change will mainly improve the necromancer in large scale fight in WvW. I'm not sure that this is something that anybody want to see.

I know that I repeat myself, but the best thing anet could do would be to remove the 2nd life bar thingy and compensate by providing proper defensive options to the necromancer. The shroud as it is hurt more the necromancer than anything, it's at the roots of almost all of the issue that the necromancer face.

Depends a lot on build, too.

For example, Reaper with Relentless Pursuit, Hoelbrak runes, and Lemongrass Poultry Soup is literally immune to Chill/Cripple/Immob while in Shroud as it takes a -100% condition reduction to those three. Food makes it work, but even in sPvP that's an 86% reduction in soft CC duration (and it is additive as others have tested) which is pretty nuts and something a full glass/damage build can opt for.

You mentioned Spotter's Shot spam for example. Reaper can Death's Charge for projectile destruction to deny the immob altogether, too. Core necro can Shroud 2 teleport or just use its 1200 range back and return fire. Scourge? Not so much. But scourge heavily favors every matchup that isn't 1200 range, while core necro and reaper have some struggles.

I think necro does what it does a bit too well, and was given huge weaknesses to offset this problem. This creates some very binary matchups, similar to how D/D thief plays.

There's also more precedent for reaper needing much better stability which got nerfed into oblivion over core and scourge, though. CC has gotten powercreeped to insanity and a melee-only kit with long animations needs it to be useful at this point. Core necro struggles a bit but it can opt for more defensive traits to eat the damage by entering shroud while CC'ed and can also recover the LF better, especially since the degen rate is slower in core vs reaper. But a scourge with too much stability (and it already has a lot) would be overpowered by being impossible to interrupt. Even core necro with tons of stability may prove oppressive in various formats/contexts.

Necro is in a weird spot. A lot of the specs need specialized tweaking to make them perform better in very specific areas while not improving the overall state of necro; too many universal buffs would make the profession as a whole OP, but it's a pretty lacking profession where it currently is thanks to some glaring weaknesses (or in the case of scourge, bad design making it either OP/UP depending on context/game mode).

All good points, thanks for commenting ^^ I was reading the necro forums (I'm looking for an alt and necro has always been an interesting class) and it just seems like necro as a whole has loads of highly exploitable weaknesses that kinda limit it to only seeing major usage in WvW zergs outside of a few other exceptions. I just picked a weakness that I tend to exploit (CC) and tried to think how it could be improved in a way that wasn't a general buff (I imagined this would end up being a trait most likely) without breaking something in the process. Obviously if shroud negated or heavily reduced (I'm thinking duration reduction like on melandru runes, just for context) CC effects, other stuff may have to change too to make sure some abominable cheese build doesn't surface.

That said it might be better in general for the CC spam and general power creep to get looked at, but what do I know :^P

Necro has actually been best in WvW zerg play because it's AoE zone control and boon denial make up a huge part of making a lot of classes killable and killing large numbers of players. Scourge arguably broke WvW.

Scourge totally dominates WvW zerg play; because it consists of such a large group of players and it provides raw AoE support from barrier, you can just stack scourges to pre-mitigate large quantities of damage over the zerg, and then add firebrands into the mix rotating boon application to give AoE stability/boons and post-mitigation via heals. A lot of necro's issues are for sPvP and 1v1/roaming (and low PvE damage) more than Zerg play.

Necros are the only real answer to boon spam due to corrupts and their high AoE condition damage. Boons are OP and everyone runs around with permanent all boons for the most part in group play, which equates to over a full additional set of armor/weapons as far as stats go, on top of added utility like stability, resistance, and swiftness. Without necros, there's no counterplay. And scourge covers a lot of those weaknesses well by just adding more scourges and firebrands.

Which is kinda my point above: Necro is absolutely miles above the competition doing what it's good at. It's just got huge weaknesses which make it easier to shut down in solo play where others can't cover the slack, and if it's brought into a situation that it doesn't really excel at (like PvE where ranged boon denial/corruption isn't 100% totally and utterly necessary), it falls off compared to the rest.

The Necromancer is the cancer cell that sickens the entire body.