Jump to content
  • Sign Up

Open Letter to ANet Regarding Latest Patch


Saracen.2691

Recommended Posts

EDIT: So they had the time to move my thread from Game Discussion to here but not the decency to recognise anything ANYONE is saying. Should that be interpreted as this being the official box things are put in when you want them to go away and not engage with your community? It's highly fortunate I wrote the text beneath before something like this happened. I'm leaving the main body unedited, but yeah, outstanding.

I want to preface this by saying I'm aware this belongs more appropriately in the subforum for Necromancer - which already has plenty of threads dedicated similarly - but my reasoning for not doing so is as follows: There is such a pittance of interaction between the community and staff on the forums these days that it consistently feels like as a player we're left out in the cold without a means to influence anything about a game a lot of us have invested thousands upon thousands of hours into. I'm starting to doubt anyone at ANet reads class subforums. Maybe they check this once in a blue moon. From my perspective it appears you announced a change ahead of its implementation, which as a concept I can only commend and asked for quite a long time ago, and then utterly disregarded all of the feedback you received. By majority it was negative. What was the point of telling us if you weren't ever going to take what we thought into consideration? ANet historically has made a lot of decisions that aggravated a lot of people, by and large the expectation is to just quit or weather it. This time I can't simply ignore it as that former option grows increasingly tempting. I want, if at all possible, some kind of dialogue with an official representative of ANet to explain this in a way that allows me to experience something other than abject anger. That done, I'll outline the catalyst for all of this.

My issue pertains to the update Necromancer received, specifically Scourge. It's only been a couple of days since the last patch and I'm already at wits end, and going by the forum reception for both the advance patch notes and the post-patch reaction it's hard to find a single person who wanted this. Most everyone vocal is firmly against the change - the few who aren't are at best neutral or demonstrate little understanding of the issue. Across all my Necromancers I have nearly two thousand hours poured into a single class and Scourge is far and away my favourite, as a specialisation and Necromancer a class versus all others. The new Shade mechanic is horrific. It is, in a single patch without exaggeration, the most damaging thing I've ever seen inflicted on a profession in this game. It disagrees fundamentally with everything Scourge was designed to do, from its lore flavour to even the intrinsic traits embedded within it.

The synergy of Sand Sage and Sadistic Searing naturally encourages you to maintain as many Shades as possible, ordinarily this is two at best and then one depending on the duration of an encounter as a result of cooldowns, with stacking Shades for the additional Sadistic Searing proc obviously beneficial. All of that is now gone. This change forces you to conserve Shades wherever possible and thus be an active detriment to yourself and your allies, irregardless of whether your angle is pushing raw damage or supporting teammates. Instead of the flexibility counting as an additional shade yourself granted you, with the ability to chase down an extra enemy while your Shades continue doing their job or getting that last second support to an ally, your only variety is mired in a single decision: Do you help yourself and harm your allies by wasting a Shade at your feet? Or do you expose yourself to an amount of danger Scourge now severely struggles to deal with for the benefit of other people? The latter also comes with no guarantee of your choice mattering in the least either. Next to nothing in this game is static. An inevitable quarter of a minute cooldown for Shades means for a quarter of a minute you have an infuriating chance to be dead weight because a mob or player stepped a millimetre outside your Shade, or just as likely someone knocked them out of it. Even worse, your team now has to effectively play around your Shades if they want any benefit from them at all and you cannot influence making that easier for them in any way. It locks everyone into a situation where reactive movement - invaluable almost always - can only be a punishment in degrees.

Scourge on launch had the charm of controlling a wide swath of an encounter or a smaller area much more intensely. That's been walked back ever since but the core of it was still there, if something evaded your Shades you could follow after it yourself, manipulate its positioning with your fear or keep some of the pressure on. Now, frequently by necessity, your F2, F3 and F4 are going to provide you no value unless you cower inside your Shades. Again, I can't stress enough, this crippling reliance is brutally unfair. It is tantamount to foolishness to suggest that's a viable scenario on average, mobility is a principle trait of almost everything in GW2 and you can't compensate by just throwing more Shades at it or you'll run out immediately and waste Sadistic Searing. The alternative is, of course, to just stop using Shades. Is that really an alternative to be considered? Is that reasonable? To take away everything that made Scourge unique? I don't think so. I think that's far, far too punishing for anything Necromancer deserves. In what world is 75% of our specialisation being rendered useless in a sizeable chunk of scenarios decent or healthy? Every time I'm hamstrung by the change I'm left knowing a week ago it didn't exist and I'd still be able to contribute as opposed to standing around waiting for cooldowns. Scourge is going to be trapped in that shadow forever if it stays the way it is now.

On a more personal note I can't help but feel like this is a culmination of the disdain and sheer neglect ANet has expressed for Necromancers over the years. Inevitably, everything Necromancer excels at is undermined in one patch or another eventually and the most tragic part of it is from a high-end PvE perspective Necromancer hasn't excelled at anything for a significant stretch of time in its history. I can't say much on PvP, but public reaction seems to be it was gutted there too. At core, people had issues with the vanilla specialisations. In HoT, Reaper was great for a month before being brought down by nerfs. It still hasn't and never will recover. Scourge fared the same as Reaper for approximately a week until Necromancer again slipped down from dominating anything. I'm not asking for Scourge or Necromancer as a whole to be outstanding or devastating in any scenario. I just want one of the few areas of the game I can unreservedly say I adore be bearable, or optimistically competitive. This change is a knife in the gut and suggesting that it opens up new opportunities for buffs is only twisting it in the guise of an attempt at blunting outcry, which means you knew this wasn't something we wanted. What should be taken from that off-handed dismissal, if not disregard, of an entire section of your playerbase? It doesn't matter how much you buff uselessness, this fundamentally breaks what made Scourge valuable and for myself worthwhile in any capacity. It feels like you're trying to tell us playing Scourge as anything other than a passive hanger-on taking up the slot of its betters is wrong. The cynic and paranoid in me wonders if you're not aiming to deliberately wreck Necromancer so none of us want to play it anymore and you won't have to worry about dealing with us. I took a break from the game when Scourge's F2 was nerfed because it frustrated me so much and came in the wake of too many nerfs. If I knew then what you'd do now I'm not sure I would have come back. That then pales in comparison to how vehemently I consider this a mistake and misstep of such large proportion it disinclines me from bothering to stick it out any longer. I don't want to hate this game, I don't want to hold its developers in genuine contempt, especially not after all this time; I just want the option of playing a specialisation I enjoy without feeling guilty of being a waste to any party I'm in knowing in the back of my mind I could be playing absolutely anything else and it would be more useful.

Ultimately, after this, I don't care what you think you have to do to Necromancer. Slash our damage by 20%+ across the board, remove our ability to cleanse conditions or corrupt boons. I don't care anymore, as long as it isn't this. I have no problem with alterations made to Death Magic. I don't want changes to Scourge's traits, I don't want nerfs to our skills, but I could accept them if the trade-off was reverting this awful change. Above all, I want someone to ANet to at least acknowledge that they've heard how universally disliked this change to Scourge is and consider, with everything else taken away from Necromancer over the years, that something just once can be switched back to help it. Please give us the courtesy of discussing it at a minimum. If not, I don't know. This one might be too much for me and I'll have to seriously consider again seeing myself out. I've tried to remain as civil as I can in this post, but it's quickly becoming extraordinarily difficult. Smile and nod is the frequent modus operandi for ANet's bulk updates. I can't do that this time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 81
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

wastedyourtime

They not going to listen or reply. Updating utilities in future is a lie told to shut us up.

All of scg utilities are useless in pve except for their labeling as punishment skills which makes sadistic searing trait procs. Where an attempt to make that useless too.

Dessicate and serpent siphon are completely useless in all gamemodes. Sand swell has too long cast time but is still used cuz we live with whats given like a beggar.

Anet didnt even follow up on warhorn changes and completely forgot that they made changes on it. The heals are utter garbage from warhorn#5. Warhorn#4 is unreliable since release because its an aoe cone which fires at the direction where enemy was at the start of cast not at the end.

When warrior got warhorn changes and theif got traps changes they got new animations and shit. We also got warhorn and focus changes and whole traitline reworked. Did we get new animations? Do they think warhorn and focus animations were good before?

Both skills on warhorn on warrior are blast finisher while there is not a single usable blast finisher not relying on enemy and not being related to utter trash minion mechanic on necromancer.

A single warrior weapon is more useful than whole necromancer class.

What a fuckin joke.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

dude Anet HATES NECROS, it has been such a pain to balance because they are to lazy to rework necro that they just want to nerf all of necro so much that it is basically not run EVER. why? because they want necro to be removed from the game. but if they did that they would get a lot of backlash, so next best thing? make the class SO BAD that no one plays it which will basically mean it DOESN'T EXIST. TBH I would give up an ENTIRE YEAR of content updates if they could REWORK NECRO to remove a lot of the necros boon corrupt and give it a much needed boost to just overall condition damage, rework shroud and ACTUALLY MAKE IT GOOD IN PVE. necromancer should be the KING OF CONDIS. not the king of the backend of all DPS check jokes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In fact, the necromancer and scourge were easy to fix yet what they did fixed nothing.

How they could have fixed WvW and PvP scourge:

  • Barrier: fondamentally the only reason barrier are an issue is that you can stack them in intensity. They just had to change that. If you have an incoming barrier inferior to the current barrier on you, you are healed for 50% to 100% of this incoming barrier value. If you have an incoming barrier superior to the current barrier on you, it replace your barrier. End of the day, barrier fixed!
  • Area denial: The core necromancer is already full of area denial tools, shades litterally add 50% more area denial on top of that. That's what we call a huge powercreep. This is the issue with shades, not the timing of the skills, not the CD of the skills, not the tells of the skills, not even the fact that it hit foes both at your location and the shade location. Sand savant isn't responsible either. No, the only thing responsible is the area denial design put on the shades. ANet just had to scrap the manifest sand shades proc out of the F skills and rework F5 into a non area denial skill and the powercreep would have disappeared bringing necro back into a balanced state (between it's e-specs).

How they could have fixed necromancer in such a way that balance between PvE and PvP/WvW isn't an eternal issue:

  • Condition manipulation: The necromancer is designed to manipulate condition yet PvE seldom offer encounters designed for that. While it's not really an issue in open PvE, in high end PvE, it make the necromancer work at 80% of it's potential where other profession work at 100%. A simple fix would be to remove the "arena power damage" that often tic for 2k damage every 2 to 3 seconds and replace it by the application of a damaging condition like bleed, poison or torment (a 10 second stack every second or every 2 seconds). This simple change in encounter design would even have made DM and minions worth taking due to _necromantic corruption without having to "rework" the spec.
  • Boon corruption: Again, the necromancer full potential can only be achieved against foes with boons. And again, this is not a real issue open world. However, it's a significant shackle to the potential of the necromancer in fight against boss. The simple fix to that is to take a boon that's worthless to mobs (vigor) and make it permanent on target that have the defiance/breakbar system (boss and champion). This wouldn't affect party without necromancer in anyway, while it would make tools like punishment worth taking in PvE.

If numbers were the issue, the scourge and the necromancer would have long been balanced. Unfortunately it is not the issues, the issues are 100% mechanical. And It's not by removing QoL to bury the issues that they will ever be fixed.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What I hate the most, is that ANet is trying to fix (read: nerf) the Necro in WvW and PvP, but they're again tagging it along in PvE, where this class is considerably the worst pick in the game (especially the PvE endgame), and has been for so long now. And again, making it even worse!

Also, I can't help to feel they tried to make the Necro more interesting in all gamemodes (including PvE) with the new Death Magic, but couldn't be more wrong with the changes they implemented. In PvE Toughness is THE most worthless stat you can build around, and exactly that one stat the Necro needed the least:

  • it's literally the worst damage dealer in the game: let's give it toughness
  • it's the most selfish class in the game: let's give it solely applying to self: toughness
  • it's the one and only class in the game with terrible active defences: let's give it the most passive defence in the game: toughness

I really don't get it!!!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They do not care or will reply because pver´s keep buying stuff from gem store. All they care is about money and pvp and wvw(specially wvw) are left ignored. Necros have yet to have a "o shi...t" button which makes them a free loot bag for most situations when focused. for ex warrior has 2 no damage stances and a ignore condis (lol) as every other class has one or 2 or even 3. Shroud does not count

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Even a Scourge has access to ranged weapons and ranged utilities.

What's the justification for giving him an additional ranged weapon (the shade) which covers range and melee at once?

There is none.

The spec has huge issues. Most of them were tied to the absurd aoe coverage. Because of that the skills itself have been overnerfed to uselessness and transformed the spec to a weak but button overloaded mess. It's finally time to fix that.

Btw.: The WvW blobs were still full of Scourges yesterday, when I tested some DM builds.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@KrHome.1920 said:Even a Scourge has access to ranged weapons and ranged utilities.True, but not the issue.

What's the justification for giving him an additional ranged weapon (the shade) which covers range and melee at once?We trade shroud for this. If we can't keep the mechanic, I'd like to have a real shroud back.

Btw.: The WvW blobs were still full of Scourges yesterday, when I tested some DM builds.So? That's what everyone said from the beginning. This patch is arguable even a buff in WvW, but a nerf in PvE and practically a delete of meaningful scourge play in sPvP.So why shouldn't there be scourges in WvW zergs?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Anet shows once again, that theyre not good at reworking. Nothing new to see here.They made shades with sand savant traited arguably stronger in wvw zergs, which was one of the main reasons they even attempted the nerf.They did an interesting but overall useless rework of death magic which has still less sustain and less support than blood magic, which even got nerfed with the blood bond fix, cutting down extremly on the possible resustain in smallscale/pvp fights hitting scourge actually the hardest again, while giving back passive, selfish sustain thats only slightly stronger than the old version of dm lol.

I guess its fair to say that those reworks and nerfs are at the level of chrono treatments, making a whole specialization pretty much useless in every mode but wvw zerging while not adressing any of its problems pointed out by the community over and over again.

To end this: I dont even like what scourge brought to the class and really hated playing it for the most time but its still stunning to see how much a blindfolded balance team can fuck up on so many levels every time they release a rework. At least we'll maybe get to a point where every build and class is so gutted because of reworks and off the mark nerfs that theyre all playable again.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Honestly your wasting your time on the forums trying to bring attention to this, the heads are already back in the sand and ignoring it, Necro got beat down and it will stay that way, you would either be better playing reaper, or another class, or just dont play at all, my motivation for playing has stopped completely now, but im only 1 person so it wont make a difference,

Necro did need a change in WvW, but they hammered it into the dirt across the game and give it a buff in WvW, there is no way they could have properly play tested this change before it went live, or they would have picked up on the issues they have introduced.

We currently have no real place in the game, necro is bad in raids, fractals, open world is meh anyway ( new system made it horrible ) and if you play WvW you can still use scourge but you better hope the enemy doesnt walk out of that 0.5 second warning and make you completely redundant.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

couldn't agree more with the OP, well said. I do not think i will play my scourge again until this change is adjusted or reverted. Luckily I enjoy the guardian in pvp right now, otherwise I would take a longer break as well. I feel bad for scourges when fighting them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I used to be a necromancer main, back in the days of the base game and somewhat during HoT. Even back then, it was evident the developers really really spitefully dislike the people who play necromancer and truly get fun out of making our lives as miserable as possible. Remember base game necromancer? Back when condition damage builds were tragic because stuff only stacked to 25? I remember. A condition class where conditions sucked because every Warrior running Arms would overwrite your bleed stacks with their 5 second bleeds while running power. I remember.

Remember when we didn't have any cleave and dagger/warhorn with Well of Suffering was our only good setup for dungeons? I remember. I remember being declined from every group, kicked or just flat out under performing when compared to the Warrior stood beside me doing a 50k Hundred Blades every 4 seconds, capped at 25 Might. I remember.

I remember being terrible up until basically HoT was announced. Up until PoF IIRC we didn't even have two-target cleave on our dagger autoattack. "Oh, god!" I said. "A good necromancer build, finally..?" I loved it. Reaper was awesome. For once, I loved my necromancer. "SUFFER!" as I smacked mobs with a 25k gravedigger soon as they dropped sub 50%. Permanent 25 might, some good CC... hell, even stability! It was too good to be true and ANet knew that. You cannot know true misery without loss and so the nerfs began.

Again. And again... and again. Now Reaper is a shadow of what it used to be. Core Necromancer is... meh. Usable, but nobody would bring you into even dungeon story-mode. And Scourge? My god, Scourge only ever shined in WvW - it was merely decent or good in high-end PvE. It was never Firebrand level of group support tied with damage. It was never even Berserker level of insane condition damage.

I'm glad I swapped to Berserker shortly after the Reaper nerfs fell on us in HoT. I just knew in my heart Necromancer would never be up there with Guardian, Warrior, Thief and Mesmer. It was cool to be the underdog for a time, but all things fade with time - and the joy of trying to excel as something truly awful faded quickly.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Tukaram.8256 said:

I am still playing core necro, no elites, but my necro/minion master is my main. He can outfight, and outsurvive any of my other avatars. My necro was the only character I had that could do any HoT. PoF is easier but my necro still outshines any other avatar I have.

There's a lot I could say in response to this. None of it is kind. I'll leave it at this: The topic's subject is Scourge. Core Necro and a build with no relevance to any consequential aspect of the game irregardless of your personal experience has nothing to do with the issue at hand.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i agree.. im only in the game for a couple of weeks.. my first char was Scourge support and i really loved it ! to be fair.. i changed into support after i noticed as dps Scourge i really needd to work harder than other class to maintain conditions but i was still far away from them in damage.. so Scourge DPS wasnt great ..i changed into support and i really loved it! to be honest.. i wouldnt mind if they just nerfed Scourge.. but i tired to play it after the last change. and it was impossible clunky and stressful to play... stuff move from the shade oir i get knock back. and it was trash . i left the Scourge and now just making elementalist.i wish they fix it so my Scourge will be playable again.. but ill be fair and say it doesnt look like they gonna fix necromancer. at the moment i feel like necromancer isnt even worth playing.. unless you want solo class for story.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Xxnecroxx.4039 said:dude Anet HATES NECROS, it has been such a pain to balance because they are to lazy to rework necro that they just want to nerf all of necro so much that it is basically not run EVER.Yeah, thats why they took 8 months to nerf the reaper DC after they buffed it through the atmosphere, making the necro singlehandedly responsible for the rise of the WvW kitten condi meta to the point where Anet not only has banned the use of the word to describe the meta on these forums but they also had to buff everything else in WvW to compensate for the insane condi output the reaper had, as they utterly refused to nerf the reaper... Until 1 week after the release of PoF when everyone had left the reaper in favor of the even more condi spewing scourge. Because of course.

But no necro will ever acknowledge that I guess.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dawdler.8521 said:But no necro will ever acknowledge that I guess.

Nope a lot of necro will agree with that. Personnally I don't agree with the statement that ANet hate necro. I truly think that ANet love the necromancer, it's just that they ceaselessly push it in the wrong direction balance wise. They have an ideal picture of the necromancer in their mind, but this ideal picture don't fit the game and tend to create more issue than anything. The necromancer could be balanced, but not the way they balance it. For example, giving more boon corruption to the PvE necromancer will never make boon corruption better in this game mode, yet for some reason it's what they did in the HoT era, until it's reach a peak when PoF was released. The same way giving more area denial through and elite profession special mechanism to a profession that already excel at it, was a very arguable idea, yet we are here, 3 years into PoF and they've consistently nerfed everything except the area denial issue. DM change is another similar example and even the way they increased the necromancer's power dps is arguable.

ANet do love the necromancer, but they love it too much. The necromancer and it's specializations need changes in their design philosophy to find a balance not stupid loss of QoL. PvE isn't friendly to boon corruption and condition manipulation, increasing them will only create imbalance in PvP and WvW where those tools have room to express themselve. You just can't have this kind of imbalance toward mechanism and expect that balancing numbers will somhow solve the imbalance. The necromancer was already flooding WvW and PvP with area denial, you can't expect a 50% increase in this flood to be without consequences. The only thing that you want to do with barrier is cap them, you can't expect that tweaking barriers coefficient with healing power will change the fact that stacking scourges is the most effective way to reach this cap. They consistentely make the wrong choices, forcing things into imbalance to reach a competitive point in an area of the game and then scrath their heads to fix the other area of the game.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Xxnecroxx.4039 said:dude Anet HATES NECROS, it has been such a pain to balance because they are to lazy to rework necro that they just want to nerf all of necro so much that it is basically not run EVER.Yeah, thats why they took
8 months
to nerf the reaper DC after they buffed it through the atmosphere, making the necro singlehandedly responsible for the rise of the WvW kitten condi meta to the point where Anet not only has
banned the use of the word to describe the meta on these forums
but they also had to buff everything else in WvW to compensate for the insane condi output the reaper had, as they utterly refused to nerf the reaper... Until 1 week after the release of PoF when everyone had left the reaper in favor of the
even more condi spewing scourge
. Because of course.

But no necro will ever acknowledge that I guess.

Lul you were op for a month so lets remove all fun and viability of your class permanently.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Dawdler.8521 said:

@Xxnecroxx.4039 said:dude Anet HATES NECROS, it has been such a pain to balance because they are to lazy to rework necro that they just want to nerf all of necro so much that it is basically not run EVER.Yeah, thats why they took
8 months
to nerf the reaper DC after they buffed it through the atmosphere, making the necro singlehandedly responsible for the rise of the WvW kitten condi meta to the point where Anet not only has
banned the use of the word to describe the meta on these forums
but they also had to buff everything else in WvW to compensate for the insane condi output the reaper had, as they utterly refused to nerf the reaper... Until 1 week after the release of PoF when everyone had left the reaper in favor of the
even more condi spewing scourge
. Because of course.

But no necro will ever acknowledge that I guess.

Do you think butchering a specialisation in 2/3 gamemodes for balancing issues in one is fair revenge for the consequences of a different spec entirely? If so, every class in the game should be brought down to Scourge's level because of dominating various metas for [x] amount of time [y] number of years ago. If you ask me, enthusiasm for retaliatory balancing is a recipe for what you enjoy getting destroyed too. Walk a mile in our shoes before you celebrate the death of a class - again.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...