Pooh.6897

Can I get an invite too? 🙂Also, is there some sort of Discord I can already join?

I’d really enjoy the devs at least acknowledging this entire discussion and see what they have to say about it.

I'm not saying I'm against the idea, but I'd be worried what, for necro, the difference would be between a mark and a well at that point. Again I'm not saying it's a bad idea, and I certainly do like the idea of marks on focus and i certainly do like symbols on guardian a lot, but that's just my 2 cents.

Alright, so lets for example look at Focus. What is the one thing that sets focus apart from other off-hands? it rips a lot of boons. What is one thing that Spite does really well and also benefits from? Boonhate. It's not the only thing it does, but it is a big theme within the traitline. I'm not 'fabricating' a connection here, I'm pointing out the facts that are presented on the table. 'Fabricating' a connection would be claiming that scepter is tied to Spite because it does power damage, and since Spite can enhance power damage through various means that must mean that Scepter is tied to Spite. The way the game was originally designed was that specific playstyles were distilled in the form of traitlines, and often a weapon with a similar playstyle was enhanced by that same traitline, making them both fit together quite nicely. It's not far-reaching or 'fabricating a connection' to state that Scepter and Curses are designed to fit with each other when the entire traitline is geared towards benefitting that weapon directly and specifically, and GW2 is filled with design choices like these. It's not a coincidence that Hammer, mace and shield all go great with Warrior's Defense traitline. It is because they can provide a lot of CC, and the Defense traitline can really benefit from dealing a lot of CC. It's not the only thing Defense does, but it is a big theme within the traitline. Similarly with how staff used to be and Death Magic. Yes, Minions is not the only thing Death Magic does. But it is a big part of what Death Magic focuses on. I'd even go as far as argue it's the largest theme within Death Magic. Apart from the three traits it has to specifically buff minions in various ways, it also has Soul Comprehension that can be extra beneficial for minion-builds. My point being, yes, making a weapon and traitline fit together is exactly how GW2 was originally designed. Maybe not for every single weapon and traitline in the game, but you can't deny that it's a design choice that very often pops up. A bit too often to be a coincidence. edit: thinking about it, didnt they just continue the same design decisions when especs came out, tying a weapon to a traitline? It is only recently that they want to come back from that decision with last patch and the upcoming expansion now they realize how limiting that can be to buildcrafting.

You're warping my words here, that is not what I said. I never claimed that the regen alone linked staff to Death magic. What I said was, staff used to be linked to Death Magic through the traits it had for staff specifically, especially within the context of the old trait system. You already pointed out what these traits were and what they did. Do you really want me to point out to you just how intrinsically tied Death Magic is to minions, even down to the minor traits it has? Also highlighting the word 'blood' as if that suddenly suggests it's somehow linked to blood magic makes absolutely no sense. Does that also mean that Blood is Power is linked to blood magic? What about blood curse on scepter AA? Or what about Enfeebling Blood on offhand dagger? What about blood fiend? Come on man, you know that labeling staff based on the word usage of 'blood' on #2 makes no sense. Even the minor trait in Blood Magic is called Mark of Evasion, not mark of blood. Yes, the traits Death Magic used to have are now baseline for staff. But that's not my point. My point was that, originally, Staff and Death Magic were connected, much in the same way that Axe and Focus are nowadays connected to Spite through spiteful talisman, Scepter to curses through lingering curse and barbed precision, and Dagger/Warhorn to Blood magic through Overflowing Thirst and Banshee's Wail.

I really want rifle necro so i can use the minigun skin with it, but I’ll settle for sword. If for some miraculous reason we do end up getting a minigun for necro, the AA has to be called ‘Rattle ‘em boys!’ while giving us maximum brrrrr.

Please give me minigun for necro.

For me, my frustrations go beyond them nerfing traits too heavily. My main frustration is that there is just so much potential, but for some reason especially the balancing team is just too afraid to make big, creative changes that make things more fun. I believe the rest of Anet is actually doing decently well, but IMO the balancing and skills team have always been the weakest link by a mile. For a start, i am strongly under the impression that balancing devs always focus the specs they play themselves while not really caring/keeping other classes weak on purpose. Despite a ton of feedback, necro still has way too many traits and skills that are just utter trash. I like being creative which is why i still take these bad traits, but man do tank my dps hard. I’ve used staff in pve since forever, yes that includes even before the buffs. It took them 10 YEARS to give it a bandaid buff. It didn’t make it stand out, not really, no they just threw a bunch of high numbers at it and called it a day. The problem I have with the balancing is that this is very common behavior. Instead of focusing on fun and then changing the numbers, they throw random numbers at skills and use whatever generates the least amount of backlash. That and i feel they’re just plain dishonest in their communication. They’ve had weeks to add the note to the preview that shade duration was going to change. On top of that, they kept saying they wanted to ‘tune healscourge down a bit’ and so their idea of nerfing one specific playstyle ‘a bit’ is pushing a blanket nerf that hits the entire espec by reducing the shade duration by more than half. To me, this is dishonest communication. If they changed the shade duration to 18 seconds, yeah that would’ve been ‘a bit’. But they didn’t. If ritual of life went from 7% to 5%, that’d narrowly pass for ‘a bit’ but okay, fine. And when they do get ‘courageous’ to try ‘new’ things, they just absolutely massacre the signet trait to replace it with the most boring, anti-fun crap I’ve ever seen. Personally i loves running a funky power scourge build using diviner gear with feed from corruption. Yoink those boons while running dagger/warhorn. It was fun, not always effective but it was alright. Now they just obliterated many playstyles because they want to shoehorn in alacrity so badly so necro follows the bland pattern they created for themselves.

To truly understand staff, you need to understand where it came from and where it is now. Originally, staff was tied to death magic. There was a trait in the old death magic traitline that would enhance your staff quite a bit. When one says ‘death magic’, one says minions. Which is also why there (still) is a regen on #2. The ‘fantasy’ of staff has always been controlling enemies with soft cc from long range while supporting your army of minions with regen uptime. Fast forward to today. Old trait-system doesnt exist anymore and staff now has a dedicated trait in soul reaping for some reason. They’re trying bandaid fixes but are too afraid to properly rework it into a new idea, mostly because it’ll very likely upset necro in PvP-gamemodes. Staff still somewhat works for the original idea although it’s used in completely different ways. If they were to change staff in any way, I’d just like to see a mark of madness being added somewhere. For those that don’t know, I believe Lich Form used to have a mark of madness that would spawn minions. I’d love it if staff could get that. That way they could recycle the old idea while still keeping it relevant to use with death magic. Also a nice damage boost from the small minion army. For those that mainly play WvW: don’t be scared, this is why we have the competitive split in balancing.

IMO if necro were to receive a ‘dedicated support weapon’ it’d have to be MH dagger, not staff. Dagger/warhorn has always been tied to blood magic. It’d make much more sense to pick those weapons for a support-playstyle, not staff. Personally I really like staff, especially since the buffs with the launch of EoD. Could it use a retweaking concerning conditions? Probably yes. But I’d say staff is in a pretty good spot right now. also please for the love of all that’s holy, steer away from the ‘it’s good for farming’ argument. Farming in Open World is not a thing you design a weapon around.

What I can say about the nerfs is that I did try out scourge for a bit after the patch, found it extremely tiresome to constantly keep spamming shades for little reward and immediately swapped to other especs. I tried pistol/torch scourge during the beta weekend and that was quite decent and fun, but IMO they really need to fix the mess they've created. I still think they were somewhat dishonest in their choice of words when announcing the nerfs. You can't say you're toning down (heal) scourge 'a bit' and then nerf them as heavily as they did, while simultaneously hitting many other subclasses in the crossfire. They made a joke about any new changes we don't like being the fault of this new member of the balance team. and while I know this was meant as a joke, i genuinely hope this was the case. Looking at how much unintentional damage has been done I genuinely hope this wasn't caused by an experienced dev. The amount of oversight and not understanding the delicacies of how different elements influence each other is staggering.

As long as the lesser used weapons get spread out more I'm happy. So focus, but also warhorn, long/short bow, rifle, shield, hammer, mace.

I voted three times for focus. Why? 1. Focus needs to be spread out a lot more. 2. I want to see surprising combinations. Let me see engi use a focus in a totally different way.

If this does turn out to be true, in the end I do hope they stick to torment for the condi-damage. The main reason for this is that, since the other condi-builds also rely (quite) heavily on torment, it makes it all a *lot* easier to really design a build that integrates well with what we currently have. If they do go with bleeds we do have the trait from curses, but there's not a lot of other traits that really build on lots of bleeds. all i can think of is maybe blood bond, deathly chill. at that point it would get dangerously close to condi GS. no matter what they end up choosing, now we probably get more condi-weapons they really should look into reworking lingering curse. It made somewhat sense before since scepter was the only really solid condi-dps option. but with the introduction of torch, pistol, condi GS, possibly MH sword they really need to rework it into something that can give expertise instead of focusing so hard on only scepter.

I'd like to talk about a different topic. This patch they've changed a lot of weapon-buffing traits to now flat out give these buffs to the weapons baseline and design the trait itself around a more independent idea/personality. I think this change is good. However there are three traits specifically that I'd like to talk about. these traits are Spiteful Talisman Lingering Curse Quickening Thirst First and foremost about Quickening Thirst. When they changed it to the new trait, they didn't give dagger the cooldown reduction that the trait previously offered. I'd like to know why. To me, this seems like inconsistent behaviour. I don't know why they have so much problems with buffing dagger in general, but it's becoming clear to me now that Anet must have some sort of problem with dagger that it's not open about. Secondly I'd like to know why the weapon-specific parts of Spiteful Talisman and Lingering Curse survived. For Spiteful Talisman, giving a small buff to axe and focus actually seems more than necessary. I really don't understand why they haven't changed this trait. For Lingering Curse, with the incoming changes to elite weapons, I'd like to see this trait changed to offer something more in general. Buff the baseline damage of scepter and replace scepter 3 permanently, and rework Lingering Curse into something that's useful for all condi-weapons, not just scepter. On a bit of an unrelated note, I'd also like to see changes to Terror for PvE. Alternatively they could mega-buff Insidious disruption and move that to the master-tier, that could work as well. Then rework Terror into something else. I don't think Terror can justify its existence as a master-level trait. Especially for PvE it's just too weak for that.