Pooh.6897

I (sort of) understand where you're coming from. The upgrades cost a lot of resources. Many smaller guilds have to grind for a long time to get these upgrades, so I understand that it sucks. At the same time, it does create a bit of a problem for Anet. Obviously, the costs of these upgrades were set according to the significant impact they had. The upgrades were expensive, but they also made a big difference. So in that sense, it was 'fair' that they cost a lot. But now the benefits are reduced, which leads to the question if the cost of these upgrades is not too high. Seeing how you only recently bought these upgrades, with no warning that they were going to get nerfed, it is understandable that it leaves a sour taste. In a way, it is a bit like the situation around Legendary Runes. Similarly to legendary runes, people put a lot of effort and materials in getting these upgrades, often specifically for the effects they have. I don't really know what compensation would look like exactly, but the idea of asking for compensation isn't that odd to me. About what Necrosact said: you forget to account for inflation. 42 gold at the start of GW2 was a lot more in raw value than 42 gold is today. The Commander's Compendium used to be 100g and is now 300g. It's not a scientific way of conversion at all, but using a 1:3 to account for inflation would mean a compensation of at least 126 gold.

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.

I'd be seriously stoked if they ever give Necro access to Rifle. I've always wanted to be able to use the minigun-skin with my necro. It even comes with a skull on top!

Seeing how GS and MH dagger are all focused on power melee, I can only say that it'd make sense if MH sword was condi-based and offhand Sword was power based. we lack a solid power-offhand, and we lack a solid melee condi-weapon. so my prediction is that it's going to be based on those damage types in that way. As for the theme they'll use, vampire is already used by dagger and reaper is already used by GS so lifesteal and cc is probably out of the window. we could see a potential healer/support type of weapon, necro doesn't really have one of those yet. Staff 2 has regen but it'd be a bit of a long shot to say staff thereby is a 'support' weapon. MH dagger is currently used in support builds, but only because of the strong LF-generation it has. Ultimately MH dagger is more of a bruiser/LF-generating tool. Axe and offhand focus both are into boonrips as is scepter 3 and dagger 3, so I can imagine they're skipping on those elements as well. Offhand dagger is about condi-transfer as is staff so that niche is probably also decently fulfilled. My final guess would be: MH Sword is condi-based melee. Offhand Sword is Power-based. Theme is a bit up in the air, but it's likely Sword will be more directly about supporting allies. Right now, the combination of these traits is where Necro very clearly lacks any clear options. They've focused on torment for a while (both harbinger and scourge), I can imagine that, in this context, they'll be going for bleeds on the AA. All I hope is that, if my predictions turn out to be true, they take a very long and hard look at the exact difference between sword and dagger. I do believe we have space for one more melee weapon, but only if they make the difference very clear. I still think that MH dagger should be properly adjusted to take the space of 'support weapon through lifestealing'. if they end up giving Sword respectable LF-generation MH dagger is probably going to completely fall off, as Sword will be able to generate enough LF while also doing a lot more DPS. The more I think about the introduction of yet another melee weapon, the more I'm convinced we need a major rebalancing/reshuffling to give each traitline and each weapon their own distinctive niche. edit: thinking about it, necro doesn't really have a minionmancer weapon or something relates to the skeleton theme, so that could be a potential avenue to explore.

I really like the way you think when it comes to turning MH dagger into a more aggressive, tanky/brawler kind of weapon. The idea of triggering wells of blood is interesting, but what about this: Make it so the AA of MH dagger apply Marks of Vampirism. Yes, I'm talking about the Marks of Vampirism that Blood Bond gives and Signet of Vampirism. Instead of utilizing a damaging condition as a tool, it could stay more true to its power-nature by leaning into life stealing to deal damage, get sustain and heal allies. You could pick Zealot if DPS is more important, or Harrier for the concentration. Our ideas could also be combined and with Harrier gear you could end up with a very solid support necro that's centered around the fantasy of a life-stealing vampire that uses blood to sustain themselves and allies, which seems very appropriate for necro in general and blood magic specifically. I do think your idea works better for blood magic than the current Mark of Evasion. I've always found it a bit silly that support necro's suddenly have to dodge around to apply regen. Traditionally speaking, necro is a very immobile class, so to suddenly require dodging around to do stuff seems a bit out of tune. It could also be described as a 'fun twist', but imo if you need to sacrifice your dodges of all things that's just a waste of evade-frames. The classes that do have healing tied to moving around are generally speaking much more mobile by their very nature.

I’ve wanted mounts since gw1, so I’m going to stick with PoF. Aside from that i love the PoF maps, they’re very nice. And we got a bit of story surrounding human gods which is always nice

I'm not quite sure where to put this but i'll just write it here and I hope a dev reads it. Could it please be possible for the male model of the Raven Ceremonial garb pants to change the dye-zones a little bit? Right now the feathers are linked to the top band, which means that if you want black raven feathers, you're always tied to a black top band. Fashion-wise this is quite terrible. Please change it so that either: 1) the feathers share the same dye-zone as the middle stripe. this makes it at least possible to have black feathers and a leathery topband, or 2) remove the middle stripe as a dyable zone and reserve that new dye zone for the feathers only. 3) make it so the middle stripe and the feathers swap places. so the middle stripe colors with the top band and the other leathery parts and the feathers can have their own zone Again I know it's a minute detail but it's quite devasting for my male sylvari. The female version of the raven ceremonial garb pants is all okay and has it set up like this, with a separate dye category for the feathers. but the male version doesn't and links the color of the feathers to the massive top band which causes a lot of fashion troubles. edit: While you're at it, *PLEASE* change the extremely odd way that colors apply to the middle stripe. if you color it Red Lion, it turns out soft orange. if you color it Green Lion it turns out cyan. if you color it Pyre it turns out green. If you color it Destroyer Orange you get citrus color. I have no idea what's going on in that department but it makes it extremely annoying to find a good color for the middle stripe.

I always get extremely nervous when people start to propose changes for MH dagger and it almost always comes down to adding a bleed one way or another. I genuinely think this is a bad idea, because MH dagger is *not* a condi-weapon. It’s supposed to be the ‘vampire’-weapon and utilize lifesteal, which inherently is power-based. aside from that part, I do think you’re onto something here. Lifesteal cant crit, and thus a power-focused support spec using zealot-gear could actually work very well. Lifesteal damage scales with power, lifesteal healing scales with healing power. Barrier also scales with healing power, as does regeneration. So a power-based support necro that used barrier, regeneration and lifesteal would be perfect and be fantastic. Then they could couple it with spite, get the bonus power from might application and actually have a solid power-focused support necro. Then if they add boon application to blood magic it wouldn’t just be scourge that gets a benefit out of this build, but it would open the door for the other especs as well. I can see harbinger work as well, and mayhaps a support reaper could also be achieved. But it’d all start with blood magic being able to provide these boons, and in that I fully support your idea. edit: in case people start pointing at dark pact, the only reason that skill applies bleeding is for life siphon. As scourge you can convert the bleed on yourself to vigor and proc more marks of blood, and the bleed on the enemy can be used to (almost) proc blood bond, which is the vampire-themed themed skill in that row

"Boons are a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural" - a Guardian probably.

Agreed. Alacrity and Quickness have become so strong that the entire game is warping around them. They need to be either seriously nerfed or completely removed. Will it happen? I have my doubts. But now we're reaching the point where classes are giving up core identities just so they can shoehorn in quickness/alacrity and the result is almost always a shambling abomination that would make Frankenstein look pretty. Please Arenanet, kill your darlings here and just straight up remove quickness/alacrity at this point. In the words of a famous jedi: "They're too powerful to be left alive".

Dark Pact also removes quite a lot of boons on a relatively short cooldown, so I wouldn't be surprised if future scourge boonrip builds would be power-focused and use dagger/focus. Together they can generate a lot of lifeforce and rip a lot of boons. In turn this would probably catapult Spite in new boonrip builds since that tratiline further focusses on boonripping. possibly something a little like this http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSgAg2lNweYIMMmJOqLavfA-e edit: Version with spite + blood: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PSABg2djlNweYIMMmJOqTevfA-e. if boonrip is the main priority then running dagger/focus and axe/dagger makes the most sense. The DPS is probably going to be pretty abysmal but it'd be a start. Also the build would still be able to do its main job, which is weakening enemies by ripping boons en masse. Funnily enough, looking at the build like this, it would also be pretty decent for applying vulnerability so at least that's something.