Majy.6792

Thank you, interesting interaction & good to know.

Sometimes when using signet of mercy it only heals the player to close to full hp, doesn't actually revive them... is that intentional? It does seem like the skill itself simply "heals" (when you revive an almost dead ally they revive with very low hp, but an ally who has only recently downed revives with nearly full hp). But is it intentional it sometimes won't revive at all? Or is that a bug?

They nerfed maw teleport at least... meh, DH is only abusive at low MMR, so whatever.

Nah that would just incentivize more temporary players who never get very good and get their reward and leave. Maybe if there were cool skins, infusions etc. for reaching certain MMR or closing out the season at a specific MMR that could work. Titles are fun but not that enticing to most people.

I have yet to see an MM build that seems overpowered (at least vs any other necro build). I don't play it much myself but have played vs. plenty of top players as MM's and never felt like anything was unfair.

There are global burning nerfs you could do which would affect some classes but not others. You can put a cd on burning stacks, for example. What's broken is certain class abilities able to achieve 15+ burning stacks in a matter of seconds. So globally nerf burns by nerfing the classes its "OP" on? Wut? I mean, you literally have some classes where they physically can't stack burning because Anet has made sure they can not, and others where they can freely stack burns, and those classes are now unbalanced because of that. So does that seem so crazy to just make it so the rules for burning are the same across all classes?

There are global burning nerfs you could do which would affect some classes but not others. You can put a cd on burning stacks, for example. What's broken is certain class abilities able to achieve 15+ burning stacks in a matter of seconds. To be honest, though, all of sPvP needs a re-work. The meta as is does not reward high skill as much as it does playing certain classes. It would be nice to reward good utilization of skills & map awareness/rotation more vs. just being able to output damage quickly or absorb a shitload of it. Reflects are a great example of well balanced skills. Use them wisely and you can do a lot of damage to your opponent while protecting yourself. Use them poorly and you've opened yourself up for a large attack.

Yea this kind of mm is really not ok. I get g3 players getting paired with p1s, even though there is some skill disparity there (for true g3 players, not p1's who have fallen due to bad matchmaking). But p2s (who are pretty much always duo with another p2) vs g1? I can pretty much 1v3 g1's, there's no way that kind of pairing should ever happen. Not fun for anyone. I try to specifically queue at peak times to ensure games feel fair, off peak games are rarely fun. A stomp fest one way or another.

Why do people claim DH to be so strong? It has slow, obvious cast times for aoe traps. People can literally walk in a circle and you´ll never hit them with any traps.It´s slow, has barely any gap closers, no decent ranged damage, and heavily dependant on people walking into traps. Spear pulls them in, but it also easily dodgeable and most classes have a teleport, invuln, block, etc. I just don´t see why anyone would claim it´s strong in solo queue beyond silver. Opposite goes for spellbreaker btw, what a clown fiesta when a sb decides to bunker up and play jumping puzzles. Scourge and necro btw is the most braindead class in the game. A class with 40/50k hp and that much sustain on top of mobility AND good damage should pretty much not exist. You know what.. most classes are kitten in pvp. Ranger with bizarre damage, insane downstate, and perma immob. Warrior with 100 gap closers, 100 cc, and 10000 toughness and 100 blocks. Firebrand which is unkillable. Revenant with the clown damage. They just managed to make a lot of specs cancerous. If you look at moba´s you can see it is possible to make classes very challenging to fight, but there is always something you can do to counter something. A water tempest? kitten out of luck. Cannot do anything. It´s like rock paper scissors. Heh, I doubt you play necro if you think it's stronger than burn DH right now. I play both, burn DH is silly, necro feels actually pretty balanced.

My favorite thing about scourge is how they time gate burning but that's not true for any other class. Burn DH is silly right now, you don't have to have any mastery of the class and can 1v3.

It's funny, you really only see afk mentality in gold and lower for the most part. I've seen some plats afk but it's super rare.

This is my preference as well. As a soloer who is constantly between p2 / top 50 & as low as g3 I find if I want to maintain rank I need to look out for and actively dodge duos, which feels cheesy but duo queue breaks the game.

Stability, blocks, ports out, invul. Does not seem narrow at all to counter it .. just saying if you get stuck on it with 0 cooldows yes i see how you can die to it but thats not dm fault. Stab - yes, after Anet has stripped down stab access across the board. Blocks - iirc this doesn't work? It'll knock you back into it similar to how dodging into the barrier will bounce you off. I've tried this multiple times (as a warr with shield5, most recently) and it has never worked if I try it after the trap has procced. I can still get yoinked into it too due to the unblockable spear. Ports - GW2 has some issues where even if you port, it still considers you as having 'passed through'. They do work but it can be very wonky. Invul - yes. I'm not here to debate semantics and the nature of language and humanity. You're welcome to disagree with my word choice. The issue is that trap stacking eliminates each others' counters (and the design of Maw negates other things - like as the OP mentions, blind) and the stuff that is available is either rare or self-defeating (ex: yes, I can certainly evade across a node to proc all the traps. And then I can't stand on it for a while, and the CD of said traps likely is already down or close to it so it happens again in short order. What is the point of this). Individually I find the traps fine, but stacked together it gets ridiculous. And then there're the slows, so anything you do is extremely vulnerable to everything ever. Just...consider this. There's a Maw trap you have to get out of. You're slowed and you're taking damage from the spinny thing. Sure, fine - on my warr I'll use Stomp, no big deal. But I'm slowed, so it takes a bit and I'll take a decent chunk of damage regardless. But wait, there's another trap that damages me if I leave its circumference - which is fine, but there's still the spinny one that is gonna hit me if I stay in there. And then there's an unblockable spear that can yoink me back into it (the yoink goes through dodge, too). All of these things are fine alone - trap that damages you if you cross it? Okay, dont' cross it. It has a pretty decent radius. Or there's a trap that damages you if you stay inside it and you can just walk/dodge out. But then, and then, etcetc - and then comes the part where the goal of the entire mode is to capture a point. Do you see how all of these things have conflicting counters? Are there counters? Yes. But they're totally inadequate, conflicting, convoluted...however you would like to describe them. You keep talking about spear. I don't think you have even the tiniest understanding of what it is you're complaining about. Burn DH will not use spear to pull into traps, because then it loses all pressure from VoJ. If you're against a burn DH, the BEST THING that can happen to you is that it uses spear. It's literally the DH giving you a free win and going "hey, guess I won't do any damage for the next 20 seconds". I'm explaining how the mechanics can stack and create convoluted counters resulting in unfun gameplay. Not being paid to read things to you, but you can copy/paste things into google for some help if you need it. Nope, sorry, your "counters" only make sense if you're imagining some magical DH build that is somehow both simultaneously a power build (the references you make to the damage from Test of Faith) and a condi-build. A magical build that is somehow able to use spear, and also retain VoJ damage. All while ignoring the most obvious counter, which is that if a DH blows its entire utility bar to make a point un-contestable for 3 seconds, then the DH has made itself super vulnerable to any pressure outside of those 3 seconds. If a necro uses all its utilities on Wells, then you can't go on point when it drops them all. Does that mean necro wells are OP? Or does it mean you are expected to be able to apply the 3 brain cells it takes to not stand on point for that short duration, and then punish the necro afterwards for having 0 sustain utility? Just imagine it was a PvE boss. Every 20 seconds, for a period of 3 seconds, it farts out massive damage in its immediate vicinity. Even PvE players can grasp the concept of "don't be near the boss when the big damage is happening". Although I guess they did have to make the PvE boss damage fields ultra-bright in order for people to understand something so basic.Necro wells disappear after a short period of time, traps do not. If you want to avoid DH traps that typically means giving up the node for a considerable amount of time. That's not true of wells.

Not even close to true. The p3 playerbase are the ones who are 500-0ing p1 teams in ats every day. The reality of the situation here is that the top tier players have so little fun playing ranked that they have dropped the mode entirely and just play ats. To them every ranked game is just a test of "can I farm enemy players faster than my team throws?" You can't practice rotations because nobody knows where to go and 1v1s aren't interesting because the opponents are just bad. There are plenty of p1s right now who have been top 20 end of season and are >200. I have played against every single player in the top 50 NA many times and I know a lot of >100 ranked players who can play as well or better than they do. I would bet anything that if you removed duo queue most of those guys would not be top players and some wouldn't even rank top 250.

On NA plat would be already less than top 250. Also at least on NA the skill difference between p1 and p3 is pretty minimal. There are bad players and good players in both brackets. Even the leg players are really on par w/ p2s mostly, they just all duo.

I agree with this. I also think duo queue should be removed, it's the only reason the top players are at the top. Otherwise most of them would just be somewhere in the 250, I've seen plenty of players outclass popular top 20 streamers.

Yea I'm pretty much ready to quit. Was plat most of this season so far, 1580 at the highest, rank 43 Out of nowhere I started getting matches where it was literally me and 4 golds vs 5 plat players. This happened over and over until I was knocked down into gold, where it actually continued except it started matching me with lower gold players. I am now at ~1460 getting matched with silvers still sometimes against the same players I was matched with and against at high p1 rating. I no longer see the p2 players -- who, for what it's worth, I held my own against fine and have even carried and won games against multiple top 10 players. After a WINNING record against all p1 and p2 players for weeks, suddenly I am on the equivalent of an 8-10 game losing streak. I don't think I have out of nowhere lost my ability to play. I can't for the life of me carry most of the games I'm getting matched in right now. At the start of the game, more than 70% of the time, 2-3 of my team mates will die in under 5 seconds fighting for mid. I don't really understand the matchmaking system but my instinct says it's still counting me as a ~p2 player and to make up for that giving me incredibly low rank players as team mates and matching vs an on average higher caliber team. Problem is, the difference in tier is so overwhelming, that even 4 g2 players vs 4 g3 players is a no-contest match. I also see players I'm used to seeing in plat at gold fighting a similar struggle, so it's not just me. I don't really give a kitten what my rank is. My problem is that it's not fun to play a match where every player in the game is at a completely lower caliber of play. Those games are just not fun, win or lose. I want to be able to play against players who are of my skill level, not be winning 1v2's and 1v3's and getting every award and it not even mattering in the outcome of the game. My assumption is ultimately the pendulum will swing the other way and I'll dominate for 10-15 games in a row and climb back into plat, but what kind of a system is it where you can ping pong like this even after ~200 games? Actually the difference between gold 2 and plat 1 players is incredible small Having played in both tiers I disagree very much. Gold 2 players make constant map awareness mistakes and generally have a low mastery level of their class. Plat 1 players tend to have higher mastery of their class and generally strong map awareness, though the main difference between a p1 and p2+ player is map awareness and rotational awareness. well g2 is just above beginner lvl but as a higher lvl player you should farm p1 or g2 just as fastidk what you mean by "farm", there are plenty of players in p1 who are better than anyone in top 10 currently. Plat and above has the best players in the game on NA. Gold and below is a significant dropoff of skill, gold 3 arguably has some great players, but by the time you are at g2 there is a very large skill difference. In any case, I just played a game in gold where 3 of my 5 team mates did not even know what tranq was. I then promptly uninstalled. GL gw2, was fun while it lasted.

Yea I'm pretty much ready to quit. Was plat most of this season so far, 1580 at the highest, rank 43 Out of nowhere I started getting matches where it was literally me and 4 golds vs 5 plat players. This happened over and over until I was knocked down into gold, where it actually continued except it started matching me with lower gold players. I am now at ~1460 getting matched with silvers still sometimes against the same players I was matched with and against at high p1 rating. I no longer see the p2 players -- who, for what it's worth, I held my own against fine and have even carried and won games against multiple top 10 players. After a WINNING record against all p1 and p2 players for weeks, suddenly I am on the equivalent of an 8-10 game losing streak. I don't think I have out of nowhere lost my ability to play. I can't for the life of me carry most of the games I'm getting matched in right now. At the start of the game, more than 70% of the time, 2-3 of my team mates will die in under 5 seconds fighting for mid. I don't really understand the matchmaking system but my instinct says it's still counting me as a ~p2 player and to make up for that giving me incredibly low rank players as team mates and matching vs an on average higher caliber team. Problem is, the difference in tier is so overwhelming, that even 4 g2 players vs 4 g3 players is a no-contest match. I also see players I'm used to seeing in plat at gold fighting a similar struggle, so it's not just me. I don't really give a kitten what my rank is. My problem is that it's not fun to play a match where every player in the game is at a completely lower caliber of play. Those games are just not fun, win or lose. I want to be able to play against players who are of my skill level, not be winning 1v2's and 1v3's and getting every award and it not even mattering in the outcome of the game. My assumption is ultimately the pendulum will swing the other way and I'll dominate for 10-15 games in a row and climb back into plat, but what kind of a system is it where you can ping pong like this even after ~200 games? Actually the difference between gold 2 and plat 1 players is incredible smallHaving played in both tiers I disagree very much. Gold 2 players make constant map awareness mistakes and generally have a low mastery level of their class. Plat 1 players tend to have higher mastery of their class and generally strong map awareness, though the main difference between a p1 and p2+ player is map awareness and rotational awareness.

Yea I'm pretty much ready to quit. Was plat most of this season so far, 1580 at the highest, rank 43 Out of nowhere I started getting matches where it was literally me and 4 golds vs 5 plat players. This happened over and over until I was knocked down into gold, where it actually continued except it started matching me with lower gold players. I am now at ~1460 getting matched with silvers still sometimes against the same players I was matched with and against at high p1 rating. I no longer see the p2 players -- who, for what it's worth, I held my own against fine and have even carried and won games against multiple top 10 players. After a WINNING record against all p1 and p2 players for weeks, suddenly I am on the equivalent of an 8-10 game losing streak. I don't think I have out of nowhere lost my ability to play. I can't for the life of me carry most of the games I'm getting matched in right now. At the start of the game, more than 70% of the time, 2-3 of my team mates will die in under 5 seconds fighting for mid. I don't really understand the matchmaking system but my instinct says it's still counting me as a ~p2 player and to make up for that giving me incredibly low rank players as team mates and matching vs an on average higher caliber team. Problem is, the difference in tier is so overwhelming, that even 4 g2 players vs 4 g3 players is a no-contest match. I also see players I'm used to seeing in plat at gold fighting a similar struggle, so it's not just me. I don't really give a shit what my rank is. My problem is that it's not fun to play a match where every player in the game is at a completely lower caliber of play. Those games are just not fun, win or lose. I want to be able to play against players who are of my skill level, not be winning 1v2's and 1v3's and getting every award and it not even mattering in the outcome of the game. My assumption is ultimately the pendulum will swing the other way and I'll dominate for 10-15 games in a row and climb back into plat, but what kind of a system is it where you can ping pong like this even after ~200 games?

Lich form is one of the most shit abilities in the game, the fact that so many people complain about it is a testament to the low skill level of the average player. Literally only good if you have 0 pressure on you (lol at high level play having 0 pressure on you as a necro) and people just stand there and allow themselves to be hit by it.

Just play a high damage team fighting class like holo or reaper, or a high mobility decapping class like thief or ranger. Best ways to solo carry in low tiers.

Short range makes it pretty useless though. Need to be face checking people for the drain, when necro really only survives taking advantage of range. Maybe some sort of bunker scourge but bunker is pretty dead. Support scourge does better with other main hands.

Great guide. Kind of a silly question but how do you make fast turns without "Use either mouse button to change direction"? Only reason I don't use free camera is because character movement is slow and clumsy for me without that option checked. That would probably be about face, which you use to automatically turn the other direction. This is very important for more precise movements like reaction based spell usage or kiting. It is also very important for the thief class which is heavily dodge based and let you use the “roll skills” in the direction you want without the risk of losing movement efficiency and all you need to use this is bind a key to the command.Free camera is actually better so that you can see what’s going on around you also, so I would recommend you experiment with it. You don’t have to take it until you fully figure out how to use it and also possibly when you get all you keybinds and settings under controlI'm talking more just turning in general. With the "use mouse button" setting I can make quick turns just by holding my mouse, but turns are very slow with that off and you can't use that and free camera. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious but yea, with free camera on I can only make these big wide turns and it's hard to be precise with movement.

Great guide. Kind of a silly question but how do you make fast turns without "Use either mouse button to change direction"? Only reason I don't use free camera is because character movement is slow and clumsy for me without that option checked.

It's less so about gap closers for me than about escapes. There is a reason most Necro builds are stuck with Wurm and Walk, since when you get jumped as Necro there are just no tools to escape and very few to make yourself properly unattractive as target.I think core Shroud since the damage nerfs is about the only thing that makes people think twice about running a train over Necro since launch, except maybe PoF launch state Scourge by merits of sheer AoE pressure, but that's not a healthy was of doing things. Most Necro weapons feel incredibly clunky to me to defend yourself with, especially melee and against multiple targets (except for maybe spamming Staff Marks and then that's it), yet there aren't really any tools to get out of situations like that aside from having a Flesh Wurm setup somewhere - or godlike kiting to try to never get into them in the first place.That's the biggest problem with necro to me, it's combination of lack of escapes, lack of scaling defenses and lack of point blank AoE pressure (outside of Shroud) make it just so incredibly easy to run into the ground without a chance. Plenty other professions have ranged weapons with escape tools, or at the very least a melee set to swap to for mobility/mitigation, or at the very very least, massive AoE pressure (and being supported by active defense in the Utility slots). Necro only has the binary Shroud which is either on or off, and most problematically has the same counter as if it weren't there - just keep running the Nec over like a train and CC. Same with Lich. The answer to everything a profession can do shouldn't be the same, to just pile on, otherwise it's fairly unengaging both to play and play against, at least imo. Necro is a attractive target to teams because they hit hard and have very high in fight sustain, a oh kitten reliable escape is not there for a reason, only having a preplanned escape makes more sense balance wise. Necro is an attractive target because it doesn't have escapes/scaling mitigation. If you focus the Ranger they can zoom away, block, stealth, immob and run etc.If you focus the Engie they can invuln, stealth, zoom away, etc.If you focus the Guard they can break focus with invuln at least, Stab/blocks to cover escapesIf you focus the Thief they can stealth and port away and will on the other side of the map pressuring a point before you know if they even really disengagedIf you focus Rev they can block, damage convert, have evade toolsIf you focus Mes they can stealth blink, spam so many visual clutter clones you might prefer to jam a spike up your eyes over keeping to playIf you focus War they can block, damage convert, zoom awayIf you focus Ele they can spam so many evades and invulns you might as well go make a sandwichIf you focus Necro, they are dead and you outnumber the enemy. That's the main difference. Not Necro's hitting way harder than other professions or having more in fight sustain, which isn't true. Besides, I'm not arguing to just load up Necro with escape tools and leaving it as is. I specifically said to introduce a small number of which one may have access to one at a time for any given build, so they can then take power out of Shroud and reevaluate the Shroud - non Shroud balance and gameplay feel, so it's less Necro On, Necro Off, and engaging to play and fight both times, without having to be overbearing or antifun to be viable despite it's design shortcomings. Definitely. Necro has at most 2 escapes they can take, and one (walk) isn't really an escape because if you are in a position where you can't use terrain to your advantage it doesn't do you any good. Wurm only goes on cd when used, meaning you have minimally 30 seconds before you get any kind of escape after using it. Every other class -- and I mean EVERY other class -- has a mobility escape on short cd. Some have multiple. Try catching a warrior who wants to run away, maybe ranger can keep up, no one else. Necro can not only not escape, but they can not pursue. They can't pursue and have low sustain unless shroud is stacked, meaning it's very easy to disengage and come back to them and kill them. The damage a necro does (which let's be fair is less than several other classes even as reaper) is not nearly enough to warrant the near complete lack of mobility. There's a reason why the best necros are all playing holo right now. mobility doesn't always mean good and there's usually tradeoffs. with necro what would you trade? ranger, warrior, thief, ele, mes have decent mobility but no where close to necro team fight potential and necro is still over them in team fight meta which tells you something about just having mobility. there's one class that doesn't have insane mobility (without a target) and that's guardian, but they don't have team fight presence either , look where they are in the meta. the only reason thief is in the meta is due to roaming/decapping/+1 because of that mobility and that's it, that's a big role in conquest though so while it's annoying you can almost never 1v1 or team fight effectively outside of picking and prodding it still has a firm position in the meta. in fact necro beats out most classes for team fight presence, this is without mobility, giving it mobility would arguably make it better than nade holo and it's completely busted, i speak mostly obviously on reaper but core necro is good against specific comps too. would you want necro to just be a roamer / decapper / +1 spec with that added mobility? you have to have a tradeoff for being probably the biggest oppressive team fighter in the game atm, the one class that has both atm is nade holo (and even then even nade holo doesn't have as much in team-fight sustain as necro by far) and with the holo leap nerf now you have to somewhat think when to use the leap because it has important mobility reduction condi removal tied to it w/ zephyr trait instead of mindlessly spam it even though it's still busted the nerf didn't change much. I'm not saying necro is terribly weak but outside of shroud they get demolished quickly because they lack any kind of defensive measures past a very brief fear or two. You can't even think about entering a team fight unless you have some life force built up, and even with shroud a single holo or ranger can push you out of a team fight rather quickly if they hard focus you. I think necro does a lot of things well, but nothing great. The problem is that other classes do some things great, even if they might do other things poorly. That gives them more specialized utility which necro generally lacks. I don't have the solution, it probably requires a large mechanic or ability overhaul, such as re-working shroud entirely. As it stands, necro is generally a tier 2 pick in every category. I actually think necro in both pvp and pve is lacking in the same way... can hold its own but will never be your best pick.