Kaladel.1670

"Most valuable traits" are you happy now? 🙄God, what is the point of being so nitpicky, seriously? Shroud was a bad decision from the start and changed on the fly last minute, since lich form skills were meant to be shroud skills. The fact is that Necro has never received the attention and care it desserves. It's a messed up profession that only survived until now because of some bad design decisions being in its favor.

Power mech (the grenade kit version) does bench almost 38k so Reaper must be higher than that.

I think the fact that most traits on necro do nothing outside of shroud (especially after shroud nerfs) is one of the main problems in the (arguably extremely bad) design of the necromancer.

Those aren't unpopular, they are mostly going from bad to terrible.

While 50% may be too much, try seeing this in a "There are limited spots in the team and I need to sell them on taking my Reaper instead of something else" perspective. Why take someone that brings nothing to the group when you can take someone who can? What do you bring to the team when you can't bring utility/boons? And the simple answer to that is "bring more dps than the DPS that bring useful/wanted utility on the side". Is it the only solution? Probably not. But, when you look at it that way, it makes sense for people to want this.

For whatever reason, it seems like the devs dislike working on necro. Like it's the stinky profession. This is really weird. Especially when it's one of the player's favorites. (And let's not talk about minions. Another players favorite who's been neglected. While, in the past, we could have accepted arguments concerning bots and passive gameplay, mechanist has proven that that wasn't an issue at all for the devs)

Necro's signets are mostly trash, so any (positive) change is welcome at this point. You could make the passives permanent, not rebalance anything and it wouldn't even be broken 😅 We have : - "The passive should be baseline, WTF Anet" signet - "Obligatory speed boost, with a decent active" signet - "Unable to choose if I'm condi or power" signet - "Poster boy/girl for a playstyle that never worked outside of some weird PvP build" signet - "Decent passive heal but crap active" signet

Proof is the only thing that will make you look right, you know. The stance of "hybrid doesn't work" has been proven for 10 years. If you want to be taken seriously while taking the opposite stance, you need to have facts on your side or people will juste dismiss it as bs. So take your hybrid with arcdps, go do some content and show numbers to the disbeliever. That's as simple as that. No need to argue or disparage other. If you are right and have undeniable proof, we'll all agree that you are right.

Carapace was bad design from the day it was implemented. Changing it for all game modes wouldn't be bad at all.

The game could have been better if more boons and conditions were treated the same way Aegis was (and still is, mostly). Aegis has always been a guardian thing, with very little of it available to other professions. If that kind of proprietary boon/condition had been more widespread, some profession would have been more valuable in some game mode and not just considered trash tier with nothing meaningful to contribute. The idea here was probably what was intended for Necro at launch, for instance. But everyone and their pet dog being able to apply vuln without even thinking about it made it irrelevant. If 5 players can max the vulnerability stacks, why would you want a vulnerability specialist?

Celestial support hybrid scourge uses Nightmare runes. As for this power-condi hybrid, never heard of it and can't find it on build websites, youtube videos or anything... Where does it come from?

It's for open world, right? Why do you use signet of spite? You don't have a stunbreak. Not sure if taking Death Magic is worth it, I'd go with Soul Reaping 1/1/3 for more damages and life force or Blood Magic 1/3/3 for support and sustain. If you want to keep Death Magic, I'd go with 2/2/2 instead, you are playing a condi build with condi weapons so power won't do much for you. Most Scourge builds take Plague Sending for the combo between f5 and blood is power, it can also benefit your other corruptions skills by giving you one more way beside dagger 4 to transfer conditions. Runes of the Tempest will be expansive to get unless you have legendary runes. Runes of the Nightmare are the prefered choice for condi builds, in general.

I don't agree with the fact that celestial is garbage. This is a decent stat set everywhere, except in instanced content with aggro on Toughness. You can do fine as support scourge in celestial (see the Hardstuck variant of the Plaguedoctor Scourge), switching traits and skills for a more offensive setup leaves you with a good enough dps to go through open world and story and Cele Harbinger seems particularly efficient for WvW roaming (you may need to have a way to switch runes, there, tho). That's the power of celestial: it's good enough for almost everything and definitely not the worst choice if you want to do multiple things while changing as little as possible. I won't deny that Trailblazer is still better for soloing content and Viper for pure offense, tho. But that's the difference between a generalist and a specialist.

Looking at what they are intending to do to Scrapper and heal Warrior, I'm pretty happy they choose to ignore necro for this patch.

well, since you won't be crippled, you'll be faster, indeed 😆

Minion Master is essentially an Open World build, there isn't really a spot for it in instanced content or competitive game modes right now. Quite honestly, it isn't that good, you can see it more as a fun/stress-free build to enjoy in Open World as you pretty much can't die while playing it. But the DPS isn't good and you'll be slower to clear content than with a proper build.

Be careful with IKEA tables, they aren't that sturdy.

It's more "let's pick the less bad of the three core elites or the one from my current ESpec" than a real choice, most of the time. Which isn't surprising when you look at them: - stupid mutant unicorn - be OP for a few seconds every 3 minutes - the one good elite (for condi builds only, against immobile targets only) - I'm reciting very edgy poetry for a while and the degree of cringe paralyses my enemies (reaper) (seriously, that cast time...) - the one good elite's little brother (scourge) - hope there won't be anti-doping tests (harbinger)

If you want an humorous (and a bit dated) take, Noxxi has a pair of video on Mesmer and Necromancer. - Mesmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjEr1pSTMK0 - Necro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf55h0x5hFM iirc, Mukluk has a video where he summarize the professions for new players. My personal opinion? It depends on a lot of things. Will they play vanilla? With xPacks? Elite spec can completely change the viability of a profession and how it plays and the themes. Do they have experience in other MMO we can use as a frame of reference? It's hard for players who are neck deep in the game to give a summary to someone not playing it. We have absorbed so many references, memes... and are very biased.

Scepter/Torch & Scepter/Dagger or Warhorn is the commonly used dps setup for Scourge. Edit: After a quicksearch, Warhorn seems to be the prefered option in current builds.

The awesome posts about warriors are almost convincing me to dust of my old Warr and come back from the nice parking it is sitting on. Maybe 2-30 more and... (what, I enjoy reading them 😆) In all seriousness, I fell for core engineer while I was leveling one to see what the appeal of mechanist was. I still have more fond memories of core than I have of mech and sincerely hope Anet doesn't nerf a very interesting profession in the process of bringing mech down.

You know, half the time I don't know if people mean Fractals of the Mists or Flavo(u)r of the Month when they use FOTM 😆

Necro warhorn is very underwhelming as a weapon. And once you start comparing it to other WH, you'll end up saying "what the f***?!" Like, Ranger's and Warrior's WH5 are both blast finishers and have effects that are way more useful. Call of the Wild even looks way overtuned compaired to our Locust Swarm.

Yes and no. Yes to the idea of balancing based on sturdiness (and range, and general usefulness to a party), no to any balance even remotely related to benchmarks. You can do 58k dps (exagerated numbers intended) on golem all you want and only be able to deal 23k in a real situation, because your perfect rotation is in tatters the instant you have to move or deal with mechanics. That's why Mech is so strong. Yes, Untamed is top dog on the benchmarks, but in a real fight, mech is reliable and that's what count. All mech players can reach the benchmarks easily, the rotation of the most difficult mech build is a joke compared to anything above. You'll sooner see a mech player reaching top dps than an untamed player. And the benchmarks put a 6-7k gap between them in favor of the untamed. So... benchmarks are worth half-nothing. Useful to get a vague idea of the max potential of a build, in perfect circumstances, but nothing else. No sane person should balance based on benchmarks.

Meaningful Reaper buffs for spooktober would make sense.