Brujeria.7536

Unholy Sanctuary is really off in this traitline currently. I really dont like OPs solution, i think you should remove most minion traits. The general idea of adept traits defining on how you will get carapace is good, but these ways should be equally tied into the necromancers core values. ADEPT: Focuses on how to get carapace, tied to the core values from the necromancer class:Minor Adept: Gain carapace when entering shroud and every few seconds while in shroud. Adept: Gain carapace when causing conditions. Poison Damage is increased.Adept: Gain carapace when corrupting a boon. Corrupt a boon on nearby foes when you get protection (3s icd)Adept: Gain carapace when you remove conditions from yourself. Gain additional stacks when transfering a condition to a foe. Remove conditions while in shroud.MASTER: Focuses on protection as a second layer of defense and creates synergy: Master Adept: Dark Defiance: Gain protection when you are disabled. When you gain protection gain retaliation. Master: While having protection you cannot be critically hit. Gain Protection when above the carapace treshold. (10s icd)Master: While having protection you periodicaly remove a condition. Gain 20% reduced condition damage while above the carapace treshold.Master: While having protection foes striking you become poisoned and weakened (icd per attacker). When reaching max carapace stacks you detonate after 2 seconds.(15 second cooldown) Causing damage, poison and corrupting 2 boons. You lose all carapace in the process.GRANDMASTER: Focuses on improving carapace. Also Minions (unwanted but mandatory) Grandmaster Adept: While above the carapace treshold incoming condition damage and power damage is reduced. When gaining protection you summon a shambling horror, absorbing some of your damage (10s icd) Grandmaster: Minions take conditions off you and transfer them to foes. (triggers adept 3). When reaching max carapace stacks you summon a deathsaint, pulsing protection to nearby allies and minions and all your minions trigger a deathnova. (15 second cooldown). You lose all carapace in the process.Grandmaster: Carapace stacks also increase your expertise and power. When reaching max carapace stacks your attacks will crit for 5 seconds and you gain 20% condition damage for 5 seconds (15 second icd after expiration). During these 5 seconds you are at max carapace stacks but lose all carapace in the processGrandmaster: Carapace stacks also increase healingpower and concentration. While in shroud you regenerate health based on your carapace stacks. When taking a lethal blow your shroud activates, healing you and granting protection based on the number of your carapace stacks. you lose all carapace in the process.

Yeah its basicly just a sad attempt to "fix" balance. Scourge really isnt the Problem, the problem lies much deeper. The entire game is too power damage centric. WvW zergs cry about boon corrupt and condis yet its just a natural part of the game. If you get spiked by power damage you are instantly dead this is fine. If you get condi bombed you arent allowed to die for whatever reason. Its just natural, if you have 2 damage types, being power damage in all of its variances and condi damage in all of its variances that each one of these should be able to kill your foe. This simple point wont get into Anets head it seems, its completly fine for engineers to cure like 3 condi stacks a second to your entire group, but if a necro causes 3 condis each second its broken. Its okay for Firebrands to spill boons like candy, yet if a skill can potentially corrupt 10 boons in 10 seconds its completly over the top. The overall balance between these combat aspects is off across the board. We have food that reduces condition duration or damage by 20%. We have condi clears. We have condition immunity in the form of resistance. Where are the counterparts for power damage? You cant undo a power spike with a "dps cleanse", you dont have a boon to completly ignore all power damage like resistance is to conditions. It also wont work to shift scourge into the "support" role, the necro base class simply does not allow it. They can only add so much power into a set of traits and utility skills. Core necro does not benefit a support aspect. It literally has not even a single support weapon. They should shift the meta the other way arround, create a fine balance between condi damage and power damage, and let both of these things allow to kill you. Naturally, there should be MORE condition application than there is condi removal. There should be MORE boon corrupts than there is boon application. If the current state of the interplay between conditions and corrupts and boons and condi cleanses would be applied to power damage nobody would ever die in a fight.

You really had any hopes that they would NOT fuck this up?

Horrible changes, really. By doing such one sided nerfs you dont tackle the initial problem of powercreep. Boonspam was out of hand even before the release of scourge and the second generation of e-specs. The additional powercreep in that regard is a massive issue, you cant severly nerf scourge and especially its boon corrupts without adressing the other aspects, of the main problem. It will just shift the problem elsewhere. This situation has been there for years now, instead of doing a quick shot like this take your time and come up with a REAL solution top till bottom. Boon application should matter. Boon corrupt should matter. Mindless boon spam with near endless duration and frequency as its in the current state is just bad. Boon application is very easy and plentifull in both, number of targets, area, and reaction time. Compared to corrupt skills which already hit fewer targets, and on a longer cooldown are harder to apply; this will most likely shift the meta to an even unhealthier state while further reducing the class variance. It will be even easier to blob because boon spam and healing is far superior compared to boon corrupt and damage. Also nothing is fine in the balance of roaming, really nothing. Oneshot skills everywhere, AAs hitting you for a quarter or even a third of health, overpowered skills with overlapping functions as well as over the top mobility and stealth for some classes. There are severall skills that are gapclosers/damage/evade or gapclosers/damage/stun on short cooldowns, this is disgusting in terms of balance, such skills should not exist, not even as an elite skill. On the other side some classes can become close to unkillable when built for bunkering which also heavily affects the balance in Zergs. Naturally if your healing output is far greater than the damage your opponent can do this will promote powercreep as nobody would die. But thats affecting zerging more than roaming. In case of roaming, for years every single class is drifting towards a very unhealthy extreme in terms of balance, be it damage, condition spam, defence or mobility. Bring the suggested PVP changes asap to WvW and take a big and hard balance pass on overall mobility and damage across all classes. Its honestly really mind boggling how a dev can say there is nothing egregious in the current state of balance for roaming. Roaming is in the worst state of balance it has been ever.

The +50% damage against targets with barrier from warrior is busted already. Imagine a target having only a small amount of barrier and a full zerker warrior hits an evisecerate with +50% damage. This will lead to unhealthy oneshot scenarios. A lot of barrier application in group settings comes from your team members, you often have no controll wether you gain a barrier from an ally or not. This trait punishes teamplay. A really horrible balance and design decision. I strongly hope the +50% damage done is applied ONLY to the barrier itself and NOT the healthpool.

Its so sad that they "rework" Deathmagic and we still have 3 traitslots tied to a single set of utility skills. Combine these 3 useless minion traits into one and make room for interesting choices.

Ranger changes are in the right direction, long ranged skills should never do more damage than mid or close range skills especially if they are so easy to execute.Rev Changes are in the wrong direction, the skill should be a projectile with a much slower flight time, allowing counterplay, also the hammer AA is way overtuned. The better telegraph is badly needed and long overdue.I dont like Scourge changes, the class is already useless besides zergs as it is.I dont like Warrior changes - the last thing warriors need is another layer of defense with barrier. The increased damage for 2 attacks also is horrible - it powercreeps certain builds for the warrior and is pretty useless for allies because you need to time it right - not many classes have "big single hit" abilities to benefit from this, also timing is very hard, i think this would be a very negative change. I like that you reduce some condi cleanses all around.Stealth detection is also very nice and should be added to more skills- stealth lacks any form of counterplay beside such skills. Overall the changes are 50 / 50 in terms of game health and fun, they further shoehorn some professions into specific playstyles which is bad, but they also nerf some big offenders in terms of overall balance (revenant and ranger)

I think they are taking the wrong approach with the Mirage balance and nerfs. Its true that the nerfs where plentifull in the last few balance patches, but they simply nerf the wrong things in the wrong way. Mesmer as a base class is pretty fine. The class is naturally a strong 1v1 fighter, dueller, skirmisher, call it how you like to. Mirage adds a LOT of new mechanics and power to that. The special dodge is ALREADY very strong, but as elite specs are there are also traits utility skills etc. that make the class broken. They should drasticly REMOVE or REDUCE parts of the kit in exchange for such a strong added power. For example: Mirage can only have 2 clones and the shatter effect on self is removed. Or mirage has less shatter skills. Remove the Distort for example. Or double the base Shatter cooldowns for mirage. Then, you look at the dodge itself. It has no counterplay, you dont need to think, strategize, it has 0 risk and a huge reward. Change the mechanic so that : You cant dodge while CCd. If you dodge while casting a skill, the skill gets interrupted as usual. Reduce the window they can use an ambush skill afterwards. Then look at the rest of the class: it has WAY too many defensive mechanics. Distort. Stealth. Mobility. Decoys/target breaking, Dodge. Simply remove some of the sources for these effects or drasticly remove the uptime. That is the only way to bring this class to a reasonable level. You can proceed to nerf every skill and trait of the class and it would STILL be unfun to play against and overloaded with defense and offense and no counterplay. You might turn down the damage a little bit, but you dont properly fix the core flaws this way.

Im sorry, but i have to disagree with almost all of these changes. The boon corrupt idea is good for PvE at least. The outcome is basicly more DPS and more CC, while i think thats not THE solution, its a solution. The better solution would be just to increase the stacks of condi necro skills do. Plain and simpleDarkfields in general are bad, but not every class needs to be good at combo fields. Sure, necro has bare to none things in exchange for the lack of combo finishers, but forcing these interactions into elite specs is a bad idea. The entire base class does not support combo finishers, so in reverse its not that critical that darkfields suck. If you want a gamewide change to darkfields make them pulse blind every few seconds. So the class with the least combo finishers at least has the only combo field reliable that does something without needing a finisherLich Form, conceptual, is fine. It just does not work with the rest of the kit like Rampage for warriors do. Warrior is tanky by default and gets further tankyness by using rampage. He can precast stances and gets free stances at certain health intervalls to keep the offensive going. Rampage skills are quick, powerfull and full of CC. Necro in exchange just gets the wrong stats. Most builds do not need more precision, necro has very good traits for that. What Lich form needs is safety: either add some form of general damage reduction or thougness or give it a separate shroud healthbar. Then tune the skills as needed. This serves as a second wind, a window to reduce skill cooldowns, while being powerfull and not being so reliable on health. Scourge i think conceptual is fine. The only problem is they add a support spec to a class without a support weapon / weaponset. The skills are not really that overtuned, in my opinion, or clustered with effects. The only "problem" so to speak is the WvW community. Scourge is easy to use, but other classes could do the things a scourge can much better - albeit its way harder to achieve and thus not meta. Meta in WvW mostly means easy and reliable, not optimal on an individual level.Deathmagic does need better traits and a concept. The Minion theme is a big part of death magic, but minions are not a big part of the necromancer class. Its just a set of utility skills. Rework the Traitline with a focus on barrier and thougness / damage reduction. And i mean meaningfull, reliable damage reduction, not 300 thougness. Deathshroud needs more than a cooldown reduction. The Problem it has is: its all over the place. It has no real condi pressure for condi builds, its kit is outdated for power builds, it has no mobility and its our main damage reduction concept. Yet damage reduction means in this case you loose either a lot of pressure while using it or you are even more of a sitting duck. The biggest defense in this meta is mobility, complete damage reduction, or , to some extend, reliable CC. Necro does not have these things. You wont fix the main problems by reducing some cooldown here and there.

-If they add breakstun to both spectral walk cast and spectral recall then it will be much better utility for use because lets be real necro needs some breakstuns as it doesnt have mobility. That's exactly how it works right now... actually its not. Spectral recall does not break stuns. its just a teleport.

I think taimi should die as well. Not because for some "emotional plottwist" , simply because shes more annoying than Trahearne was. I mean the permanent jokes, forcefully funny dialogues and every "deux ex machina" she brings to the story is way too much. In the last living story segment we went in for a very dark theme fantasy wise, plagues, people dying, epidemic and apocalyptic plot. I, for one, cant take the story serious when people are dying, the story implies that things are in a dangerous spot and 20 seconds later there comes a funny joke. This isnt a comedy show. And this happens WAY too often. She is always the solution or the driving reason we do things, the reason we find something out. The entire Asura influence on the story as a whole, is way too big as it is. Need to get somewhere? Asuragate! Need to know something, or figure something out? Some asura study or new side-character gets added. When was the last time we really had some MEANINGFULL progress, story, influence by a norn? By a human? A charr? A Sylvari? Asura and the technology aspect are omnipresent in the story. "Oh we need to get some army into a far away area! hey lets have an asura portal" I mean like.. dont humans have airships, dont charrs have big ass tanks? Norn could have a big ass Wurm trough their connections to the spirits to travel underground. "Oh we are alone in a scouting like mission on new grounds, LUCKILY, some randomly added asura golem a story segment back, got his arm sucked in trough the portal and LUCKILY, that arm has all the tools we need!" Again, same thing. Charrs have the ash legion for such scouting / stealth stuff. We could have a norn or sylvari scout, even caith or braham, to show us how to hide in such a situation, "learning" those things along the way, you are on new land after all, you need to "adapt" to what to do there, not just some miracle arm that coincidently does everything one needs. Such kind of ideas and aspects are completly deleted from the game. The development of the other races and the potential they bring is at hold since years. Every big "step" or "insight" is tied to asuras or asuran technology. This is also the case in the rest of the game - Current events - Fractals - Events like wintersday, SAB. Everything is so asura centric, its getting old. SAB could have been some "very special" norn brew they do once a year that makes the people high, or a sylvari connection to a "strange dream" for every race once a year. Pretty much all other characters from the commanders "squad" are just here for good measure, rox, braham, feel like sidekicks, being completly forgotten. I mean yes, Braham did have his moments in the last segment - even funny ones, but these feel fitting, even though they where not really meaningfull, story wise.

Good: Story is greatMounts feel very goodMaps are nice and diverse, love the hidden places and secretsBounty system is good, needs more a bigger pool of random effects though.Concept of the elite specs is great, love the lore attachedOpen world difficulty feels just rightBad: Low replay value on maps due to no big crafting items and relevant meta events is bad. Once i have all the gear and achievements i have no point in going back to these maps like the HoT ones.Overall game balance between classes is very bad