looking back 10 years, i wish i had rolled an ele or necro

[otto.5684]

Ele had long periods of no viability in spvp and issues in pve. And necro was dead in pve until scourge. And only recently it had strong dps builds.

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, Lighter.5631 said:

What you even talking about. dead people do no DPS.

Yeah, all the people running bunker builds in endgame content were saying exactly the same... There's a reason why this sentence is now a meme, you know...

5 hours ago, Lighter.5631 said:

you will understand as long as you simply played warrior only for an extensive amount of time, which you obviously didn't.

You absolutely have no idea what class did i play, how, and when. I happen to have over 1000 hours played on warrior (and those weren't afking in a lobby, if you're wondering) - i guess for you that is not extensive enough?

[apharma.3741]

10 hours ago, otto.5684 said:

Ele had long periods of no viability in spvp and issues in pve. And necro was dead in pve until scourge. And only recently it had strong dps builds.

This is not true at all.
Since the core trait rework the only period where elementalist did not have a good build was parts of PoF when tempest and supports in general were becoming obsolete. Even more so if you're using the term viable. EVERY class has had a viable build at every point in time, the closest classes to have ever come to being unviable were guardians after aegis and firebrand nerfs pre EoD and mesmers post Feb 2020 patch until distortion was added to Chrono and Virtuoso.

What made necro and ranger not wanted in dungeons was entirely to do with how utterly broken FGS and frostbow were, meaning everyone should have 1 in a fight. The other part was that most necros and rangers were horrible at the game often playing pet builds which were awful. Why weren't other classes? They were, it's just the people picked up a FGS or frost bow which more or less covered up their bad build and lacked the summoned pet giving away that they were built to let the pet do the fighting. Moving on to HoT, reaper was a great raid class, extra health bar, reliable damage, excessive minions, epidemic was at it's height and people really abused that.

So no, you're just plain wrong about necro being dead in pve until scourge.

Edit: At the OP, it took me a long time to settle on a class to main, I played most of them, ranger, engineer and elementalist I got the highest until I settled down and decided to just take the elementalist to 80 and start playing. It's been a good pick and certainly better than others but after 9 years I've moved on and playing other classes more. It's just a natural progression for most people.

Edited May 11, 2023 by apharma.3741

[Dadnir.5038]

1 hour ago, apharma.3741 said:

What made necro and ranger not wanted in dungeons was entirely to do with how utterly broken FGS and frostbow were, meaning everyone should have 1 in a fight. The other part was that most necros and rangers were horrible at the game often playing pet builds which were awful. Why weren't other classes? They were, it's just the people picked up a FGS or frost bow which more or less covered up their bad build and lacked the summoned pet giving away that they were built to let the pet do the fighting.

This is misinformation.

As a matter of fact, in the vanilla game the PvE groups were heavily relying on fire fields and combo blast to build might and, incidentally, fury when using elementalist. You could use warrior to build might but that meant sacrificing damage whereas elementalist didn't need the sacrifice.

The main sin of the necromancer, which was also the sin of the guardian in the vanilla game, is that to do a tiny bit of damage the profession needed to lay fields covering the fire fields and thus bringing down the might generation. Necromancer having relatively low strike damage output didn't helped.

The reason ranger was hated in the vanilla end game content is because it's pet was pushing back the boss by half a step on each hit, usually breaking the main strategy of damaging the boss against a wall. The tendency of many ranger players to abuse PBS also didn't help the profession in being tolerated.

[The Boz.2038]

16 hours ago, apharma.3741 said:

This is not true at all.

It really doesn't seem like you played the game back then. Or you played in a very closed static that really hated your main, lol.

[Strider.7849]

On 5/7/2023 at 12:32 PM, Cyninja.2954 said:

A friend of mine made a guardian specifically because his necro main was getting kicked so often. I think you are misremembering.

The usual dungeon groups were: warrior, mesmer (later replaced by another warrior) and elemtalist (especially for those that focused the ice bow shots into a small area or used fiery greatsword into a wall).

The usual fractal groups where similar with more of a focus on having 1 guardian or mesmer, especially for Volcanic and reflect. Elemenatlists where good to have for mass aoe blind, especially in Cliffside.

Necro and ranger where pretty much bullied out of any instanced content with some LFGs specifically mentioning not wanting those classes (next to AP requirements, level 80, etc.).

Ranger main here since launch. I've been kicked from dungeon groups, speed/farm runs of Citadel of Flame, WvW pretty consistently until soulbeast made its way into GvG's, among other things. The funny thing is I remember being able to clear the pillar boss on CoF just as fast as the hundred blades banner warriors, if not faster.

 

There was a lot of bad bear bow rangers (max range with longbow, brown bear, and usually in soldiers gear lol) in the past which is why all rangers immediately had everyone's eye on them thinking they were bad. In memory of that time I still keep the mini brown bear on me to this day.

[Ruisenior.6342]

3 hours ago, Strider.7849 said:

There was a lot of bad bear bow rangers (max range with longbow, brown bear, and usually in soldiers gear lol)

That was a classic standard for new players, i used this same combo brown bear+ soldier gear 🙂. One friend was always scared of me because i didn't stop my autoattack with gs killing subject alpha on crucible of eternity but almost every time worked as expected i used to dodge its big aoe with the chain skill 3...

Edited May 12, 2023 by Ruisenior.6342

[Lily.1935]

On 5/7/2023 at 1:26 PM, Invoker.5462 said:

All classes seem to have had their hour of fame.

But ele and necro have always had a place in all aspects of the game. At no point would wonder if a necro or an ele will be a useless addition to a group.

Unfortunately, not everyone has picked these two classes.
In fact, a human elementalist would have been the most likely to stick around the longest. As the human has the best camera angle, and elementalism has never suffered an identity crisis in any part of the game. 

They would have saved a lot of production money had they removed professions and races and had the human elementalist the only playable thing in the game. It seems as though this profession is used as a benchmark for every other profession, and has recieved the largest number of minor tweaks throughout the years.

The necro, in a similar vein, has always been a safe bet. You'd be safe in your assumption that a group of necros and ele's could get through 100% of the content in gw2 without much of a struggle.

Unfortunately i mained warrior and engineer, and have been constantly cut down from being a fan boy to completely and totally pessimistic about class balance for this game.

Let me tell you a story about the necromancer main back in 2012-2015.

The necromancer had a single game mode were it could say it was fairly strong in and it was only strong in that game mode with friends. That game mode was WvW, back when Lich form spam was the go to for the necromancer mains running with a full focus on staff during the interim. There, they were good in a zerg and little has changed necromancer still be fairly decent in a zerg in WvW. You couldn't roam though, you'd end up dead fairly easily.

What about PvE? Necromancer had quite a few hurdles to overcome. Because the meta was all about stacking and abusing the AI this put an importance on fire fields, cleaving and blast finishers. Something the necromancer had none of. Dagger didn't hit two targets at the time they hit one. Life blast didn't pierce at the time, you needed to trait for that. Tainted Shackles didn't exist and life transfer's damage was less than a third of its damage it does now. Wells would override the fire fields with their useless dark fields and well of darkness didn't do any damage.

Life force generation was even worse. Generating life force now can feel fairly slow, but it was significantly slower back then, and you lost life force actually drained quicker than it does now. Not that you'd want to be in shroud. Its damage output was pathetic, worse than just auto attacking with a weapon because of the life blast's after cast delay and low damage. Plus you had no stability for the longest time. This made necromancer a pinball in PvP and you'd only ever see them on low ladder.

Eventually Necromancer would be given a godsend of a trait which no longer exists. Foot in the grave. This trait gave stability and would stunbreak you when you entered shroud. Suddenly Necromancer was exceptional in PvP, but even with that they were still focused down as a free kill much of the time because they didn't have projectile blocks, evades or any sort of scaling defenses.

Necromancer's wouldn't be taken if they were condi especially since the condition cap was 25. Warriors had a minor trait which would more easily stack bleeds than necromancer could with how slow attacking necromancer was meaning that you'd be fighting against the Warrior who was the PvE meta at the time with Phalanx strength. Worse still even if warrior didn't have bleed the baseline damage of conditions wasn't high enough to make up for the condition damage and power damage divide at the time.

Come the patch of June 23 2015, suddenly the condition cap was 1500. Which was great! Now necromancer could struggle to get 20 stacks of bleeding still while other professions like warrior and engineer could easily surpass that and had burning stacks on top of that, meaning that even at condition damage necromancer was still behind. But, Little did we know at the time that this change secretly broke a necromancer skill which we wouldn't discover until the some time after the release of HoT.

HoT releases soon after with reaper and suddenly reaper can fit into the Dungeon meta, but by then Dungeons had been abandoned in favor of fractals and raids which fractals were quickly being patched to remove the stacking meta from dominating them. Forcing players to actually engage with the mechanics. So sadly, reaper was just a little too late.

But something was stirring under the hood of core necromancer that would create one of the most broken builds in PvE the game has ever seen. With the busted 66% skill cooldown reduction from Chronomancer's alacrity and the high healing output from Druid they created the perfect storm that cracked a lot of professions in half but none of them benefited from this quite like the necromancer did.

Thus, Guild Wars 2's First and only meta minion master was born! Lich form was cracked, Mark of horror which summoned 5 jagged horrors which would live indefinitely at the time with minor health degeneration along with a change earlier which reduced the damage summons took in PvE resulted in the Reaper summoning dozens of these little creatures. And because each of them could bleed this resulted in damage numbers the necromancer has only recently started to get close to again.

You see, it wasn't reaper that broke, even if reaper was still taken. This minion build combine with blood is power and epidemic along with minions transferring your conditions resulted in near perfect immunity to conditions along with heavy damage. Shortly after this build started to dominate Fractals and Raids the build itself would be nerfed out of existence and reaper would again fall out of favor.

Necromancer was a low Condi damage profession up until Path of fire, and so there were very specific raids they'd be taken on for epidemic. Understandably the necromancer community was very protective of epidemic at the time because without it the necromancer would see no play.

Come Path of fire and the Scourge. At the very start of the release, scourge was a difficult elite spec to run. We didn't have great life force generation outside of dagger at the time so scepter+torch and Dagger+warhorn were the sets we used. Shade life and count recharge was pretty bad making it so maintaining 3 of them the entire fight was actually impossible now that alacrity was nerfed pretty hard by the time PoF released. But Scourge had two pretty major bugs which aided in their early adoption.

First was each sand shade could trigger its damage on the same target and the second was Dhuumfire would trigger for each pulse of desert shroud. This made Scourge one of the top DPS builds at release. But this wouldn't last. Once the bugs were fixed the scourge's damage dropped significantly and scourge suffered the same fate as condi reaper. Only ever taken in situations were epidemic was good.

Scourge was slightly better off due to barrier, but even then the heal scourge was a meme even then. You take it when your group was extremely bad. it was a pug carry but not at all respected as a DPS.

This was what scourge was up until May 11 2021, only 2 years ago! What happened then? Torment's damage was flipped from doing more damage to moving targets to stationary targets. And this was HUGE for the scourge. Their damage shot up significantly becoming one of the best DPS for a time.

But once that happened, soon Scourge was hit with a lot of nerfs. Some justified others not justified. Their demonic lore was reduced from 33% increased damage for torment to 25% increased damage. Justified. Their barrier application on allies was nerfed. Justified. Sand Cascade's barrier was nerfed to not be able to be applied to allies unless you traited for it. Not justified. The self barrier from Desert Shroud was nerfed significantly, not justified.

Now Scourge is sitting in an awkward spot where its technically okay but not amazing and can't really be touched with damage or support in its current form because it still breaks the 5 target rule even though scourge could use a touch up.

Reaper started to get buffed during this time though and soon they would become an okay option. After this point Necromancer would be a decent option regardless of which elite spec you chose and with the last balance patch, Reaper is now a meta pick and harbinger is okay, if not strictly inferior to reaper as a DPS right now due to its frailty.

I point all this out to show you that necromancer for most of the game's life hasn't been in a good spot. Necromancer being good is modern. VERY modern! We're talking 2 years modern. The few blips Necromancer was good were just that. Blips. Months at most were it was good.

One of the professions has to be the worst and for 8 years that was necromancer.

[apharma.3741]

8 hours ago, The Boz.2038 said:

It really doesn't seem like you played the game back then. Or you played in a very closed static that really hated your main, lol.

It was a regular static which we used to 4 man (usually) dungeons. I usually played ele as that was my main for the first 3 years I played. We were very flexible with classes if there was 2 eles to provide might, fury, frostbow and FGS because literally everything melted in seconds. However whenever we saw a ranger you could tell based on pet what they were going to be like and usually it was awful so kick, same with necro, if they weren't using dagger or had minions that was a kick.
The only dungeon remotely challenging was Arah and that's only because it had actual mechanics for some bosses and lots of traveling between events/fights.

[eXruina.4956]

On 5/8/2023 at 2:12 AM, Nefras.7314 said:

yeah no you defo got kicked out of some dungeon groups as a necro in vanilla. Its one of the oldest memes in the game and me and alot of my friends have experienced it myself lmao.

this did in fact happen. i started the game 2 years after initial release and this was happening,

[Arheundel.6451]

On 5/7/2023 at 6:26 PM, Invoker.5462 said:

All classes seem to have had their hour of fame.

But ele and necro have always had a place in all aspects of the game. At no point would wonder if a necro or an ele will be a useless addition to a group.

Unfortunately, not everyone has picked these two classes.
In fact, a human elementalist would have been the most likely to stick around the longest. As the human has the best camera angle, and elementalism has never suffered an identity crisis in any part of the game. 

They would have saved a lot of production money had they removed professions and races and had the human elementalist the only playable thing in the game. It seems as though this profession is used as a benchmark for every other profession, and has recieved the largest number of minor tweaks throughout the years.

The necro, in a similar vein, has always been a safe bet. You'd be safe in your assumption that a group of necros and ele's could get through 100% of the content in gw2 without much of a struggle.

Unfortunately i mained warrior and engineer, and have been constantly cut down from being a fan boy to completely and totally pessimistic about class balance for this game.

Never fixate yourself on a single class...never do that brother! The only reason why I am still here it's because I have 2 x more mains to jump on when the dry spell for ele starts, and this period of time with the dev team, it must have been the longest period of time when ele has been left in a playable state, aka enjoyable to use. Catalyst brought back more than half the ele players you see now, you wouldn't see nearly as many eles now in PvP and WvW before cata and, the scepter rework. Before cata and scepter rework you wouldn't see even a single ele in Monthly tournaments

[mizaru.1385]

Necro auto kick, Ranger auto kick, Ele perpetual downstate expert.......those were the days

Edited May 20, 2023 by mizaru.1385

[Atomnium.1532]

Isn't the guardian the most longstanding safepick that never had a period of time where it wasn't a desirable pick ?
I mean necro and ele are probably some of the worst examples for safe picks (thief is worse i must admit), necro was quasi systematically kicked out of groups in vanilla and reaper has had terrible periods in hots, scourge is really what put him in the desirable category. (And then the totally op category for ... years)

Ele is the opposite of a safe picks, it has been either totally OP to a degree of immense class stacking or absolutely of no use to anyone whatsoever because outdpsed by anyone and provide no utility and have a subscription to downstate.

Arguably, the safest profession is mesmer if you look at raid representation.
https://gw2wingman.nevermindcreations.de/popularity
Never fallen under 1.5 mesmer per 10 man raid.
From march 2018 to now, you will see less than 1 ele per raid comp, being benched for 5 years isnt the safest bet.

Necro before scourge had less than 2% representation in challenging content, that doesnt draw a rosy picture of the history of necromancer before scourge.

Obviously it's not perfect data, but it shows how masses will drift away from undesirable picks so it's stil an indicator of the perception of professions and specs.

Edited May 22, 2023 by Atomnium.1532

[Swagger.1459]

On 5/7/2023 at 1:26 PM, Invoker.5462 said:

All classes seem to have had their hour of fame.

But ele and necro have always had a place in all aspects of the game. At no point would wonder if a necro or an ele will be a useless addition to a group.

Unfortunately, not everyone has picked these two classes.
In fact, a human elementalist would have been the most likely to stick around the longest. As the human has the best camera angle, and elementalism has never suffered an identity crisis in any part of the game. 

They would have saved a lot of production money had they removed professions and races and had the human elementalist the only playable thing in the game. It seems as though this profession is used as a benchmark for every other profession, and has recieved the largest number of minor tweaks throughout the years.

The necro, in a similar vein, has always been a safe bet. You'd be safe in your assumption that a group of necros and ele's could get through 100% of the content in gw2 without much of a struggle.

Unfortunately i mained warrior and engineer, and have been constantly cut down from being a fan boy to completely and totally pessimistic about class balance for this game.

Well, you can only blame yourself for not rolling an ele or necro. I would suggest stop wasting even more time on the forums and just make them instead. 

[Burnfall.9573]

On 5/7/2023 at 1:30 PM, lezbefriends.7516 said:

I find it amusing that the two spellcaster classes are melee. Really turns away strategical players.

 

I main everything. This isn't that other MMO, where you're stuck with what you picked.

This

This is where Elementalist Profession including Mesmer Profession identities, roles and visions were intentionally stripped away in Guild Wars 2.

Guild Wars Respectively, Specifically designed and assigned Professions according to their roles and to their identities. 

-Damage--Kill as many foes in the most efficient manner

-Pressure--Force foes to expend resources and take inefficient actions

-Support--Maximize allied effectiveness while keeping them in the fight

-Control--Manipulating foe's actions, movements, and damage output

 

"The Value Of Identity Of Course Is That So Often With It Comes Purpose"