Necromancy and the June 27 Balance Patch

[Zdac.3947]

Necromancy is the practice of magical sorcery involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions, or by resurrection for the purpose of divination; imparting the means to foretell future events; discovery of hidden knowledge; “returning a person to life”, or to use the dead as a weapon.  I took this from Wikipedia, so here's a grain of salt, but it seems close.

The upcoming balance patch seems to take a core doctrine of the Necromancer and throw it away. Maybe Anet's patch will include a new profession name, because it will not be a Necromancer any more. After taking away an ability to raise the dead and providing alacrity, maybe they'll rename this new profession, Mage or Sorcerer or Wizard.

I am a very casual player. I don't have time for theorycrafting. When a content creator provides a build and explains the synergy between various traits and skills, I understand them, but have no time to puzzle it out myself. Ergo, I will not comment how these changes will affect the Necro profession. But I can listen to the content creators who devote much of their time to this gaming hobby we all love. Listen...

“...many of the Necro's ways of converting boons into conditions, which is one of their main things, is gone. I really hope this doesn't go through. These are like class defining features they are taking away to give them alacrity.” - Mukluk

“They are taking away the reviving, it still has terrible healing and giving it alacrity; who is going to want that in their party?” - Mukluk

“Necromancer. I want to say in advance, I am so sorry.” - Mukluk

“Let's talk about Necromancers. Oh, no... oh, no, no, no.  Oh, no, no, no.” - Teapot

“This is an apocalypse nerf to Scourge in my opinion.” - Teapot

“I actually think this genuinely nukes Scourge to extremely mediocre. In fact I will say it will become underpowered from the damage build. This is a huge colossal nerf to everything the Scourge can do.” - Teapot

Ok, I cherry picked some quotes here, but that doesn't diminish what they said.

In addition to flat out deleting Scourge, Anet is clearly hell bent on removing boon rip from all classes. One forum member said it best, Anet's goal is 99% boon application and 1% boon removal. In the June 27 Balance Update forum post, Anet was vague and ambiguous about their “primary goals.” They listed 4 bullet points that could translate to anything. But their actions in this “balance” patch speaks clearly. There are several threads in the WvW forums on boon rip. Most All are in favor of increasing boon rip, not nerfing into the twilight zone. One thread included a survey that clearly shows adding boon rip to the game is what the WvW player base wants. However, that is not what Roy wants. Or Cal. They must be loving the idea of 4 hour stalemates between boonballs.

[Ashen.2907]

I dislike the changes to Scourge as well, but how do those changes cause the Necromancer class to no longer merit the name as per your quoted definition of necromancy? 

[The Boz.2038]

There is nothing to like in the necro changes.
Nothing.
Not a single good one.
The alacrity one? They botched it; should have been Sand Savant, but for some reason, they elected to nerf the entire spec instead.

[maxwelgm.4315]

19 hours ago, Ashen.2907 said:

I dislike the changes to Scourge as well, but how do those changes cause the Necromancer class to no longer merit the name as per your quoted definition of necromancy? 

Not the OP, but they're removing most of the boon corruption present all across the board as well as reducing in major ways the capacity to resurrect allies. Both things have been defining characteristics of the profession, but on the other hand they kinda limited what devs could give Necro since they already did have these very unique (and situationally extremely powerful) capabilities. 

So in order to give Necro alacrity - and fulfill what I guess is the goal of properly homogenizing the entire game with all classes being capable of quickness/alacrity - they turned the rest of the kit into a subpar version of the kits from other classes. This is true in general though. Removing unique buffs made sense but let's see what happens going forward with this much degree of homogeneity. 

[Dadnir.5038]

23 hours ago, Zdac.3947 said:

Necromancy is the practice of magical sorcery involving communication with the dead by summoning their spirits as apparitions or visions, or by resurrection for the purpose of divination; imparting the means to foretell future events; discovery of hidden knowledge; “returning a person to life”, or to use the dead as a weapon.  I took this from Wikipedia, so here's a grain of salt, but it seems close.

Curious, I'd say that in many ways, the patch can be defined by this quote.

[susana.7814]

the one i dont understand is the nerf to vile vials reducing elixer cooldowns....there's literally no reason to pick that trait now

[Mewsha.3561]

The boon corruption removal is entirely unnecessary and is the easiest thing to strike from the list of Necro nerfs. It's truly indefensible and lazy.

The main problem with boon corruption is specifically how might is corrupted into fear. The person who uses any ability that grants them might gets totally screwed in an interaction with a Necro. That shouldn't happen, but the solution isn't to remove boon corruption. The solution is to make it so might converts into something else. Problem solved. There's now no need to remove boon corruption and in WvW at least we'll still have something to deal with the boon balls they pretend they do not see.

There's also got to be a better way to apply alacrity to Scourge other than tying it to its barriers. I seriously doubt that anyone on the balance team plays Necro at the moment, but I know they do not play Scourge if they think nerfing sand shades from 20 secs to 8 secs isn't going to kill that elite spec. Just a horrible change and one that isn't going to matter because people are still going to prefer Mechanist, so who is this change for? It's not for the Necro mains, it's so Anet can say that every class has access to alacrity/quickness.

The only controversial change that I see people talk about is Heal Scourge, which is really only used for Boneskinner because of its ability to pull downed players from grasp that would otherwise be completely lost, and that does trivialize the fight. However, outside of that almost nobody plays Heal Scourge because nobody wants to make room for Heal Scourge. It requires a specific comp, and when I heard that alacrity could be potentially on the table for Scourge, I thought they were going to be addressing that problematic duality of Heal Scourge where it's only used in one encounter, and completely discarded in everything else. Instead their solution is to delete something that is a really cool concept unique among MMOs because they can't be bothered.

[Tyrian.7420]

Since the topic of giving everything access to Quick/Alac came up I've always thought the better fit would be for it to go with Reaper.

Scourge in its various forms if fairly unique in what it does. The heal and hybrid options have value in specific locations  It was fine as is and it wont displace any of the current healers just straight up giving it alac.

Reaper on the other hand was just a mediocre damage spec when the recent changes started, It's been buffed and now its pretty decent. So keep the damage but add an alac trait that competes with the damage options. A change to Blighter's Boon to now pulses alac in shroud and shouts grant alacrty. It competes with Reaper's Onslaught which adds damage to power builds with raw stats and cooldown reductions and Deathly Chill which Turns chill into bleeding. Start with just a combination of shroud and 2 shouts giving full alac uptime then if the damage is too high, make adjustments and scale it down so you need Diviner's or Ritualists to compensate. It'd be easy enough to implement, easy enough to adjust and it'd still play like a Reaper.

Across the 3 specs you would end up with Reaper and Harbinger on the more offensive side of things offering Quickness or Alacrity and Scourge on the defensive side of things offering a unique situational healer as well as a survivable DPS that works well in a lot of situation.

[August Valek.9368]

For context, I main a warlock in wow, when I get invited to a party I know what I am good at, I'm not expected to be a tank or a healer.  Now, when I started playing necromancer I felt right at home with all the pets, the clearly evil profession that is somehow one of the good guys, but then I got the expansion and my mind was blown away  when I discovered I could double down as a healer, some kind of weird healer, but fun to play and in line with what would I expect from a profession that dances around with death, is not a "meta" build, but is fun to have because why not, after all a necromancer is not supposed to be a healer, and with the new patch this healer build will be bad at what it was good, gaining maybe some extra healing from regen and alacrity, in exchange the dps build which should be the primary use of the specialization gets gutted with boon corruption removed and weak shades that will force us to spam f1 more than before.  I swear if they go through with this idiocy I'll quit the game, at least in wow I'm not gonna  log in one day to discover they are gonna take away unstable affliction (one of the warlock core damaging spells) for regrowth (some druid healing spell or something).

Edited June 14, 2023 by August Valek.9368
spelling

[lovemghool.7613]

The boon corruption removal makes necromancer's condition output extremely low and even niche traditional builds like terrormancer no longer viable. This also gives so much more power to cleansing where you can no longer kill builds with alot of  condition cleanse. Condi cleanses and conversions to boons over the year have been buffed so much, you cant just nuke every boon corruption on weapons and traits just because condi reaper is doing somewhat well in pvp. 

Ridiculous. 

[DEATHsCLAW.1978]

11 hours ago, lovemghool.7613 said:

The boon corruption removal makes necromancer's condition output extremely low and even niche traditional builds like terrormancer no longer viable. This also gives so much more power to cleansing where you can no longer kill builds with alot of  condition cleanse. Condi cleanses and conversions to boons over the year have been buffed so much, you cant just nuke every boon corruption on weapons and traits just because condi reaper is doing somewhat well in pvp. 

Ridiculous. 

boon corruption is getting removed bc anet wants to limit it in wvw for scourge especially. I doubt they had pvp in mind at all. 

rest is absolutely correct. I doubt necro will be anywhere close to meta in pvp, not even in teamfight compositions.

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

it's just a result of anet nerf tide once again, and without any second thought

like, no clue what they are thinking, the changes make just zero sense

i cannot rate the pve changes, but for Wvw one it's really horrific. 90% will kill the class of scourge fully off

[Downstate.4697]

Obviously they did it for a reason and failed to tell us why.

[DEATHsCLAW.1978]

i think they mentioned it on stream, they want to change the wvw meta if I recall it correctly. to them, ranged aoe booncorrupt is a problem.

tbh scourge has been dominant in wvw zergs for the last years becaus of its massive ranged aoe-booncorrupt options. if they want to change the zerg meta in wvw the boon corruption changes are necessary.

the sad part is that anes doesn't see that the booncorruption is the only reason necro is being picked over other classes in competitive modes. nerfing that without compensation will result in necro being trash tier in those modes. postpatch I expect necro to have one metabuild gamewide which is pve reaper..

[Lctl.6198]

If these changes go through, it will make my decision to drop the game even easier.

I love HScourge. I know it's niche, I know it's not "accepted" by most PUGs anyway. I *accepted* that a long time ago.

And then comes Anet, pretending to be the good guys, pretending to make HScourge PUG Viable ( as if there weren't better options still), by destroying the entire class for *one* stupid boon.

 

That ain't right.

Edited June 16, 2023 by Lctl.6198

[KrHome.1920]

7 hours ago, Downstate.4697 said:

Obviously they did it for a reason and failed to tell us why.

A good reason would be to nerf the base duration of every applied boon to 3 seconds. I bet they just forgot to tell us.🙃

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

On 6/16/2023 at 8:34 AM, DEATHsCLAW.1978 said:

i think they mentioned it on stream, they want to change the wvw meta if I recall it correctly. to them, ranged aoe booncorrupt is a problem.

tbh scourge has been dominant in wvw zergs for the last years becaus of its massive ranged aoe-booncorrupt options. if they want to change the zerg meta in wvw the boon corruption changes are necessary.

the thing is, they did several changes on this yet, scourge lost like 50%+ of it's former corruption output from sneaky changes, but they killed the specs now

reaper will probs take it's role for the first part, maybe some core memes, but scourge isn't worth anymore. rip wheelchair

[ZeftheWicked.3076]

Guild Wars 2 has 8 professions. And a Necromancer.

This is a fact that the dev team needs to understand and stop fighting it.
Since day one necro is the odd one out, and ironically it does game good.

This profession should not be "homogenized" as that was never it's role.
It's role is to police and counter the other 8 in their ways, while being countered by them.

Necro does not do evades or iframes. But he can deny evades (spectral ring) and wait out Iframes because he's a class of attrition.

Necro is not there to vomit out party boons left and right, he's there to corrupt them on enemies.
Well now he can share lotsa boons as Harb, but that's an e-spec feature.
Gutting boon corrupts on every turn is not an e-spec nerf, it's an overall necro nerf.

Necro heals his own unique way - with barriers and ressing instead of big green numbers.
And that's good. He's supposed to do things his way without a care for how the rest of the pack does things.

But a-net in it's infinite wisdom (nearling 200 years of Riot's game design experience) decides necro needs an outgoing healing boost (which does not work for either barriers or resses) while dimishing scourge barriers baseline, cause alacrity. Which is an option to be selected and not a baseline feature.

Edited June 17, 2023 by ZeftheWicked.3076

[draxynnic.3719]

On 6/13/2023 at 10:14 PM, The Boz.2038 said:

There is nothing to like in the necro changes.
Nothing.
Not a single good one.
The alacrity one? They botched it; should have been Sand Savant, but for some reason, they elected to nerf the entire spec instead.

Put alacrity on big shade, normalise big shade and big shade scourge to 3 targets each for 6 total, no need for shade uptime nerfs?

[Shadowmoon.7986]

On 6/13/2023 at 7:14 AM, The Boz.2038 said:

There is nothing to like in the necro changes.
Nothing.
Not a single good one.
The alacrity one? They botched it; should have been Sand Savant, but for some reason, they elected to nerf the entire spec instead.

They did not touch reaper. That is the best part.

[Zex Anthon.8673]

1 hour ago, ZeftheWicked.3076 said:

he's a class of attrition.

You lost me. What part of necro screams "class of attrition"? It's the only class that has to maintain a mana source in order to defend itself. 

In a sense you are correct. Necro is the "class of attrition" because every other class can win with superior mobility, CC, and some patience. Life Force will drain eventually.

[DEATHsCLAW.1978]

46 minutes ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

They did not touch reaper. That is the best part.

they did. they killed procreaper in pvp..

[Adonaj.7932]

On 6/16/2023 at 9:34 AM, DEATHsCLAW.1978 said:

i expect necro to have one metabuild gamewide which is pve reaper..

well condi and quick condi harb is in pretty good spot currently. and reaper ofc after buffs. but ye scourge is dead. i  hope it will not go on live server.

[God.5728]

I deeply regret spending all my gold buying bag slots to expand my Necromancer's inventory now.

Edited June 18, 2023 by God.5728

[Zex Anthon.8673]

26 minutes ago, God.5728 said:

I deeply regret spending all my gold buying bag slots to expand my Necromancer's inventory now.

Ask for a refund. Then don't give them any more money.