July 18th Necromancer Changes

[Degs.5148]

4 minutes ago, Aktium.9506 said:

The one legitimate complaint is that less shades means less cleave, and this in a world where Epidemic is a shadow of its former self.

Oops you stumbled on the point.

[Aktium.9506]

11 minutes ago, Degs.5148 said:

Oops you stumbled on the point.

Don't act like the majority of complaints are about worse cleave and not a misguided notion that APM increased.

[Nephalem.8921]

2 hours ago, Tiviana.2650 said:

So true, utterly deaf to the problems at this point.  ITS NOT FUN PLAYING SHADE SPAM ANET! Do you even play the class?

They force you to press buttons. Absolute horror. What comes next? Weapon swap?

1 hour ago, Arianth Moonlight.6453 said:

2 patches ago, my Reaper was doing 55k, then 38k then 45k then 37k... All with the exact same rotation.

When was it doing 55k? or 45k? It did not... Please dont make up things. It got slowly buffed from 34k to 40k.

 

They vastly overbuffed scourge damage AGAIN. Why does harb exist when scourge does more damage with less drawbacks? Is harb supposed to be the quick bot? We had 38k dps scourge before and it broke the game and got stacked everywhere. Now it does 41k... Totally fine. People totally wont stack scourges and virtus everywhere. slb, scourge and virtu are currently extremely overperforming for the effort they require. Cvirtu uses at least weapon swap unlike scourge or slb but is has an almost full signet bar.

They nerfed harb last patch by 1.8k or something just to buff scourge to 41k? What is this balance?

[Beheader.4287]

26 minutes ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

They force you to press buttons. Absolute horror. What comes next? Weapon swap?

When was it doing 55k? or 45k? It did not... Please dont make up things. It got slowly buffed from 34k to 40k.

 

They vastly overbuffed scourge damage AGAIN. Why does harb exist when scourge does more damage with less drawbacks? Is harb supposed to be the quick bot? We had 38k dps scourge before and it broke the game and got stacked everywhere. Now it does 41k... Totally fine. People totally wont stack scourges and virtus everywhere. slb, scourge and virtu are currently extremely overperforming for the effort they require. Cvirtu uses at least weapon swap unlike scourge or slb but is has an almost full signet bar.

They nerfed harb last patch by 1.8k or something just to buff scourge to 41k? What is this balance?

I was gonna ask if Harbinger is even worth playing, cause it feels like my condi Harbinger has trouble just taking out normal mobs sometimes xD if I do more on Condi Scourge and get barrier and other fun stuff, why am I even on Harbinger nerfing my HP?

[Arianth Moonlight.6453]

32 minutes ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

When was it doing 55k? or 45k?

when I tested it on the golem 2 patches ago. Ever since, I can't get a consistent damage.

[Shaogin.2679]

13 minutes ago, Arianth Moonlight.6453 said:

when I tested it on the golem 2 patches ago. Ever since, I can't get a consistent damage.

I dunno, I've been following the Snowcrows benchmarks and the dps for Reaper has only gone up. If you have some logs to post then go for it, but from what I have seen Reapers have been getting steady dps buffs lately. 

[Lily.1935]

I've been doing further testing and numbers go up seems to be the hype people are talking about but I've never been a person who's just satisfied with big numbers. If I was I'd be a berserker player. So from my perspective numbers go up doesn't mean more fun.

So far, I'm not enjoying the scourge. the 8 seconds is much too tight, and if you don't have both alacrity and quickness you wont be able to maintain your shades. Considering I do raids, strikes, open world, this looks like a change that only considers Raids and strikes were you can rely on having these boons. Going into open world in tougher maps with enemies which can actually kill you, like the Heart of Maguma, End of Dragons maps, Living world season maps, both not having these boons and fighting much tougher enemies means you'll frequently be unable to either set up or maintain your shades. This results in extremely sloppy and un fun experience.

IF you have any latency issues like if you, say, living in Australia, may Grenth have mercy on your soul, Scourge isn't going to be very fun for you. There is no room for error and barely any room for error in raids and strikes.

Buffs are one thing, but is it fun? And the answer for me at least is GOD NO! its dreadful.

[Thron Stal.9367]

12 hours ago, Lctl.6198 said:

So....ignored the 25+ pages feedback *again* 

GOT IT.

I truly give up at this point

Welcome to the Scrapper forums ROFL

[rotten.9753]

3 hours ago, Aktium.9506 said:

The one legitimate complaint is that less shades means less cleave, and this in a world where Epidemic is a shadow of its former self.

3 shades means up to 12 targets, with 41k+ benchmark, no weapon swap, mostly ranged, free barrier and condition cleanse it would be really overpowered, not that it's not already 🙂

[rotten.9753]

2 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

They vastly overbuffed scourge damage AGAIN. Why does harb exist when scourge does more damage with less drawbacks? Is harb supposed to be the quick bot? We had 38k dps scourge before and it broke the game and got stacked everywhere. Now it does 41k... Totally fine. People totally wont stack scourges and virtus everywhere. slb, scourge and virtu are currently extremely overperforming for the effort they require. Cvirtu uses at least weapon swap unlike scourge or slb but is has an almost full signet bar.

They nerfed harb last patch by 1.8k or something just to buff scourge to 41k? What is this balance?

It doesn't matter it OP now, because it's more spammy and because of classes homogenization, the two buzzwords thrown around here constantly. Scourge is now totally busted and oppressive and needs, together with cVirt and Slb, a quick balance pass.

[ericpeggy.8206]

Dear Anet

You really think 41k DPS is we really want?

[Lctl.6198]

5 hours ago, Aktium.9506 said:

These complaints about "shade spam" are absolutely clueless. Any Necro who has complained about it should feel ashamed. Prior to the patch you dunked out 3 shades at the fight start and pressed it off cooldown when it wouldn't interrupt a higher priority skill until the end. With alac, uptime was 100% on 3 shades. Now you do the exact same thing for less shades with the same bonus.

Rotionally, almost nothing changed for Condi Scourge in PvE. Making sure Nefarious Favor gets pressed off cooldown is way more important now than it was before, but that's it. But you already did press it off cd for the Dhuumfire procc so that's not really a big difference.

The one legitimate complaint is that less shades means less cleave, and this in a world where Epidemic is a shadow of its former self.

GG on ignoring the fact that most HScourge's used big shade instead and never touched 3 shades to begin with. 
Screw HScourge's right? Let's force an entire specc to use the same build when we had options pre-patch.

Even the 3 shades before, it allowed us time to adapt to the fight and perform any rotation or skill use in a clean and proper fashion. So it's kinda disingenuous to say we pressed them off cooldown before - since we didn't had to worry about them for a LONG TIME ( which remains the major complain about shades right now ). 

That's what changed, and it's ridiculous to ignore that change like you did. The time between the "spam" was a lot higher, now we *have* to constantly babysit them. There's no "choice" anymore, or adaptability. We're forced to do it out of necessity, constantly - cutting a LOT of time to do/press/use other skills entirely .

Pressing a button because it's fun VS Pressing a button because we have no other choice.

How some people don't understand that is beyond me.

[rotten.9753]

17 minutes ago, Lctl.6198 said:

GG on ignoring the fact that most HScourge's used big shade instead and never touched 3 shades to begin with. 
Screw HScourge's right? Let's force an entire specc to use the same build when we had options pre-patch.

HealScourge finally has a working build rather than a overpowered carry build used for progression only. F1 is used as barrier skill so you really have need to use it on low cooldown. With the other grandmaster trait you would have too many targets affected by its skills.

[Lctl.6198]

7 minutes ago, rotten.9753 said:

HealScourge finally has a working build rather than a overpowered carry build used for progression only. F1 is used as barrier skill so you really have need to use it on low cooldown. With the other grandmaster trait you would have too many targets affected by its skills.

Which no one asked for. HScourge players were perfectly happy with how the class worked - and the fact it wasn't used as desirable specc for clearing content doesn't justify making the class play like kitten to justify being another specc slave to an orange icon

[rotten.9753]

Just now, Lctl.6198 said:

Which no one asked for. HScourge players were perfectly happy with how the class worked - and the fact it wasn't used as desirable specc for clearing content doesn't justify making the class play like kitten to justify being another specc slave to an orange icon

If you say so. They were definitely happy to never play this build except occasionally on Boneskinner with bad groups.

[Fueki.4753]

The Shade duration is still horrible. Shade spam is not fun Arenanet. Give us back at least some of the duration.

When it's more fun to not use the specialization mechanic, then you should realize you made a big mistake.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Fueki.4753

[Dediggefedde.4961]

16 hours ago, Nanoir.2315 said:

Idk much about pve builds but why do they have to add unnecessary changes to wvw? What am I going to do with an alac scourge there? Make rams and catas go faster?

Exactly. And even that is already taken care of in organized groups thanks to support druid, tempest, and mech. And for roaming with the occasional cele renegade.

I had hoped the Patch from 18th of July would adjust some WvW related things from the june patch, but most of it is irrelevant for WvW.

We changed our setup in favor of dps harbingers and reapers with support druids, support firebrands, dps dragon hunters and dps scrappers.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

For all the people complaining, would you be happy with having the 20 sec shade duration back, but only having 1 shade? Basically have all shades act like sand savant, and sand savant only makes the shade bigger?

Asking for 3 shades and 20 sec duration is not going to happen because of wvw and possibly of maintaining 10 man alac.

[Lily.1935]

24 minutes ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

For all the people complaining, would you be happy with having the 20 sec shade duration back, but only having 1 shade? Basically have all shades act like sand savant, and sand savant only makes the shade bigger?

Asking for 3 shades and 20 sec duration is not going to happen because of wvw and possibly of maintaining 10 man alac.

No one is asking for 10 person alacrity and Several solutions have been presented to give that. And NO! we wouldn't be happy with just one shade at all times. I'd rather not have alacrity at all than deal with the 8 second duration. Which btw, if you have any latency issues, good luck playing a scourge. You wont be able to effectively.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

18 minutes ago, Lily.1935 said:

No one is asking for 10 person alacrity and Several solutions have been presented to give that. And NO! we wouldn't be happy with just one shade at all times. I'd rather not have alacrity at all than deal with the 8 second duration. Which btw, if you have any latency issues, good luck playing a scourge. You wont be able to effectively.

Then honestly you can not be reasonably satisfied. Necro is in the best place in the games history and people are screeching that the class is awful. This undermines actual complaints about the class.

We are a far from when necro got instant kicked from dungeons back in 2014, we now have 1 high preforming power build, 3 high preforming condi builds (one with low ramp, one with high ramp), a good quickness build, and now a good alac build. The only role we are week at is a healing role, but would require overhauling blood magic. And this patch shows that radical changes that makes Necro better will be meet with unfounded complaining, which will only lead to hesitation  about doing the changes we actually need.  Rezbot scourge was not a healthy healing role for the game.

[Lily.1935]

8 minutes ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

Then honestly you can not be reasonably satisfied. Necro is in the best place in the games history and people are screeching that the class is awful. This undermines actual complaints about the class.

We are a far from when necro got instant kicked from dungeons back in 2014, we now have 1 high preforming power build, 3 high preforming condi builds (one with low ramp, one with high ramp), a good quickness build, and now a good alac build. The only role we are week at is a healing role, but would require overhauling blood magic. And this patch shows that radical changes that makes Necro better will be meet with unfounded complaining, which will only lead to hesitation  about doing the changes we actually need.  Rezbot scourge was not a healthy healing role for the game.

So, the main build I used to run before the last patch was DPS scourge, not heal scourge. It was my bread and butter, my comfort space. It was the build I was known for in my guild. I praised scourge's mechanical design because of how well it all worked. It was dynamic, it was fluid. Sure it wasn't perfect, it has some flaws with shade casting were they wouldn't always register as being cast(A problem which persists), but it was the build that kept necromancer as my main.

Now, what you're failing to realize is just how much this warps the gameplay of scourge. Even from scourge's inception, with its recharge being rather high back then you could at least maintain one or two shades without too much of an issue and maintain those control points. That was in its design, it was baked into what its identity was. Now, the duration is one second longer than Desert shroud's duration. This puts you in a tight position to have to activate it right after cast. And the shade will vanish by the time its done. There is no room for different timing on this because if you don't its a DPS loss. Potentially a massive one, not just a condition duration loss but also potentially you miss some of the shroud damage ticks as well.

Try weaving in other skills during this time and its not fun. its quite cumbersome. It makes ever part of the rotation worse. Before you could fit in a few auto attack chains, get in your weapon skills and activate blood is power. You can't fit all of that in between required castings of Manifest sand shade. And if you don't have quickness, you wont be able to cast more than 3 other skills before you have to hit manifest sand shade again. I've been testing it, its miserable to play.

I played scourge back when it was 29k DPS and only taken as a DPS because of Epidemic. High Damage isn't why I play the spec, its mechanical design was. And that's something You need to understand because a small handful of you on here, yourself included just are not getting or not listening to.

What was a better solution? Well there are several which have been suggested.

1. Merge Sand Savant with Desert Empowerment as a single grandmaster trait and change the shade function to either pulse around the player or the shade, never both. Look at that, the target cap is solved and we don't need to nuke the shade duration to do it.
2. Have the Alacrity trigger as an AoE around your most recent shade either on manifest or on skill activation and not linked to Barrier at all. Another solution which keeps the target cap at 5. The Manifest barrier from Desert empowerment already functions like this so this isn't difficult to implement for arena net at all.
3. Have the shade duration being 8 seconds linked specifically to Desert Empowerment. Honestly the worst solution of the 3 but it still would work just fine and not harm the play ability of the other builds.

Arena net made a radical and unpopular change to a beloved mechanic to shoehorn a boon into it poorly. To say there's no pleasing me or others who don't like this, you're Logically, objectively and factually just wrong.

[Lctl.6198]

5 minutes ago, Lily.1935 said:

So, the main build I used to run before the last patch was DPS scourge, not heal scourge. It was my bread and butter, my comfort space. It was the build I was known for in my guild. I praised scourge's mechanical design because of how well it all worked. It was dynamic, it was fluid. Sure it wasn't perfect, it has some flaws with shade casting were they wouldn't always register as being cast(A problem which persists), but it was the build that kept necromancer as my main.

Now, what you're failing to realize is just how much this warps the gameplay of scourge. Even from scourge's inception, with its recharge being rather high back then you could at least maintain one or two shades without too much of an issue and maintain those control points. That was in its design, it was baked into what its identity was. Now, the duration is one second longer than Desert shroud's duration. This puts you in a tight position to have to activate it right after cast. And the shade will vanish by the time its done. There is no room for different timing on this because if you don't its a DPS loss. Potentially a massive one, not just a condition duration loss but also potentially you miss some of the shroud damage ticks as well.

Try weaving in other skills during this time and its not fun. its quite cumbersome. It makes ever part of the rotation worse. Before you could fit in a few auto attack chains, get in your weapon skills and activate blood is power. You can't fit all of that in between required castings of Manifest sand shade. And if you don't have quickness, you wont be able to cast more than 3 other skills before you have to hit manifest sand shade again. I've been testing it, its miserable to play.

I played scourge back when it was 29k DPS and only taken as a DPS because of Epidemic. High Damage isn't why I play the spec, its mechanical design was. And that's something You need to understand because a small handful of you on here, yourself included just are not getting or not listening to.

What was a better solution? Well there are several which have been suggested.

1. Merge Sand Savant with Desert Empowerment as a single grandmaster trait and change the shade function to either pulse around the player or the shade, never both. Look at that, the target cap is solved and we don't need to nuke the shade duration to do it.
2. Have the Alacrity trigger as an AoE around your most recent shade either on manifest or on skill activation and not linked to Barrier at all. Another solution which keeps the target cap at 5. The Manifest barrier from Desert empowerment already functions like this so this isn't difficult to implement for arena net at all.
3. Have the shade duration being 8 seconds linked specifically to Desert Empowerment. Honestly the worst solution of the 3 but it still would work just fine and not harm the play ability of the other builds.

Arena net made a radical and unpopular change to a beloved mechanic to shoehorn a boon into it poorly. To say there's no pleasing me or others who don't like this, you're Logically, objectively and factually just wrong.

Thank you.

The amount of people that say Necro is in it's best place ever only look at excel sheets and numbers. They entirely overlook that the class ( scourge in this case ) plays like kitten now
Scourge gameplay was never about big numbers and what not, but it compensated by having a really really really good flow of gameplay. The mechanical side and design was actually pretty good, interesting and rewarding.

Now it's pure BS and some people say it's fine because " BIG NUMBERS BRUH!".
I loved scourge because it meant not being a boon slave. Now scourge is *just another boon slave spec*

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

I haven't been able to test it myself, but I've heard that only 5 targets can ever get alacrity anyway from Scourge.  If this is true, there wasn't actually a need to nerf the shade duration in the first place to prevent 10 man alacrity.

[Dadnir.5038]

30 minutes ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

I haven't been able to test it myself, but I've heard that only 5 targets can ever get alacrity anyway from Scourge.  If this is true, there wasn't actually a need to nerf the shade duration in the first place to prevent 10 man alacrity.

You didn't understood well, scourge grant alacrity through desert empowerment whenever they grant barrier. which mean that without the change to manifest sand shades, sand cascade would provide alacrity to up to 12 friendly targets (right now you can still do 9 through sand cascade if you're ok with wasting shades uselessly).

That said, despite how people stress this idea as the reason behind the change that have been made, I doubt that it's the true reason. If anything I'd say that the issue is that peoples abused the coverage of the shades in PvE meta events and the devs just wanted to re-balance this coverage in such a way that Scourge lose it's edge over the other professions/e-specs.

[Boh.4568]

just give me back my corrupts in (WvW only), then you can continue gutting scourge in pve I don't care