July 18th Necromancer Changes

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

45 minutes ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

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.

I've seen people saying that Desert Empowerment will only apply alac to 5 people, regardless of how many you gave barrier to, and claimed to have tested it (but did not confirm that they tested it with Sand Cascade or Sandstorm Shroud).  I've been trying to get people to test it, but it's proving very difficult to get 5 volunteers to help.

Given the devs said the reason they nerfed the shade duration was to prevent upkeep of 10-man alacrity in the original stream, the best we can do is take them at their word.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Drarnor Kunoram.5180

[draxynnic.3719]

One thought that strikes my mind - if they're concerned about 10-player alacrity, could they just have the reduced duration on Desert Empowerment alone and revert the duration if you're using one of the others?

There's really no need for the duration reduction to keep alacrity limited to 5 targets on builds that aren't providing alacrity in the first place.

Edited July 19, 2023 by draxynnic.3719

[Drarnor Kunoram.5180]

9 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

One thought that strikes my mind - if they're concerned about 10-player alacrity, could they just have the reduced duration on Desert Empowerment alone and revert the duration if you're using one of the others?

There's really no need for the duration reduction to keep alacrity limited to 5 targets on builds that aren't providing alacrity in the first place.

ANet likes to balance around problems rather than addressing the problem directly.  This has been a longstanding thing since GW1.  You can see it today still with decisions like the shade duration nerf for everybody and the fact Reaper is the only way for Necro to have a decent power build.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Drarnor Kunoram.5180

[draxynnic.3719]

3 minutes ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

ANet likes to balance around problems rather than addressing the problem directly.  This has been a longstanding thing since GW1.  You can see it today still with decisions like the shade duration nerf for everybody and the fact Reaper is the only way for Necro to have a decent power build.

And then they do finally admit they have to address the problem directly, but refuse to admit that all the things they nerfed around the problem were nerfed in error and reverting them, leaving them non-viable indefinitely.

I'm a GW1 vet too, I know how it works. But hey, if a sensible suggestion is thrown into the ring there's at least a chance it will be picked up on.

[Nephalem.8921]

3 hours 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.

Ok so you were known for not knowing how to dps so you played scourge. You praised how few buttons you had to press and how little impact the order, rotation or generally you praised how little effort it required to achieve decent results. It was the go to beginner build for a reason.

3 hours ago, Lily.1935 said:

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.

You could control 4 control points because 3 shades were permanent. Now just 2.5. Desert shroud happens around caster aswell. As long as you are melee shade is just there for the expertise buff. Only ranged shades matter. Also if you place another shade during desert shroud it will pulse the shroud aswell. So no you dont have to time it at all. Its scourge afterall. Just press all the buttons. No brain required. Just like it was before.

3 hours ago, Lily.1935 said:

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.

? The cd is exactly the same. As dps scourge you pressed it on cd anyways because it did dmg and you required 3 for expertise.

3 hours ago, Lily.1935 said:

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.

You mean the lack of mechanical design or complexity was why you played scourge. Which is fine. You can still play like that and you will do even more dmg than before. And if you faceroll harder you can do 41k now. Ignoring scepter chains and just pressing skills on cd does 39k already.

3 hours ago, Lily.1935 said:

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.

You are objectively, factually and logically a "hi dps". Shade duration has almost no impact on dps scourge now. There is not a single situation where it will limit you in pve.

Edited July 19, 2023 by Nephalem.8921

[Dadnir.5038]

2 hours ago, Drarnor Kunoram.5180 said:

Given the devs said the reason they nerfed the shade duration was to prevent upkeep of 10-man alacrity in the original stream, the best we can do is take them at their word.

Let's be fair, I don't take what the devs say in podcasts as face value and I don't think anyone should do it either. The effective impact of the change is that Scourge are, for the majority of the time, limited to hitting 6 targets with their shades skills and this even the field with other professions in term of balance.

Now, that's my own opinions and I force nobody to share it.

[Batalix.2873]

If there is a five person barrier limit, they can afford to bump up the sand shade duration back to at least 12, 16, if not closer to the full 20 seconds.

But personally I think they should just go back to 10 man alac/quickness as the standard for those two boons. Remove the target cap and duration nerf. And then maybe tune down DPS numbers because Scourge always did too much damage for being able to tag so many targets--it should have always been more of a low-DPS pressure/area control class, not a DPS beast.

[Aktium.9506]

On 7/19/2023 at 9:39 AM, Lctl.6198 said:

Screw HScourge's right?

Heal Scourge in its prior form as a downed player vacuum had to go. So kinda yeah. Heal Scourge was a crutch that shouldn't have been allowed to exist for as long as it did.

The new Heal Scourge can comfortable generate party wide 25 Might, 100% Alac uptime, 100% Fury uptime, 100% Prot uptime, 100% Regen uptime, 60% Aegis uptime, has access to a lot of condi cleanse and outheals the Extreme aura on golem by a good margin. It fits into most compositions as a proper Alac Healer now.

On 7/19/2023 at 9:39 AM, Lctl.6198 said:

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 .

This is not even remotely true. If you weren't pressing shades off cooldown on condi dps scourge prior to the change you were absolutely dropping 100% uptime on 3 shades and by extension 5% condi duration or possibly even 10% if you were really slow on the usage. You're just punished harder for messing it up now by losing the entire 15% if you let shades drop to 0, which I support. Bad play should be punished, especially on an easy build like Scourge.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Aktium.9506

[culturespy.1324]

3 hours ago, Aktium.9506 said:

Heal Scourge in its prior form as a downed player vacuum had to go. So kinda yeah. Heal Scourge was a crutch that shouldn't have been allowed to exist for as long as it did.

I have a question but first just a little background: I never experienced old heal Scourge in raids or strikes. I had a little fun with it in open world on occasion though, and I was a little bummed to see an interesting play style just absolutely deleted like that. Especially since it seemed like it was done solely to make room for Scourge to become an alacrity bot which no one asked for, but that's beside the point...

Honest question: "it had to go" but... why? If people would never bother bringing the build to an experienced group, then it's irrelevant for the majority of people playing instanced content. And if it really did function as "training wheels" as I've seen it described, well doesn't that just help get people into the content and help the game grow? If it's broken in competitive, then nerf it for competitive. What's the actual problem with it?

Edited July 20, 2023 by culturespy.1324
Fixed incomplete sentence.

[soul.9651]

@Nephalem.8921 well scourge mains did it, they forced balance team to overbuff it again and it seems its gonna be even worse scourge stacking (probably worse than in the past when they changed torment). With cvirt and scourge having +41k balance its just kittened, cant wait for parties and squads full of them... And the fact that those "mains"are still complaining will give anet 2 choices either make balance even more kitten, idk how but they will manage.. or anet will tune down the scourge when they see soon how much it will be spammed in instanced content and never listen to any player feedback ever again(since the main reason why this kitten even started is thanks to a few genius people in forums who asked for alac on scourge to begin with..)

Edited July 20, 2023 by soul.9651

[Dadnir.5038]

2 hours ago, culturespy.1324 said:

What's the actual problem with it?

Power budget.

To put it simply the devs balance professions around this elusive concept of "power budget". By adding barrier pulse to sandstorm shroud, they created an imbalance in the "sustain support power budget" which meant that they needed to tune down something else as a trade off and they chose to trade off rallying potential for scourge only.

That said, the scourge rallying potential is now technically on equal ground with both reaper's and core's. Maybe there is also a will to create some sort of balance between the necromancer's e-specs as well. (Which make me wonder if harbinger will eventually experience something similar at some point of it's existence, after all, transfusion make voracious arc into a potential 10k heal/18% rally on a 6-7s CD.)

[rotten.9753]

2 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

@Nephalem.8921 well scourge mains did it, they forced balance team to overbuff it again and it seems its gonna be even worse scourge stacking (probably worse than in the past when they changed torment). With cvirt and scourge having +41k balance its just kittened, cant wait for parties and squads full of them... And the fact that those "mains"are still complaining will give anet 2 choices either make balance even more kitten, idk how but they will manage.. or anet will tune down the scourge when they see soon how much it will be spammed in instanced content and never listen to any player feedback ever again(since the main reason why this kitten even started is thanks to a few genius people in forums who asked for alac on scourge to begin with..)

If they won't listen to feedback from this forum, I'd say it's a big win.

[culturespy.1324]

4 hours ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

Power budget.

That's basically "we traded it for alac" from a different angle tho. It seemed to me that @Aktium.9506 and others feel "it had to go" even without the alacrity change. Like there's something intrinsically wrong with the old "training wheels" build existing in the first place. That's what I don't get. Thanks.

[Aktium.9506]

20 minutes ago, culturespy.1324 said:

It seemed to me that @Aktium.9506 and others feel "it had to go" even without the alacrity change. Like there's something intrinsically wrong with the old "training wheels" build existing in the first place. That's what I don't get. Thanks.

The whole training wheels rationalization for Heal Scourge was utterly unhinged nonsense at best. The build was at it's core, the strongest build in the entire game for what it brought. To claim it was only good as training wheels is deranged.

Heal Scourge during it's existence saw plenty of use during new squad content progression and raid races. It became a mainstay in many experienced groups because bruteforcing encounters by invalidating entire mechanics is very enticing for players who just want their weekly raid clear. I know many groups who used a heal scourge so much that they became reliant on it in a degenerative way. I myself having led hundreds of runs often gave in to the temptation of throwing heal scourge at a problem rather than fixing it or making sure an inexperienced player learns.

From ANet's perspective the build invalidated a plethora if not the majority of damage related mechanics that did not result in instant death. From a content design perspective this is incredibly limiting. Damage needs to matter in content designed to be challenging.

Edited July 20, 2023 by Aktium.9506

[culturespy.1324]

Thank you for explaining your position.

Can you comment on why so many would claim that experienced groups would never have needed or wanted a pre-patch heal Scourge, when that is counter to your experience?

Also, isn't it the goal of pretty much every group to skip any mechanic they can, usually by healing through the damage, so as to maximize DPS and end the encounter faster? Like, should any build that brings significant healing be sort of "on notice" that the nerf hammer may be coming down in the future?

Thanks again.

[Lily.1935]

8 hours ago, soul.9651 said:

@Nephalem.8921 well scourge mains did it, they forced balance team to overbuff it again and it seems its gonna be even worse scourge stacking (probably worse than in the past when they changed torment). With cvirt and scourge having +41k balance its just kittened, cant wait for parties and squads full of them... And the fact that those "mains"are still complaining will give anet 2 choices either make balance even more kitten, idk how but they will manage.. or anet will tune down the scourge when they see soon how much it will be spammed in instanced content and never listen to any player feedback ever again(since the main reason why this kitten even started is thanks to a few genius people in forums who asked for alac on scourge to begin with..)

We didn't force them to do anything, you think we have that kind of power and Actually, we warned them against the buffs. I for one actually said, that what they're doing is too strong, it wont be healthy. You're blaming us for something Arena net did, which is kinda kittened.

IF they listen to the scourge community it would be extremely healthy for the game. Scourge would be at 38-39k and Sand Savant would have a target cap of 5 that applies alacrity and the shade duration would be at 20 seconds again.

[TrueTyrant.6458]

I can't help but laugh at the community who think they have what it takes to balance a game. I'm not saying arenanet is perfect, they have and are still making many mistakes, and I also agree that feedback shouldn't be flat out ignored unless they acknowledge why they believe such feedback would be a bane than a boon.

But flat out saying "if they listened to us the game would be perfect!" is so delusional I can't help but cry from laughter. If you guys are so convinced you can balance the game better than they can then make your own MMO, then watch as it struggles to stay afloat while your playerbase complains about balance and constantly complain about anything.

Like the great Sakurai said, "Have you ever made a game bro?"

[Shadowmoon.7986]

4 hours ago, Lily.1935 said:

We didn't force them to do anything, you think we have that kind of power and Actually, we warned them against the buffs. I for one actually said, that what they're doing is too strong, it wont be healthy. You're blaming us for something Arena net did, which is kinda kittened.

IF they listen to the scourge community it would be extremely healthy for the game. Scourge would be at 38-39k and Sand Savant would have a target cap of 5 that applies alacrity and the shade duration would be at 20 seconds again.

They are never going to buff Sand Savant. Look at the wiki and the trait history. It was broken, and it took multiple nerfs to get it back in line, it completely unusable in wvw because how broken it is if it was useful. Putting alac there means no alac in wvw and pvp.

Honestly stop complaining about the good builds we have now and go back to writing fan fic about death magic. Scourge traits are is in a good place. We went from having 7 meme traits, to 4.

[culturespy.1324]

11 hours ago, Aktium.9506 said:

The whole training wheels rationalization for Heal Scourge was utterly unhinged nonsense at best.

Hey, sorry, I didn't quote you in my follow up so maybe it fell off your radar. Not that I'm calling special attention to this sentence, just quoting to ping you. Go back a few replies...

[Shuzuru.3651]

9 hours ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

They are never going to buff Sand Savant. Look at the wiki and the trait history. It was broken, and it took multiple nerfs to get it back in line, it completely unusable in wvw because how broken it is if it was useful. Putting alac there means no alac in wvw and pvp.

Honestly stop complaining about the good builds we have now and go back to writing fan fic about death magic. Scourge traits are is in a good place. We went from having 7 meme traits, to 4.

I looked at the wiki and history, look like a normal history for a trait, care to explain why it was broken and why they wouldn't add alac there? 

[Shadowmoon.7986]

7 hours ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

I looked at the wiki and history, look like a normal history for a trait, care to explain why it was broken and why they wouldn't add alac there? 

Look at the wvw version, it has 100% more recharge and hits the same number of targets as a normal shade, 2. So you are making a 15 sec big shade, that hits only 2 people, with a 30 sec recharge.  The trait actively makes shades worse in wvw.  Ultimately they only want the skill to hit 5 people.

Pvp, same 30 recharge, the target limit does not matter because of small scale nature of pvp. I guess it gets to hit minions, pets and summons, in a team fight, but that would require the entire team to be in a ball, which unlike wvw does not happen.

And sand savant is still really good in farming. It is now one of the only ways to hit 10 targets at once in pve. I will probably use it when I lab farm when halloween comings. 

[Shuzuru.3651]

2 hours ago, Shadowmoon.7986 said:

Look at the wvw version, it has 100% more recharge and hits the same number of targets as a normal shade, 2. So you are making a 15 sec big shade, that hits only 2 people, with a 30 sec recharge.  The trait actively makes shades worse in wvw.  Ultimately they only want the skill to hit 5 people.

Pvp, same 30 recharge, the target limit does not matter because of small scale nature of pvp. I guess it gets to hit minions, pets and summons, in a team fight, but that would require the entire team to be in a ball, which unlike wvw does not happen.

And sand savant is still really good in farming. It is now one of the only ways to hit 10 targets at once in pve. I will probably use it when I lab farm when halloween comings. 

Well, I mean, I know how to read a skill history, what I asked you is why was it broken and why would buffing it be a problem, considering the fact it's actually in a weak state. 

Edited July 21, 2023 by Shuzuru.3651

[Shadowmoon.7986]

17 minutes ago, Shuzuru.3651 said:

Well, I mean, I know how to read a skill history, what a asked you is why was it broken why would buffing it be a problem, considering the fact it's actually in a weak state. 

Way too much zone coverage. Big shade is the size of a capture point and the scourge is another capture point. The fireband scourge combo felt very oppressive when pof launched.

Wvw, way too much cleave and boon corrupt. Basically you can run with the zerg ball cleaving 5 people while your big boo is cleaving and boon corrupting another 5 people elsewhere. 

[soul.9651]

Amazing, scourge stacking is back :') cant wait to see wingman data in a week or two, gz you kittened the game with all this complaining for those who played any instanced content and enjoyed varianty 🙂

[Nephalem.8921]

On 7/20/2023 at 5:32 PM, Lily.1935 said:

We didn't force them to do anything, you think we have that kind of power and Actually, we warned them against the buffs. I for one actually said, that what they're doing is too strong, it wont be healthy. You're blaming us for something Arena net did, which is kinda kittened.

IF they listen to the scourge community it would be extremely healthy for the game. Scourge would be at 38-39k and Sand Savant would have a target cap of 5 that applies alacrity and the shade duration would be at 20 seconds again.

Scourge being at 39k would be far from being healthy for the game.