Is core necro an option?

[KrHome.1920]

There is a fact about core that is crucial about roaming and that is that you can never ever reposition yourself or god forbid disengage from a fight. And you have no stability. You have just an absurdly high shroud uptime. If two competent players focus you, then you are basically cc'd at one spot until you die.

 

You play a reaction class. You can not control the fight. Your target can engage and disengage and spike you at will. Not everyone likes that.

 

PvE: full soldier reaper has a higher dps (and 3 times the cleave) than full berserk core. Who wants to play that? MMOs are time consuming enough. Why would anyone want to play a spec that needs twice as long for every content as any other spec?

[Dadnir.5038]

> @"KrHome.1920" said:

> You have just an absurdly high shroud uptime.

 

I don't think 5 whole extra potential seconds of shroud are worth the adjectives "absurdly high uptime" granted that in general you just want to stay 10 seconds in shroud out of the potential 20s (RS) - 25s (DS), especially in PvE. The difference in shroud uptime isn't significative anymore since they brought DS back up to 4% decay in sPvP/WvW where a high uptime might be perceived as a strong point.

 

> PvE: full soldier reaper has a higher dps (and 3 times the cleave) than full berserk core. Who wants to play that? MMOs are time consuming enough. Why would anyone want to play a spec that needs twice as long for every content as any other spec?

 

While the attack speed is a significant factor in PvE, the cleave isn't when you essentially bash onto a single big lump of health point (which is boss fights in a nutshell). The need for cleave used to have meaning pre HoT, in the dungeon era, after HoT it became less important in PvE end game (it's a good QoL for open PvE but not much more).

 

The main issue of the death shroud in PvE is the horrifyingly slow auto attack rate. The fact that it hit hard is supposed to save it but in practice it doesn't. The death shroud also don't offer an extra source of power damage over time (nor does the core weaponsets) that could be added to the AA making it essentially unfit as a dps tool.

 

Having a high uptime of high hits rate is often what make other professions deal high amount of damage, the core shroud does not offer the option for such a thing nor does the core profession's utilities and weapon skills. That's the issue of the core necromancer as a dps. However, as a potential meta pick the issue of the core necromancer in PvE is mainly the fact that it's designed role is essentially negated by PvE design even after all the bandaid fix that ANet introduced.

[KrHome.1920]

Core shroud uptime is not only determined by life force degeneration, but the core mechanic and the trait options as a whole, which gives it a lot more tank options than reaper.

 

Reaper is melee and this means potentially more vulnerable and it can't run 3 defensive traitlines and even if it runs 2, then it lacks damage to compensate the risks it faces with its melee mechanic. Regarding 2 def. traitline builds: it is no breaking news here that I think the BM, SR meta reaper is trash (not to mention any DM reaper) if you run into someone that knows how reaper works - I've never lost to that build.

 

I did not speak about boss mashing, but about open world, living story and stuff. That's what 95% of the playerbase does for 95% of their ingame time. Core is poor in that environment because it wastes life time in an inacceptable and unnecessary way. It offers a minion build for afk farmers and that's it.

[Shroud.2307]

> @"KrHome.1920" said:

 

> You play a reaction class. You can not control the fight. Your target can engage and disengage and spike you at will. Not everyone likes that.

 

I think that's an accurate statement.

 

As myself and many others have said before, Necro relies on proper positioning more so than any other class. So long as you can learn to do this effectively, limited mobility becomes a lot less of an issue. You just need to know when to move and where to move before you're caught in the open, a bit like playing Frogger. Always have an escape plan and never overstay your welcome, always know where you're going to move next ahead of time and try to avoid being the center of attention. Doing "jumping puzzles" in small scale fights _(hopping on/around difficult terrain and objects)_ is key to avoiding spikes and baiting people in to over extending.

[Dadnir.5038]

> @"KrHome.1920" said:

> I did not speak about boss mashing, but about open world, living story and stuff. That's what 95% of the playerbase does for 95% of their ingame time. Core is poor in that environment because it wastes life time in an inacceptable and unnecessary way. It offers a minion build for afk farmers and that's it.

 

Bosses are all over PvE, not just in raid. I'm pretty sure most players spend a great deal of time bashing bosses or more commonly foes benefiting from defiance's OPness. As for core in open PvE (the largest part of the game), I don't think it got less value than scourge or reaper, I don't even think that their lower damage there make much of a difference.

[Anchoku.8142]

> @"Dadnir.5038" said:

> > @"KrHome.1920" said:

> > I did not speak about boss mashing, but about open world, living story and stuff. That's what 95% of the playerbase does for 95% of their ingame time. Core is poor in that environment because it wastes life time in an inacceptable and unnecessary way. It offers a minion build for afk farmers and that's it.

>

> Bosses are all over PvE, not just in raid. I'm pretty sure most players spend a great deal of time bashing bosses or more commonly foes benefiting from defiance's OPness. As for core in open PvE (the largest part of the game), I don't think it got less value than scourge or reaper, I don't even think that their lower damage there make much of a difference.

 

Necro's main hand dagger cleaves 2 targets; one additional besides the target. That was an update a few years after release when dagger had no cleave at all. Large hit boxes have 3 targets. Whatever reason there was to limit dagger in the past may no longer apply; especially now that each game mode can be balanced separately. Hacking a third of the dps off dagger's auto-attack on large hit boxes when the number of targets can be adjusted as is with shades seems like something obvious to fix.

 

It is hard to buff core Necro's dps without also buffing its elites but there are opportunities now that Arenanet can tweak numbers between game modes. I also do not mind paying a price to make core less uncompetitive.

 

Also, there are other core professions that need attention so it is not as if I struggle only with core Necro being "one size fits all" and "nothing works especially well."