Necrotic Edge needs changes

This WPS animation is still too long, and it becomes even longer during lag spikes. I won’t guess why that happens, maybe the animation is heavy on the engine, or on the CPU, or smth else, i’m no expert here, but it does happen. It’s hard to illustrate properly because the biggest problem is during lags which occur when there is too much stuff on the screen to tell things apart. Here is just one example outside of clutter:

During the Zantarin fight, note how long the Necrotic swing is and how late the impact happens (jump to the end to observe the same effect during final fights vs Zantarins). This allows monsters not only to sometimes dodge the hits by sidestepping but also simply to kill you if you receive two heavy hits during this long animation. Basically to take this WPS you need to cover yourself with another layer of defense.

The nail in the Necrotic’s coffin for me was this build which had Necrotic at 13/12 at first:
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/YNn8XrGV

Aside from bad animation, it illustrated another big flaw of the skill - chance to confuse. Enemy confusion is detrimental to a dedicated melee build, both for performance and survivability. Confused monsters lose aggro, spread around, recover their skills, have a chance to be healed.

The melee ability to deal high burst dmg in a small AoE is effectively countered by confusion which acts like a smart retreat - a forbidden technology for Grim Dawn fauna. It confuses me greatly, why a melee(ranged) WPS would have confusion on it.

Long story short, i removed Necrotic for dual Seal of the Void. The build became faster and more reliable.

Every dedicated melee build i’ve ever made with Necrotic suffered from these issues, and they were much more profound with 2H (even slower animation). One exception is Reaper with Spectral Battle Axes, due to synergy between high WD and high %WD bonuses from the items.

If the skill is currently balanced around this poor animation, i suggest to nerf the numbers but buff the animation.

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The confusion effect is terrible for melee - please remove it! :+1:

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For my experience, it’s the WPS that has the slowest animation speed; especially for DW melee. 2H version seems smoother (or atleast to me). I usually skip it if I have another option/build has no modifiers to it etc but sometimes you stuck with it and then you must hardcap it so it can worth the effort. It’s a dps loss if you use it as one pointer without proper conversion etc.

I’m also playing with a DW Reaper recently https://www.grimtools.com/calc/q2Mw8R7Z which has the same problem, slow NE…

+1 for faster animation speed.

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pardon my noobness
but can’t confuse actually be good for melee?, since it only affect those already in range, and assuming a decent attack speed, it doesn’t/“shouldn’t” give them much room to move too far away while zerking?, - and yet still safely benefiting from interrupting their skill usage ? :thinking:
or is that just because i’m a filthy casul not noticing something larger ?

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I used to love tossing Flashbangs for Confusion back when I first started playing, but then I realized it just complicated things when fighting susceptible monsters (and groups of them!).

When in melee, you’re best defense is killing the mobs ASAP. Having to chase them around makes you more vulnerable to death as you are not hitting them and are therefore not getting healed from ADCtH. Just like you can “side step” a SS from Fabius or a Blitz from a charging monster, they can do the same to you. If they move away when you are attacking, you miss.

Missing attacks or not being able to attack at all due to distance is a loss of healing/damage and is a huge problem when combined with what banana_peel mentioned about confusion’s negative effects in the first post:

Confusion can be great for Ranged and for Casting classes though, albeit less so for characters using shorter range attacks such as FoI or Drain Essence as they are range-limited.

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yeye, but i totally get it using ex flashbang or ill omen,
but suppose i just feel like when in melee and attacking quick that it just feels like i’m "always in range"automatically anyway, so the confuse appears less of downside to me i guess :thinking:
doubt i’m “pro” enough to pay attention to/notice a mob sidestepping a melee swing in necrotic edge range :sweat_smile: - but i understand it in theory i think

Well, I’m not a “pro” player as well, and had NE on melee Oppressor. While not noticing much improvement when using it (at rank 5 though), I also didn’t notice much disruption despite having another source of Confuse from Imp.

Terrify retaliation from Dying God is a real bitch though. Trash mobs go full “pedal to the metal” mode which is highly annoying for melee.

There is no substantial difference between Necrotic Edge and other WPS skills in terms of animation.

In fact it has less frames and the hit occurs at earlier frames than some of the others, including the Nightblade WPS. Its damage is comparable to other WPS if not on the higher end.

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It doesn’t feel like it, maybe it’s all in my head but I always thought Belgothian Shears and Necrotic Edge has a very noticable long animation ends with a milisec stop that somehow disrupts your attack pace(noticable means by eyes with max speed, you rarely catch AQC, Whirling Death or you can’t notice Reaping Strike or Smite without their colour effect for example). Maybe problem is about attack speed scale? That would explain why it feels smoother with 2H since you rarely have max AS with those builds everything looks normal with low speed.

Anyway since you’re saying there is no difference from other WPS then we are probably overthinking on the matter.

Lol if you think Belgo Shears is slow now, then you will be surprised that it got a boost in speed at least twice in the past i believe.

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Especially telling since Reaping Strike and Necrotic Edge have the exact same timing.

Not sure what that means. WPS don’t have different AS scaling.

I’ve moved up its animation interrupt by a tenth of a second. Maybe that will feel smoother, or nobody will notice. Who can say.

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I have the same experience. Whenever i can skip Belgo on NB i do (if i don’t have many ranks and i don’t benefit from phys part).

Everyone i discussed builds with and who plays melee has the same experience with Necrotic. The only difference in opinion is if NE is worse for 2H or DW.

I know NE probably looks good in terms of numbers coded and it should be the end of it. I’m just reporting my experience with literally hundreds of build variations involving NE. And in the last build, where i lost a lot of dmg from two vitality components, took two supposedly inferior WPS and ended up with a better build (30 runs recorded) - this doesn’t make any sense and tipped me over the edge to make this thread.

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i think maybe you have lower regards of Burning Void than it maybe deserves :thinking:
i’ve used it too on a couple of builds, “sacrificing” that 10 phys conversion, but frequently the stats make up for it
an obvious reason why it could also be helping your build in this example is
you have minimal phys dmg to lose on the conversion
you have decent ele and chaos conversion -> resulting in a ton of flat dmg
Burning Void has more flat dmg and WD than Necrotic Edge
^you are converting a bigger portion of flat dmg on Burning Void than Necrotic Edge
“all” you have on necrotic edge is dot/3secs

even animation speed/hit timing aside, by default from your conversions on the inherent stats on Burning Void you just have a more efficient wps there, because flat>dot i reckon, when there are no NE modifiers to boost it “above” the 1:1 flat/direct comparison values there

Incorrect. With NE I had 142% WD and 101 flat and 450(3) dot (very important for low aoe melee) with 180 arc and 5 target at 27% chance VS 140% WD and 180 effective flat on Burning Void with 150 arc and 3 targets at 32% chance. These are pretty similar numbers. Two Seals of Blight gave me a lot of % dmg, flat and crit. Seals of the Void gave me 8% AS which i had overcapped already.

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I finally got around to recording video and watching on the vitality pistol oppressor that I took reaping strike and not necrotic edge on originally when I thought the latter was slower. At least for pistols, it does indeed appear that Z is correct (a first amirite) and the firing animation is exactly the same speed. 200% AS, tests with both single WPS and full WPS blend.

So they both fire off the same, but compared to smite in the same build, the time before the next shot happened/animation ended appeared to be longer. I admittedly didn’t go full side by side video try hard, but did do a bunch of watching! Assuming the animation numbers on Smite are tighter.

Still on the fence if I’ll take necrotic edge on most ranged builds going forward, but that has more to do with the skill and utility than the animation now. The arc and multiple targets are not applicable for ranged, so unless I have full conversion to take advantage of the extra damage over RS, the leech in the latter is always going to get my attention first.

I honestly don’t know how anyone can notice these hypothetical differences in WPS animation speeds. Sure, if they exist, they might be detectable with careful testing and slow motion replays, but how could anyone notice those differences in real time, it just confuses me.

Sad to report nothing has changed. 30% Necrotic chance with insane modifiers to it can still get you killed during the animation.

The hitreg on it comes soooo late, after the whole long animation is completely over. Similar thing i’ve noticed with Whirling Death but to lesser extent. Another thing, sometimes your char manages to miss with this WPS even with 100% hit chance and no fumbles around. No idea why. Maybe partly because with delayed hitreg on NE monsters have more frames to interrupt it.

When you have NE you can feel it in your bones. It’s like your char is taking a sip from a cup of tea every time NE procs. NE is basically a separation between melee builds: if you have it you must get extra layers of defense.

Could be related to frame drop problems? No idea, really. My rig is an overkill for GD anyway. But why is it NE alone that feels that off? Very sad because Reaper is one of my fav classes and i wanted to test more melee things with it.

Ragarding frame punishment brought up in the other thread:

48 secs of hitting dummy each
With NE: 166 attacks, 52 NE procs
Without NE: 174 attacks

52 NE attacks were equal to 60 normal attacks, with no effects around. In crowded environment the difference becomes worse, maybe because with such delayed hitreg the game has more opportunities to skip frames and deny you of hitreg.

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Oh my. I thought DW NE was bad. 2H NE somehow became even worse. In a mob, when monsters are bouncing around, half the time there is zero hitreg. And then when the dmg actually come through, my leech falls to zero out of nowhere. And it’s on a build with TWO WPS with innate leech and 18% life leech.
https://www.grimtools.com/calc/mN49Xll2

Sure it’s glassy on paper. But the incoming dmg is not problem at all. It’s just the leech drops to zero and there is nothing you can do.

What an absolute horror of experience, good Lord.

Am i going crazy? Unlikely. Can somebody else share their late experience with Necrotic Edge?

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I don’t understand why a WPS with attack arc like NE can “miss” inside a mob, with no fumble around, and get you killed. I’m sorry I’m not being helpful but perhaps you can make another video illustrating the problem to get Zantai’s attention, because to me it sounds more like a bug and nothing to do with NE having a late frame hit or slow animation.

Also cool build. I know from experience tri-elemental melee builds are the hardest to make.

Tbh i’m pretty exhausted with all the tests and videos rn. As you can see, there is a good display of DW problems with NE in the OP video which lead to no results. Taking another round of videos for 2H, dissecting them frame by frame to find flaws and then defend your stance for several pages… i think it’s a little too much to ask from a washed up player.

I’m reporting a problem (which i rarely do), my results are so glaring they are way outside of observation error. There is a reason you don’t see good 2H AA builds with Necro like… ever? The only one i can remember is Arcblade Spellbinder with Beronath’s Fury filler. But Binder, obviously, has no survivability problems.

In the end you just have to try it and feel for yourself: take some regular Avenger Warder and then switch to 2H AA Necro build.

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