Guild Wars 2

Balance Changes in the September 2014 Feature Pack

“Our focus for necromancers in this balance update has been on improving their survivability through utilities and traits… your utility skills have been updated to provide more survivability over time”

Translation:

Well of Blood:
Decreased the active time of this well from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Increased base healing per pulse by 50%. Updated the skill to have the correct values when Vampiric Rituals is equipped.

I actually laughed really hard like it was a joke when I saw it. I’m just being honest. I really found it funny.

You can see in any recent math-relevant post now about this change that its just a very hard-hitting nerf…….. to our surviviability…. and our allies survivability.

I mean this is just gold right here I’m not sure I’ve seen anything quite like it.

It may not of helped right now, but it is a step in the right direction if you ask me. Think about the old well of blood, you stood in a circle for 10 seconds to get a small AoE heal from it. Aside from waving a banner of war you couldn’t be asking for any more occurrences of “Direct AoE here”.

It would of been nice if they took a minute to do some math and realize the healing power multiple on the pulses is taking a dive by cutting the duration in half but compressing the pulse heal to give a little more in a shorter time frame is good.

I do hope that it’s something they look at. I understand (i think) what they where trying to accomplish and hopefully they do look at their numbers. The new light auras and whatnot might of had something to do with it but I do hope they look at the ratios.

And they’ve nerfed our elites on top of that. Flesh Golem has a slower charge, Lich Form no longer increases power (so you can’t use it to boost the damage from wells for example, like you used to), Plague has been nerfed as well.

They say one thing, and then do the other.

But but but…they did give us 1 more second on one of the most hated and useless heal skills in the game at the moment (SoV). So it’s ok, all is good. That makes up for all the nerfs.

Yup. It supports the general active combat of the game by requiring less time in which we are restricted to a small area. It literally does the exact same thing, but it does it faster.

Yup sure, lets make a complaint thread about.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Yup. It supports the general active combat of the game by requiring less time in which we are restricted to a small area. It literally does the exact same thing, but it does it faster.

Yup sure, lets make a complaint thread about.

Base AoE heal took a 45 and a half% nerf in ticks with a 50% buff in tick strength. However, the scaling per-tick is still .4, as it was pre-patch. 68.25% as strong as it was pre-patch with 0 healing power. Adding healing power worsens the difference.

That’s a hefty nerf in quality

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Yup. It supports the general active combat of the game by requiring less time in which we are restricted to a small area. It literally does the exact same thing, but it does it faster.

Yup sure, lets make a complaint thread about.

Base AoE heal took a 45 and a half% nerf in ticks with a 50% buff in tick strength. However, the scaling per-tick is still .4, as it was pre-patch. 68.25% as strong as it was pre-patch with 0 healing power. Adding healing power worsens the difference.

That’s a hefty nerf in quality

Which may or may not be necessary, because as a rule frontloaded power is better than the same spread out over a longer duration.
They might still have to buff it, but nerfing total power in exchange for increasing the speed of it is pretty reasonable.

Perhaps, but the “frontloaded power” isn’t much. At level 80, it’s gone from 152 per tick to 228 per tick. Over the 5 second duration, that’s a difference of 456 health compared to the same period pre-patch. And because the per-tick healing power scaling didn’t change, that 456 health over 5 seconds is all you will ever get over the same period pre-patch.

Can’t get mad anymore..

kitten this game.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Yup. It supports the general active combat of the game by requiring less time in which we are restricted to a small area. It literally does the exact same thing, but it does it faster.

Yup sure, lets make a complaint thread about.

You are completely correct.

But you are over looking one thing.

Area control is pretty much the Necro’s thing.

Marks and Wells are both built around the thing ANet is going away from (Position Control). If they want to go away from it that is fine, but massive parts of the Necromancer class are going to need rework.

Xae.7204:

dancingmonkey.4902:

Yup. It supports the general active combat of the game by requiring less time in which we are restricted to a small area. It literally does the exact same thing, but it does it faster.

Yup sure, lets make a complaint thread about.

You are completely correct.

Just a quick correction: losing 2 times your healing power as healing from a skill is not “doing the same thing but quicker”. It is in fact a nerf that isn’t adressed by the increase in healing per tick.
In addition this skill is still not a good option without healing power and in case you got healing power (for whatever reason) it is just worse than the pre patch version.

Math.. can be difficult.. especially when your job is actually changing numbers.. XD