Guild Wars 2

Signet of Vampirism is bad. Most of the necro community knows this, but I haven’t yet seen a total breakdown on why. It’s known that the ICD on both passive and active (especially the active) kills it from being useful as a heal, but here are a few numbers to consider.

First, a link to a build showing the highest possible Healing Power for a necro to obtain. Not listed are the friendly Warrior and Guardian, running Strength in Numbers (Guardian) and Empower Allies, Banner of Defense, Banner of Strength, and Banner of Tactics (Warrior) as well as supplying the necro with extra Might. Also not listed are the maximum stacks of Applied Strength and Applied Fortitude from WvW. I manually factored in these boosts (other than the Might).
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQFAWCN2moZokNAMNgrIB-T1RDABGqEEq9DuU9nsU+BwDAQPdAqsgQAgDg3fPAc8xHf8xH3xHf8xHfcpAcaMA-w
The maximum healing power that a necro can obtain outside of unique PvE buffs is 2513.16. This will be relevant later.

As a self-heal, Signet of Vampirism is pretty bad. The passive effect is flat damage reduction, rather than actual healing, and its effectiveness gets reduced by poison The only time this isn’t the case is against Mesmer clones, which don’t ever hit for noticeable direct damage.

The active seems slightly better, assuming you can claim all five stacks you are allotted. This requires having Locust Swarm or a well running and hitting your target as you activate Signet of Vampirism, due to the long aftercast. Otherwise, you can only claim 4 stacks yourself.

These next comparisons assume 0 healing power.

Without claiming any stacks of the signet’s active, the base heal is 3960 at level 80. For comparison, let’s look at Consume Conditions, which has a base heal of 5240 at level 80. Given the 1.25 second cast time for both skills and their recharge, we get a base healing/second value of 109.24 from Signet of Vampirism and 199.62 from Consume Conditions. If traited for faster recharge, Signet of Vampirism goes up to 135.38.

Claiming all five stacks of the active heals for a maximum of 5920, just 680 more than Consume Conditions’ base heal. In addition, getting all five stacks requires using a second skill with a minimum of a 24 second cooldown (Locust Swarm traited with banshee’s Wail). At max potential, this is a 167.94 healing/second heal. Still lower than Consume Condition’s base HP/Sec. Traited for cooldown, this finally surpasses it with 202.39 HP/sec.

Now, how does Healing Power factor into this? Well, Signet of Vampirism scales at .5 Healing Power base and .2 per stack. Consume Conditions scales at 1.0 base and .1 per condition consumed. Assuming max stacks used on the signet, and equal healing power, we get the following thresholds for Healing Power in order for Signet of Vampirism to equal Consume Conditions:

0 conditions consumed: Signet of Vampirism always heals more
1 condition consumed: 110 healing power
2 conditions removed: 2560 healing power

I’m going to stop right there. Remember what I said the absolute highest healing power a necro could get was? 2513.16 As we can see, it is literally impossible for Signet of Vampirism to out-heal Consume Conditions with just two conditions removed.

Okay, so as a self-heal, it’s out of the question. What about group heal? Honestly, still not helpful. The base value for ally heal is 1960, assuming that ally claims 5 stacks. This is blown out of the water by the trait Transfusion, which incidentally also uses a skill that does more damage and AoE. The base heal on Transfusion is 2808 and does not require your allies to hit the specified target. The scaling is also much, much higher (1.8 total as opposed to 1.0). Then there is Well of Blood, which even manages to make Transfusion look small by comparison. Only 1672 base heal for allies, but scaling at an astounding 4.4 healing power total. If you want group healing, go with either of them. Even Renewing Blast can do much better.

Well, it has one more thing to look at: the damage component. It is indeed the highest damaging healing skill in the game, assuming all stacks get claimed. However, you would do just as much damage in most builds by just attacking instead of using the signet. For the same cast time, you could instead run Blood Fiend (and have similar sustained healing) and fire off a single Life Blast, which has a higher expected damage against everything but crit-immune targets (which the Signet can’t be used on anyway, save Stone Heart eles).

This skill needs considerable help. My personal suggestion would be to remove the ICD on the active, and then re-evaluate from there. I also suggest that the passive either lose its own ICD (as it still won’t heal the necro from anything but mesmer clone hits) or become a siphon with a unique ICD per attacker.

Nice breakdown.
Buuut if you factor in taking bloodthirst you only need around 750 healing power to surpass CC+2.
Also you didn’t factor in the damage mitigating aspect – which is screwed on one hand since necro signets and healing abilities don’t work with the class mechanic and on the other hand probably over the top if you assume that you get 1 hit in per sec, never ever enter DS and are never full health.
It is the same as with every other vampiric ability on the necro. When the stars align and everything is just setup perfectly it gets decent to really noticeable and under normal circumstances its simply trash.

It might become better if they made the passive only proc every 3 sec and triple the amount healed. Still CC will always be king since it removes conditions.

Bellamy.9860:

Nice breakdown.
Buuut if you factor in taking bloodthirst you only need around 750 healing power to surpass CC+2.
Also you didn’t factor in the damage mitigating aspect – which is screwed on one hand since necro signets and healing abilities don’t work with the class mechanic and on the other hand probably over the top if you assume that you get 1 hit in per sec, never ever enter DS and are never full health.
It is the same as with every other vampiric ability on the necro. When the stars align and everything is just setup perfectly it gets decent to really noticeable and under normal circumstances its simply trash.

It might become better if they made the passive only proc every 3 sec and triple the amount healed. Still CC will always be king since it removes conditions.

I did not include Bloodthirst, you are correct. I actually initially avoided that due to post length concerns. With Bloodthirst, we then have the break even points at always more for 0 and 1 conditions, 752 healing power for two, and the very impossible 2750 healing power to break even on 3. All of these calculations ignore how much damage Consume Conditions “healed” be removing damaging conditions, and of course, how poison reduces Signet of Vampirism’s effectiveness.

As for the damage mitigation, I did mention it, but any sustained healing can do something similar, while actually letting you gain health if you manage to avoid getting hit. SoV passive can’t do that. For example, Blood Fiend heals for 926 every 3 seconds if its attack hits, which breaks down to 308.67/second. Pretty comparable to the current signet passive, but with Bloodthirst, it goes up to 1111.2/3 seconds, or 370.4 healing/second (an equivalent from SoV passive requires 454 healing power).

Very nice and clear write up, never known that we can achieve that much Healing Power… Though it’s around 1600.. Good to know

I agree. This healing skill needs a big change. Usually skills should be balance around risk, reward, effort and circumstances/useability. This pattern is used in every competetive game i can think off.

So looking at SoV compared to other passive / active healing skills, it should passive and under best circumstances (1 hit/second) heal MORE then a healing signet passive.

The active heal isnt that good either and can be completly negated by enemy skill, if the enemy attempts to use a block, stealth, invulnerability skill or stuns you he can completly avoid the active effect. On the other hand, if we execute the skill perfectly, the reward factor is really low though. This leaves the skill on a high risk low reward level which is the opposite of what it should be.

The main problem in the skill design is that it is supposed to be both – a support type skill and a heal over time skill, this concept doenst work out, you get a subpar self heal, as well as a subpar support skill that serves no real purpose in any game mode.

So, what i suggest to balance this skill is this:

- Passive effect is a real siphon now, it deals damage and is affected by traits.
- The icd of the passive is changed, it can now proc 5 times per 3 seconds, the icd is resetted every 3 seconds.

This serves two purposes: Balancing the passive effect based on its usefullnes and possible max amount under optimal circumstances. Enabling skillfull play for the necromancer, clever shrouddancing can be used to not loose passive heals while in deathshroud.

As for the active part, either remove the cap as well as the icd, increase the duration and balance the siphon amount to turn this into a real “support” skill.

Or make the active effect caster only, only the necro and maybe his pets should benefit from this. Remove ICD, remove baseheal. High risk, high reward.

The numbers might need to be rebalanced, but i think it is much more crucial to fix the design and purpose of the skill before finding the correct numbers. A passive getting hit siphon fits the necromancer attrition theme too kitten well to be left undershadowed by the pseudo purpose of group utility.

Honestly, I’d be interested in knowing if ANet has plans on bringing up the bad skills like this one. Every profession has some, I’m just curious to know if ANet is actually trying to bring them up.

They do “balance” patches after all, i just have no idea why they dont focus on the more serious problems first. Skills like SoV or Corrosive Poison Cloud need help so badly.

At least the Ranger CDI seems to had a bit of an impact. IF we should ever get such an CDI for Necros we could make our voice heard.

the build he tossed unfortunately works only on the builder.
the ingame stats dont even take the extra power into consideration.
It could be that the hero screen isnt updating but kinda too time consuming to go testing if it actually works or not.

grave of hearts.7830:

the build he tossed unfortunately works only on the builder.
the ingame stats dont even take the extra power into consideration.
It could be that the hero screen isnt updating but kinda too time consuming to go testing if it actually works or not.

It’s all right, I left out the extra from Borderlands Bloodlust as well. The point wasn’t even necessarily to be “this is how much you actually get”, more of “assuming things work in the best possible way, you can only possibly reach this value”

Impressive.
I don’t think anyone of the balance team could disagree with the skill lacking in some area’s, this also goes the traits supporting/working with this signet.

secret bump