Guild Wars 2

With obvious and terrible pun intended, welcome to a discussion of some shortcomings or issues I believe exist in our profession’s Well utilities; and a new place to submit community feedback on the matter.
Wells aren’t bad, but at the same time they aren’t “awesome”. When it comes to group play I often times have a very hard time arguing the reason to put a well on my utility slots, despite the combos dark fields present. (or in the case of Well of Blood, light field, wtf, why do we make light fields we’re necros! ‘Darkness incarnate’) Signet of Undeath, Spectral Grasp, Poison Cloud, Minions, Spectral Walk, Epidemic, these are all utilities that I will often have to mark hard choices on, when it comes to group play. “How do I want to function? What are other people bringing to the group? Will not bringing this make things noticeably harder?” Those are questions that display the utility value of skills, yet I never have such an internal discussion when it comes to Wells, despite a stern desire to bring them into groups more often. After thinking about it for the past month my biggest gripes are probably the need to trait their placement and uptime.

With Well of Blood I can live with dropping it where I’m standing without a trait, although it always feels nicer when I happen to be spec’ed into spite so I can drop it on melee; but with the other Wells, like Darkness, Corruption and Suffering, not always having the capability to toggle where they go is a huge detriment to their utility. There are plenty of situations where getting close together or getting in melee range of the target is suicidal. With those situations a plenty, that makes the Focused Ritual trait feel extremely mandatory in order to make Wells even start to become a worthwhile utility.

Uptime is another huge problem with Wells. They have long cooldowns and very short durations, and the Ritual Mastery trait doesn’t even feel like it makes much of an impact over cooldown times. 12 seconds off 60, while numerically significant, doesn’t feel all that great when during those 48 seconds, the Well only lasts for 5 or so. Either cooldowns need to be brought down substantially again, or durations need to increase. Personally I think shorter cooldowns would be more entertaining, as it makes the wells more engaging, and less passive.

In the end I think changes of this nature would be extremely helpful in making group play for the necro profession more dynamic. As it currently stand, group play feels very static and parallel to solo play. With a lack of combo finishers and most initiators being tied up to lackluster utilities. Changes like these would also open up for more build options and possibly even present whole new levels of group strategy that the community finds not only engaging, but useful as well.

So, thoughts, opinions?

I feel that wells should last 10 seconds instead, because it takes so kitten long to cooldown. Or at LEAST cut the cooldown by half. or give us a trait that makes the well bigger or faster or something. I drop it and I watch people walk out of it, it’s just so stupid.

Wells are both powerful and fun to play in dungeons and basically anywhere friendlies and/or enemies congest (ie. wvw). It has a good mix of direct and condition damage, have a large enough radius, etc. I think the only problem with a well build is the lack of combo field variety. It makes sense that necromancers are affiliated with “dark” stuff, but hey, we got a healing well that’s “light”, why can’t we get something else other than dark combo fields?

IMO convert two dark wells to a ethereal and an ice well should do the trick.

I speculate that the issue is not the wells themselves, but that they are our major non-condition aoe source outside of DS Life Transfer.

Heck, they may well be our major non-condition (especially non-bleed) damage source completely (unless we attempt to maintain DS above 50% at all times).

And this gets especially aggravating in massive champion/boss groups where the bleed stack will be hardlocked to 25 thanks to incidental bleeds from other professions auto-attack and crit procs.

Well of Corruption and Well of Sufferring on top of each other on a play in WvW is dominating. It destorys them.

I think the only way for wells to receive an increased duration or a reduction in cool-down would be to reduce their effectiveness (via damage they deal, or time between ‘ticks’).

Although I agree that the wells should be naturally targetable, this becomes less of an issue when built defensively. More importantly is how predictable they are without the trait… so much that I would go to the extent of saying the ranged wells are a requirement for anything outside of pve, if you intend to use them at all.

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to flesh out a response because I have to get to class, but I can sum up my general sentiment:

Great in pve, when enemies roll around in them until the end of time.

Lame in pvp; too long of a recharge for something that is countered by a single dodge roll.

Imo, each well should do something to enemies and something to allies. Adjust the numbers as need be, but at least that way you can still get something out of a well if you’re opponent counters it by lazily walking away.

problems with wells -

Cooldowns are Huge, Compared to mesmer and ranger similar skills each of their skills are nearly half the cooldown and double the duration -

Well Combos- the life drain combo is almost utterly useless the amount of life it steals is almost non existant

Wells Vamp/ stealing life tallent – this also steals almost no life prolly because its like 2% of a well that does nearly no dammage anyway giving you non existant numbers

Duration – my god what is wrong with this game and durations – .01 sec fear. .05 sec wells…. for kitten sake give us durations that mean something

10 seconds min, maybe even 15 sec for the crappier wells, just because your giving us a longer duration doesnt even mean its viable to stay in the well that long. but at least give us the option to try

Also some of the wells should grab and slow people in them, maybe add chill to well of darkness, as its a really weak well, with no dammage

I would be satisfied if they implemented an additional effect to wells like the green bubble giganticus uses- Where if you attempt to leave the well prematurely, you receive extra damage.

It would reward the players who leave the well quickly, without making the well entirely useless against players who do so.

In all the high-level sPvP streams I watch, with necros like Xelfer and Powerr, they are all using wells. Well of Darkness gives you near-invulnerability to melee. Well of Blood scales the best with +healing (Xelfer uses a hybrid build, Shaman’s amulet) and if allies use projectile finishers through it, it removes conditions from them. During fights for the clocktower on Kyhlo I’ve seen one or both of them use Well of Power to convert the large number of incoming conditions to boons. Converting conditions to boons is HUGE in terms of battle effectiveness and I’m not aware of any other ability in the game that does the same thing.

They have high cooldowns because of how strong their effects are. The CD reduction trait is absolutely worth it. Wells are also the same size as capture points (except for the big middle one on that one map), meaning that if an enemy wants to stop you from taking or neutralizing the point they are forced to stand in it. Don’t forget the trait for 3s of protection on cast, and it’s AoE protection too, meaning it will hit all allies on the point with you. They’re not very effective in WvW because there is a lot of space for enemies to dodge or move away, but in sPvP they are very, very strong abilities.

I use them in PvE to farm groups of mobs in Orr. Just aggro a bunch (5-7), drop Wells of Blood and Suffering, then staff AoE them all down. If you take the “wells siphon health to you on pulse” trait your health never goes below half. Really cool.

Xelfer and Powerr interact with their viewers, feel free to drop by their streams and ask them questions you may have about wells or other necro stuff.
www.twitch.tv/xelfer
www.twitch.tv/matchlesspowerr (I think)

So in essence wells work for two scenarios, PVE with mobs stacked around you like wood (except i thought the default necro MO was to kite kite kite, them some very tight turns) and PVP as point defense.

I’d rather have wells just be tied to weapon skills or something instead, so they can be buffed w/o being OP.

Hate how cooldown based how dmg is because of how much power builds rely on wells and Life Blasts.