The Scourge will be released into the game in a few months and its important that we get this topic rolling ahead of time even before we see all potential changes made to our core specialization since this Elite specialization will be the absolute easiest for Arena net to get terribly wrong. What changes take place will either make or break the scourge. And since this will likely be the necromancer’s support spec and their condi DPS spec for at least 2 years, its imperative that that the traits absolutely need to be reworked in order to allow for fluid synergy and interesting choices and play. I’ll list all of the traits that Synergies Poorly with scourge or not at all and I’ll make suggestions to open their function to scourge players. I care a lot about this class and Scourge could be the necromancer play style I’ve always wanted, but if things stay the same as they are, scourge wont be very good, and likely fall into the same place that necromancer used to be before elite specs were announced.
Traits that need to be reworked:
- Reaper’s Might
- Rending Shroud
- Spiteful Spirit
- Furious Demise
- Path of Corruption
- Weakening Shroud
- Armored Shroud
- Shrouded Removal
- Deadly Strength
- Beyond the Veil
- Unholy Sanctuary
- Life from Death
- Unholy Martyr
- Transfusion
- Unyielding Blast
- Speed of Shadows
- Vital Persistence
- Foot in the Grave
- Death Perception
- Dhuumfire
Some of these might need a bit of a language update such as Vital Persistence, while others need a complete function change in order for them to work. Some traits have reduced function with the elite spec which Clearly moves favorability away from specific specializations. My goal with these posts is always to bring each specialization up to par with the others so that the player can make meaningful choices. As it stands now, Scourge has few to no meaningful choices in which traits it chooses. Blood and Curses being the most optimal for their build and considering Blood has very few options that the scourge actually would desire this is problematic.
Shift from Shroud Focus to resource use Focus: This is the first step and will be the best possible solution for most of these traits. Shifting it to have their effects Trigger on the decay of shroud or the shade abilities as they spend life force to fuel them will go a long way. How this can work is one of two ways. For some of these traits their intensity could be increased by how much life force you spend on a given action while others could have a cool down attached giving the necromancer more control over how they are triggered.
Examples:
- Dhuumfire: For every X amount of Life force you spend your auto attack inflicts burning for X seconds. This Would have no impact on shroud as the Dhuumfire effect would constantly reapply to your auto attack. It would make no difference to the player. However, using it with Scourge would mean they could pop their new Shade abilities which could give them a burst of Dhuumfire burning to their auto. This example would also work with Death Perception.
- Spiteful Spirit: When you Spend life force strike your foes around you, stripping their boons and granting retaliation. 10 second cool down. This change is a straight up buff. You get the trigger on entering shroud but also after 10 seconds if you remain in shroud. I realize that this might happen with these trait changes, but I feel this minor buff wouldn’t cause too many problems especially with how deeply you are locked out of abilities in shroud. But the dual use for Scourge gives this sort of trait some great synergy. Another Good example would be Life from Death that could also trigger like this. I understand that Life From death triggers on Exiting shroud, however as it exists now it removes control from the scourge player as they Will have less control over desert shroud.
Now this solution doesn’t solve all of our problems. There are a few traits that it just wouldn’t solve their problems. Unholy Sanctuary and Transfusion are two such examples. My suggestion for Unholy Sanctuary is that it should Trigger a massive barrier on you when you would die instead of entering shroud. This would actually be great as it wouldn’t harm the normal play the necromancer faces. And it would still have functionality on all specs. Transfusion is a bit trickier but I feel its trigger should activate when you use a channel skill, regardless of if you are in shroud or not. This gives it function with Dagger, which I admit would be a bit odd, but I feel this design could go a long way to possibly opening new ideas to the elite spec or even future ones.
Foot In the grave has to be the toughest solve for this. I think it could work to break you out of stun on spending life force since the Shades don’t have an activation time for their abilities. But that’s a bit more iffy. Having it on a 10 second cool down would be okay if that was the case. Some programming weirdness might happen though. Which is why I’m a bit iffy on this one.
These are just some ideas, but its very clear that these traits need to be addressed before the expansion comes out. So here’s to hoping. I want to trust arena net on this one, but we’ve been burned before. So No offence to you guys. But this needs to be mentioned. I’m sure the Ranger players feel the same way right now since they are in a similar situation.