Guild Wars 2

To get off on the right foot, I think the change to Blighter’s Boon was necessary; the amount of sustain that it gave to you when in the most extreme WvW scenarios was outright absurd. What I want to talk about is the way they changed it, and other possible ways of keeping it strong and flavorful for a Grandmaster trait.

Personally, I think that the new effect is too linear, even for an elite specialization, and pidgeon-holes individuals a little too hard into a build. Since necromancers as a class don’t have copious ways of applying boons to themselves, it forces most players to pick Spite for the unhindered generation of Might that it provides.

With the literal concept of “Blighter’s Boon” in mind, why not try to make use out of the thematic centerpiece of necromancers: Condition application. What if Blighter’s Boon triggered whenever you applied any number of stacks of a condition on a foe, or even better, whenever you corrupted a boon on your opponent? After all, the Boon of a Blighter is when the foe’s own strength becomes their weakness.

Obviously this approach comes with a number of conflictions. Necromancers have vastly too many different sources of varying conditions to allow Blighter’s Boon to trigger on every single application of a stack or stacks. It then also has some minor conflictions (or synergies, depending on your mind state) with Parasitic Contagion. With the corruption concept, it not only makes Celestial Signets even stronger, but then you still just run into the issue of being mostly forced into picking Spite in concert.

Still, I believe this is some interesting territory to be explored since we’re still in the tweaking/open-creativity stage of the HoT Release.

TL;DR How would you like to have seen Blighter’s Boon changed?

I honestly loved the concept of blighter’s boon, just a lighter version of the nerf would’ve sufficed for me.

Such as gating the heals with an appropriate cooldown.

The Necro, for the first time actually had a really good possible team play (kindof like powering a juggernaut), that said; there was too much healing/life force generation going on. I think just toning it down would’ve been great.

Another idea that I think maybe(?) could work was:

A reverse of what we have now, instead of healing whenever you gain boons.. how about gain short-term boons whenever you are healed, time gated ofcourse..(thematically, what doesn’t kill you; only makes you stronger)
I found this interesting in a way that you can’t be healed while in shroud!, so there would have to be a balance shrouding and not shrouding..
This also finally gives the necro a boon generator, much like other classes..

But eh, could be broken, could be lame. I found it interesting..
maybe I’ll think harder on this one lol.. I’m not very good at this ..

Limit the number of allied boons that could proc the heal every 3 seconds. Leave self applied boons as is with no ICD. If it is still too powerful increase the interval or reduce the number for allied boons.

Either heal yourself when you apply a condition OR keep the current version but remove the ICD on chilling victory. It would allow more synergy within the traitline and help remove the dependence on spite.

Activates on applying conditions or specific conditions maybe?

The excess with the old trait was that revenant stack short duration boons every seconds. If you played with a guardian instead, which stacks long duration boons but less regularly, this was not as strong. So what about:

“you are healed/LF regen every seconds depending on the number of unique boons on you”.
The amount of healing/LF would depend on the number of boons, but not linearly (maybe by putting a cap that beyond 5 boons, it does not add more).

This way, you automatically have a cap of how much healing/LF you get (let’s say 2% LF or 500 HP per second, but it can be more or less depending on what feels reasonable).
Isn’t that the best solution???

Nerf the trait even more if u must, but give necromancer more group boons and some blast finishers.

“Hey guys, we noticed boon spam was really over the top, so we added an entire elite spec whose sole purpose for existing is spamming out boons that are even more OP than normal boons. Oh, and we nerfed Necromancers because they were receiving too many boons.”

Trying to put the counter-intuitive nature of it behind us, isn’t the way it originally functioned the way we would want it to work? It gave it a certain niche where we would want it sometimes and not want it others; A place where it was absurd and a place where it was simply bad. Makes it feel more like the Grandmaster of an Elite Spec: Polarized and Specialized in usage. I would honestly almost prefer for them to play with the scaling and just cut the numbers, but allow us to retain the group nature of it. I would use a Grandmaster that was simply terrible in 1v1 if it was absolutely incredible in XvX, like havoc or zerg environment.

Zero Solstice.9754:

Trying to put the counter-intuitive nature of it behind us, isn’t the way it originally functioned the way we would want it to work? It gave it a certain niche where we would want it sometimes and not want it others; A place where it was absurd and a place where it was simply bad. Makes it feel more like the Grandmaster of an Elite Spec: Polarized and Specialized in usage. I would honestly almost prefer for them to play with the scaling and just cut the numbers, but allow us to retain the group nature of it. I would use a Grandmaster that was simply terrible in 1v1 if it was absolutely incredible in XvX, like havoc or zerg environment.

My thought is that BB is basically inverse Altruistic Healing, try it out with AH’s healing per boon and cut the LF per boon to 1/2%

Berengar.6951:

My thought is that BB is basically inverse Altruistic Healing, try it out with AH’s healing per boon and cut the LF per boon to 1/2%

The problem here is that AH is controlled directly and fully by the guardian, who certainly scales up as they move into larger fights, but always retains control. BB however, goes further and further out of the Necromancer’s control with more allies. If you nerf it so that it is balanced when a Herald is in the group, then the Necromancer’s self proccing of it will be essentially worthless (already too weak for a GM), and then we’re looking at a GM level trait where the player equipping it has no meaningful input involved. Its not just bad overall design, but also really unfun design to rely on teammates to make your build choices not-bad.

The best choice we could see with this is one of the following:
1) Greatly even out boon application among specializations and utilities, and also significantly buff its strength per proc.
2) Return it to before, implement 1s ICD on allied proccing (potentially unique per ally), or a system like the old Chilling Nova had, where allies can say only proc it 10 times every 10s.

The first option can be balanced by having a lot of boon applications that scale with enemies hit, similar to YAAW and Unholy Feast, the second would basically just be a more balanced version of the old trait.

Or you know, they could just leave the self boon part alone and only add the ICD to incoming allied boons. I proposed something like 4 boons every 3 seconds from allies, with the self boon part intact.