Guild Wars 2

I kind of think Blood fiend deserves some sort of change/buff. Warriors have many more blocks/defenses, we can’t heal in Death shroud, so why does blood fiend heal for so little?
- Healing signet heals for roughly 400 HPS, any time it keeps ticking.
- Blood fiend:
*Heals for 926/3 sec (swing timer) = 309 HPS. Doesn’t scale with HP unless you have siphon, which you’d be able to push about 330 hps if you’re lucky. (All assuming no misses, 100% up time.)
* Does about 25 dps
* Can be killed.
* Can be evaded.
* Can be CCed.
* Can be LOS’d.
* Doesn’t heal us through our “blocks” (DS)
* Doesn’t heal us when the enemy is stealth/running.

Doesn’t anyone else feel its a bit lack-luster?
I mean these are both high HP classes, we have fewer active defenses, our defenses cut the healing, and ours is much much less effective and our heal can miss.

Considering its healing attack can be avoided via a number of methods… yes I think it should heal for more. It would make it a viable choice compared to CC(in more than just vamp minion builds).

Full MM is kinda immortal (or at least hard to kill) in duel (or PVE) until all minions are dead, didn’t see a reason to complain.

Reason to complain is ret?rded minions reaction on target switching/attacking

For not MM – Consume Conditions is just best healing skill in game (for me, at least)

If we had other really reliable methods of condition cleansing in MM builds, I’d take Blood Fiend a lot. I only don’t take him because CC is way more flexible, and the only time you can actually spare the lack of cleansing is PvE or in PvP when you have Lyssa runes, 30 dumped into BM for the trait, and staff/dagger offhand.

Also, again, different classes different needs. What they do need to do about Blood Fiend is add in scaling on his healing per hit, and give us some more reasonable sources of condition removal to make up for the massive one we lose from CC. Either a chance on hit for Blood Fiend to remove, or w/e.

But really, the loss of cleansing is the only reason he isn’t in my builds. His HP is as high as Flesh Golem, the healing is crazy, and he benefits from minion traits.

I still think an improvement could be:

“If blood fiend is killed (read: not sacrificed), heal for 1.5x the sacrifice heal”

Play/counterplay. Does your enemy target the hps (health per second) minion and try to get him down to prevent your hps but give you a heal or does the enemy just let him stay up?

A true way of fixing thing would be first to allow healing in DS. Our class has access to many regen options (plus Well of Blood ticking for 10 sec, DS #4 healing, Siphoning from any source) but we lose all those nice things upon entering our class mechanic.

Blood fiend could keep the same numbers if it worked while in DS, and we would see a mini competition with CC because he would be a good healing source we could use while transformed.

Sepreh’s idea ain’t too shabby

Yeah id consider taking it more if it auto healed when killed. The fact that we cant even get some ui to display minion hp bars is incredibly annoying.

Seraph got to it first.

The Bone Fiend needs to heal when it dies. Period. Regardless of whether it was killed or was sacrificed.

Enemies shouldn’t be able to completly disable your heal skill so easily. Force it to go off at an unwanted time? Sure. But disable the skill completely? No.

Sepreh.5924:

I still think an improvement could be:

“If blood fiend is killed (read: not sacrificed), heal for 1.5x the sacrifice heal”

Play/counterplay. Does your enemy target the hps (health per second) minion and try to get him down to prevent your hps but give you a heal or does the enemy just let him stay up?

Remove almost any remote sense of skill in using the minion? No thanks. The MM build has enough “if I just sit here pressing 1 I’ll probably win” already. They need to promote more active play in it, and this wouldn’t help at all.

The problem with Blood Fiend has little to do with how “easily” it is killed, except in WvW zerging (why are you bringing minions to a zerg?). In PvE it has over 30k HP traited, and will either sit at 900 range, taking only the random AoE damage, or it will stack with you, making your group far more resistant to the boss’ damage.

In PvP it is almost never focused, because wasting all the damage (13k or 19k) to kill the minion, especially when any respectable MM will get the sacrifice off in most situations anyway, has just made the minion more efficient. It dies due to random AoE/cleave.

The problem with the minion has far more to do with the lack of condition cleansing. CC is a massive part of our cleansing in most builds, and while we have the option of taking another source of cleansing from a utility skill, they are all vastly worse.

Bhawb.7408:

Remove almost any remote sense of skill in using the minion? No thanks. The MM build has enough “if I just sit here pressing 1 I’ll probably win” already. They need to promote more active play in it, and this wouldn’t help at all. ..

Thanks for the feedback – don’t play minion master so I don’t have a lot of input on that perspective.

It seems like it is relative consensus that blood fiend needs to be buffed in some way to be a viable heal.

What do you think is the best way to do this and make it useful for both mm and non-mm builds but also prevent it from becoming overpowered? Would it be to increase the total HP generation per second? To increase the sacrifice heal? To transfer conditions on sacrifice? To make its active a skill that does not sacrifice him but provides an increased life siphon with some risk?

I’d say something like this:
Reduce damage and healing by 25%.
Now attacks in 2 second intervals.
So it’d be 695 healing every 2 seconds. (347) Still not as good as healing signet, but it gives it more chances to actually hit/missing isn’t as harsh.
And add: Every third leech removes a condition from the master.

What about that? Leave the sacrifice the same.

ronpierce.2760:

I’d say something like this:
Reduce damage and healing by 25%.
Now attacks in 2 second intervals.
So it’d be 695 healing every 2 seconds. (347) Still not as good as healing signet, but it gives it more chances to actually hit/missing isn’t as harsh.
And add: Every third leech removes a condition from the master.

What about that? Leave the sacrifice the same.

I like this, for the reasons you listed. Plus when Necromatic Corruption eventually doesn’t perform terribly (or gets buffed in some way) this will indirectly be more useful. Also means a very slight buff to the Vampiric Master proccing.

But these changes I think are pretty small (so not in danger of suddenly OPing it), and make it more reliable and competitive.

What if the fiend had a better active but that active could be interrupted like:
“Leech life: your blood fiend attaches to your enemy for x seconds during which time it does not heal you. At the end of x seconds, blood fiend siphons x hp”

This would allow your enemy to dodge the initial attach, kill the blood fiend within the x seconds, interrupt the fiend during the x seconds, etc

Just throwing out ideas

I would like it a lot more if it did zero damage, but was invincible (and never takes agro so there’s no invinci-tank).

At the moment it does less healing than healing signet, and it dies!

We can’t kill a warrior’s healing signet.

That’s pretty much the point in a nut shell. I don’t mind it dying, because it’s a minion. It’s part of having them is watching them die; however the issues are:
- It heals LESS than signet.
- It is killable/ccable/Losable
- The heal tick can be “dodged” by the enemy.

The damage it does isn’t a big deal. 25 dps is pretty shruggable for… basically anyone. It’s kind of like having half a 0 condi power bleed on the enemy at all times that can be evaded, not a big deal.

I still think you could make the thing tethered to my side and attack from there like a little sentry turret, and have it be untargettable, like a rail gun mounted on my shoulder. The attack is still avoidable and wont heal when it gets avoided, but the minon is ALWAYS on me and attacks when I do, assuming it is in range. I don’t have to wory about it kitten in around behind me, dying to some random mob.

I don’t mind so much that the thing dies, but that it never seems to be in a good position, and I cannot manually reposition the thing. Why would I want to devote my attention to watching that things health bar when I have no control over where it stands.

Make it like an orb that circles around you and attacks whe you attack, then it would be arguably worth dropping the best in game heal CC, for a sustain play/build.

Well that’s really for the balance team to decide. I kind of enjoy the counter play of people killing it. (PvP) But I think we can all agree it DEFINITELY needs help. The healing numbers are low (9000 over 30 seconds assuming 100% uptime/never CCed/Never Evaded/Always locked on/The enemy doesn’t stealth/block/invuln, plus all the down sides of it… Simply put; it never even close to reaches its par POTENTIAL, so yes, it has got some issues.

I agree. I enjoy that it actually has counterplay, but it needs help.

Would like to get some more attention on this topic.