Guild Wars 2

Greetings fellow necromancers. I had an idea to lay out our traits the other night and then assign them grades according to their usefulness. Some of our traits are basically givens or necessary for most builds; some are specific to certain builds; and some, well, some are… well, worthless. What I would like, is an honest, straightforward, realistic discussion about our traits. Obviously, I will give you my opinion, and you can tear it apart, shark style. I grade these scales taking into consideration their level (i.e. adept vs. grandmaster), their usefulness, and to some degree in comparrison with other classes. Ok, so without further ado, here are our Blood Magic Traits. These are not my favorite traits and I have a hard time going into blood magic for anything but builds focused on the dagger or well boming for well cooldowns. The rest is poop imo. Sorry

Minor Blood Magic traits (I won’t call them BM traits because BM means Balve Movement, or taking a dump, and well, it seems almost relavent doesn’t it?)

Adept – Full of Life: Gain 5 seconds of regeneration when your health reaches 90% (30-second cooldown). Ok, heath reaches 90%, WTH will regen do for me there. How about 50% health. That makes sense. 90% health? Blah, D grade. Give me a break.

Master – Vampiric : Siphon health whenever you hit a foe. Ok, interesting. Siphon health whenever I hit a foe? Scaleable with healing? No. Not really. I give this a D. Maybe its my misunderstanding but this is just…. blah. 10 hps or something for a hit? 10 hps when i have 28000? WTH is that? No. D.

Grandmaster – Blood to Power: Deal 5% more damage while your health is above 90%. Ok. this might be good for pve, when one hit does not slap you below 90% hps. Come on, this is our grandmaster blood magic trait? more damage when I have more health? So, for example, I run 25000 hps (just hypothetically speaking), and I get hit for one cloak and dagger, or one warrior greatsword 3, which usually is about… 2500 to 3k dmg, which not only hurts, but effectively renders my grandmaster trait.. USELESS> I give this a D.

Adept – Dagger Mastery: Dagger skills recharge 15% faster. Ok, this is a decent trait, and good if you’re running dagger in a condition build, or a power build. I find it helpful, though its in the blood trait line and not the power trait line, ok, so, I give it a B.
Adept – Bloodthirst: Siphoning health is 50% more effective. WHen I first read this, I was like, kitten 50%! wow, this rocks. well,,,,, not really. Oh, it is 50%, and oh, yo have to select it if you want your siphoning to be anything noticeable, but lets face it, 50% of crap is just 50% more crap. Maybe it adds up, if you get some get through a siphoning or if you OVERSTACK healing, but in my opinion THIS SHOULD scale much better with healing power. Come on, give us something for an attrition build. Over time we get weaker, not stronger. I want to give it a D- because it should be better in general. That said, it is one of the only skills that leans towards attrition, thus i give it a C+. Work on our siphoning imo.

Adept – Mark of Evasion: Leave a Mark of Blood when you dodge. Alright, not that bad, mark of blood, gets bigger if I go with DM II. Not all that bad. Its a basic, solid choice in the adept line. I give it a B.

Adept – Ritual of Life: Create a Well of Blood whenever you revive an ally. Hmm, I have to say , I have never chosen this, because I just don’t think that well of life is goign to do squat in WvW, and in PvE, I am not reviving anyone but stupid dead quest mobs. Thus I give it a C-.

Adept – Vampiric Precision: Siphon health whenever you critical hit. This is decent, if done right, but what irritates me is that it is in competition with bloodthirst, and in order to make siphining and stealing health effective, you need vampiric percision with bloodthirst. Still, it does not scale well with health and thus frustrates me. I give it a B-.

Adept – Transfusion: Life Transfer heals nearby allies. SOrry, never used it, and Don’t have any experience with it. I will leave this one up to other, but because I don’t use this skill, I give it a C-.

Master – Vampiric Master: Minions siphon health and transfer it to you. OK, we are back to minions again, though I find this useful, when running a minion build. It is decent, but along the same lines as the other two vampiric skills. I give it a B, but I re-state it irritates me because its a minion trait.

Master – Ritual Mastery: Wells recharge 20% faster. SOlid A trait. Needed and one of the most saught after traits in this line because dagger/wellbombers use this skill. Our wells are on horrible cooldowns and this makes them acceptable. I give the skill an A, but i give wells overall a B, because of the cooldowns. HIGH COOLDOWN for a Short effect irritates me.

Master – Deathly Invigoration: Heal in an area when you leave death shroud. I have heard this helps out, when running a support build . I am a selfish kitten and don’t run a support build, aside from the fact that our support build does not rival the guardian or ele support builds. We are better off trying to do mediocracy elsewhere. Grade of C.

Master – Quickening Thirst: Move 15% faster while wielding a main hand dagger, move 10% faster while wielding an offhand dagger. I don’t select this because it is a waste in my opinion. I give this a grade of a D. Maybe it is too harsh, but either I am runninga locust signet, which renders this null, or I have a warhorn. Mostly, I don’t chose this because I rarely go 20 into blood magic, and I am usually not picking this trait.

Grandmaster - Fetid Consumption: Minions draw conditions. Each minion can draw one condition every 10 seconds. OK, this irritates me again. Really? Minions again? FIX MINION AI. This is an OK skill. MInoins take conditions off you. But still, grandmaster? I have to go 30 into blood magic to get this trait? this is it? 30 points into blood magic for this? No! C. It would get lower if it was not semi useful. Still, even if I am running a minion build, its not 30 into Blood Magic. I want to give it a D, but the fact that they draw conditions off you every 10 seconds… wait a minute, dont guardians get this at the adept level? OH kitten me, D. It gets a D.

Grandmaster - Vampiric Rituals: Wells also siphon health every time they pulse. I would select this, and have on rare occasions when I am doing high health, low defense, high power builds. However, my feelings on this trait also reflect the low Healing power scaling we seem to be afflicted with. I have to say, I rarely, if ever go 30 into blood because there is no reason too. I give it a C. Dissappointing for a grandmaster trait.

I don’t like this trait line, I feel there are some decent to good traits in it, but I hardly choose it because they are mostly underwhelming. IN fact, if I am going into Blood Magic it is usually only for decrease in well cooldowns and then im selecting an adept skill at random. Siphoning is crap, so I am usually trying something else.

This trait line needs help.

Full of Life: Actually, 90% is a MUCH better time to get Regeneration. We aren’t at full, so the healing doesn’t go to waste, but we also have enough health left that we actually get the full benefit of the boon (assuming we don’t jump into death shroud, but that’s a different issue altogether). At 50% health, we will probably die before we get the full benefit, and definitely before we get the trait to trigger a second time in a fight.

Vampiric: 25 health per hit is pretty much crap, but it does add up given how many multi-hit skills we have (such as Life Siphon, Ghastly Claws, Locust Swarm, wells, the kittenloads of AoE, staff 1) Small amount, but it can be useful. I’d probably give this a D+, but only because it doesn’t scale with anything at all. Otherwise it would be a C.

Ritual of Life is pretty handy, since Well of Blood is the strongest healing skill in the game and is AoE. The version from this only ticks 6 times instead of 11, but it is still a very good support trait (and Ritual of Protection also applies here, giving whoever you revived the best situation to get back up in). I still rarely choose it due to preferring other traits, but in WvW, I strongly suggest trying it.

Bloodthirst should be re-evaluated as it works with Vampiric, Vampiric Precision, Vampiric Master, and Vampiric Ritual traits as well as Life Siphon (dagger 2), Life Leech (downed 1), Signet of the Locust, and Deadly Feast (Spear 3)

Transfusion is also a great support trait, since it heals nearly 3k to each ally in an area (292*9, subject to normal AoE cap)

Gryph.8237:

Adept – Full of Life: Gain 5 seconds of regeneration when your health reaches 90% (30-second cooldown). Ok, heath reaches 90%, WTH will regen do for me there. How about 50% health. That makes sense. 90% health? Blah, D grade. Give me a break.

Master – Vampiric : Siphon health whenever you hit a foe. Ok, interesting. Siphon health whenever I hit a foe? Scaleable with healing? No. Not really. I give this a D. Maybe its my misunderstanding but this is just…. blah. -snip- No. D.

Grandmaster – Blood to Power: Deal 5% more damage while your health is above 90%. Ok. this might be good for pve, when one hit does not slap you below 90% hps. -snip- I give this a D.

Adept – Bloodthirst: Siphoning health is 50% more effective. WHen I first read this, I was like, kitten 50%! wow, this rocks. well,,,,, not really. -snip- Work on our siphoning imo.

Adept – Transfusion: Life Transfer heals nearby allies. SOrry, never used it, and Don’t have any experience with it. I will leave this one up to other, but because I don’t use this skill, I give it a C-.

Drarnor already nailed it on Full of Life. You’re getting the regen sooner, and are more likely to get it twice or three times in a fight.

Vampiric is in an iffy spot right now. The idea is good, the execution is a little lacking. I can’t rate it low because constant small heals while you’re successfully attacking is very good, but I can’t rate it high because the healing is too small and capped by its lack of scaling with compassion (healing power).

Blood to power is for people that are playing healer-support, or some other build that doesn’t rely on going into the front-lines itself to be effective. This may also apply to minion masters. It gives them more damage to make up for how they’ve probably sacrificed damage to stay so safe, and reward their play style. Still limited, but I can see it. So it’s a C for me.

Bloodthirst – See vampiric. I think it’s better than what you’re giving it, but it’s not quite as great as I want it to be, because siphons aren’t quite as great as they should be.

Transfusion is when you want to help your allies out with some heals, but you don’t want to drop 800 points in healing power. It’s pretty minimal investment as an adept trait, and you get maximum effectiveness out of it regardless of your compassion. It’s either a B+ or an A though, because it’s fairly strong. Also good for minion masters.

Gryph.8237:

Fetid Consumption: Minions draw conditions. Each minion can draw one condition every 10 seconds. -snip- This is an OK skill. MInoins take conditions off you. -snip- I want to give it a D, but the fact that they draw conditions off you every 10 seconds… wait a minute, dont guardians get this at the adept level? OH kitten me, D. It gets a D.

Grandmaster - Vampiric Rituals: Wells also siphon health every time they pulse. I would select this, and have on rare occasions when I am doing high health, low defense, high power builds. However, my feelings on this trait also reflect the low Healing power scaling we seem to be afflicted with. I have to say, I rarely, if ever go 30 into blood because there is no reason too. I give it a C. Dissappointing for a grandmaster trait.

Fetid Consumption – Each minion. It’s probably more comparable to the Ranger (grandmaster) trait that periodically pulls 3 conditions to your pet. Except ours can pull more conditions at a time, and doesn’t actually afflict the minion with the conditions, if my sources are correct. (It’s also only for a specific build type, so I guess that’s a point against it.) B-.

Vampiric Rituals – At least a B. It can restore a lot of health if you rush in and drop a well (or two, or three) on a couple people, which is a tactic I’ve seen / heard a lot of. Also, you want high toughness, not high health if you’re trying a siphon strategy: makes the healing more effective, relatively. And this is without any additional scaling from healing power.

Softspoken.2410:

Vampiric Rituals – At least a B. It can restore a lot of health if you rush in and drop a well (or two, or three) on a couple people, which is a tactic I’ve seen / heard a lot of. Also, you want high toughness, not high health if you’re trying a siphon strategy: makes the healing more effective, relatively. And this is without any additional scaling from healing power.

For siphoning you want both since it doesnt do damage if you are at full hp, nor does high toughness help if you get bursted down (since it has kinda terrible scailing in comparison to precision without protection on you).

Also Gryph.8237 most of your grades dont make sense and/or are based around 1 build, not general use a necro can do with it (like transfusion – amazing, and Ritual of Life – possibly op since it is a 3.4 healing light field pre rez), nor some of its effects e.g. Strength of Undeath is 10 power pre 10% life force, tooltip is just buggy; please replay the necro for another 200 hours before doing arbitrary ratings that people will sadly think are true or worth judging based upon, just like IGN and Metacritic are idiotic with their arbitrary ratings.

Why didn’t you just post in the threads complaining about siphoning rather than post a wall of text that literally read the siphoning traits sucks and I have no clue what the rest of the blood magic traits do.

To be fair, this stuff works a lot better when put together, rather than viewed as a separate thing. As you yourself listed, OP, you do not really go fully into the trait line. If you did, one thing you could do is take:
Bloodthirst, Vampiric, and Vampiric Precision.

Bloodthirst will be increasing the use of every heal you get, and if you have both of the Vampiric traits listed above, that means upon a critical hit you will be self-healing twice. That on top of the previously-mentioned usefulness of a 90% health regen makes things easier. Granted, the heals are usually not HUGE, but it’s designed that way for a reason. If it were significantly larger, it would no longer be attrition so much as “I dare you to try to kill me”, if that makes sense to you.

Oh, and as it wasn’t mentioned yet on this thread I believe, Vampiric Rituals will also work when dropping non-damaging Wells including the Well of Blood. I’m sure for some that may be seen as a “Well no duh”, but if it can help further at least one person’s understanding, may as well list it.