Guild Wars 2

Blood fiends aren’t useful are they? its like if u like to solo roam u fight with it, ppl will take it down…the healing is good tho.. what u guy think?

They do less healing than a warrior signet, only heal you when they are attacking, and can be CC’d/Killed.

I wouldn’t expect it to get fixed despite all of these issues:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Blood-Fiend-needs-a-buff/first#post3278887

I was told all of my suggestions are selfish just because I use Blood Fiend even if it is sub-optimal. I think I ruined it for us. :/

Oswaldzl.3652:

Blood fiends aren’t useful are they? its like if u like to solo roam u fight with it, ppl will take it down…the healing is good tho.. what u guy think?

It is good IF:
1) You have enough condition removal from other sources to drop CC
2) You have very limited healing power
3) You have at least 20 points in Death Magic with both minion traits picked up
4) You understand how to make minions engage at max range, and are capable of doing the “micro” of using his active before he dies
5) You aren’t doing something that has so much passive AoE that he dies too quickly
6) Having the meat-shield minion is worth more than a standard heal

^^ Bhawb gave some great advice there.

Quick question – if traited for it, isn’t the cooldown on the blood fiend minion something like 13 seconds? I might have my facts wrong and cannot confirm it now. Still, 13 seconds isn’t that bad.

DayLight.9603:

^^ Bhawb gave some great advice there.

Quick question – if traited for it, isn’t the cooldown on the blood fiend minion something like 13 seconds? I might have my facts wrong and cannot confirm it now. Still, 13 seconds isn’t that bad.

16 seconds traited, 20 seconds base.

The thing to remember about blood fiend/passive regen is that it scales best with high toughness (which is granted by our Death Magic tree).

Blood fiend benefits from:
1) Flesh of the master (50% more hp)
2) Death Nova (poison field on death)
3) Necromantic Corruption (boon removal on attack)
4) Vampiric Master (more passive healing/more damage)
5) Minion Master (20% cooldown reduction to 16s)

Also note that it has an active heal for ~ 4k @ level 80 (250hps active heal traited) and can tank/distract opponents from targeting you directly. Since necros have a lot of ways to get rid of conditions (Plague signet, Putrid Mark, Death Swarm, Well of Power), there definitely a number of builds that can take it over Consume Conditions.

Bloodfiend is one of those subpar heals untraited, and borderline OP when traited correctly. It’s a tough one to balance. Hopefully the new healing skills that are introduced on Dec 10 give more options.

Edit: I want to say that the biggest problem with bloodfiend is that it does not heal you while you are in DS, thus wasting your “passive healing” time. Life transfer should heal necros behind DS in my opinion, but I’m not sure if that’s balanced. I personally play a full berserker necro in the top 500 tPVP and have no problem staying alive by dancing in and out of DS so I feel like it might be a bit of an OP change.