Guild Wars 2

Given that Death Shroud is the Necromancer’s core mechanic and also primary defense (as all other defense are short duration Protection and some Blinds, both on long cooldowns. I don’t count Weakness for this purpose due to the random nature and ease of removal. People don’t usually remove Blind.), it is clear that it needs to be both effective and not overbearing.

However, there is an inherent flaw in Death Shroud. By being a second life bar, it is either too little for multiple enemies, or it is too much for one. There simply cannot be a middle ground on this. (Thanks to BloodRedArachnid for pointing this out so succinctly recently). The end result is that we have a very heavy AoE class that is ironically far better suited to facing one opponent over many. This just doesn’t fit.

The best suggestion I have seen (Thanks to Overkillengine) is to cap the amount of damage that can be taken in a second while in Death Shroud. While I am not sure if this can be programmed well, I do think this is worth looking into. My own personal suggestion is a cap of 6,000 damage per second. In a 1v1, you typically aren’t taking more than that anyway unless your opponent is bursting (but Death Shroud is also supposed to be an anti-burst mechanic, so no real issue). As such, the change would not really affect 1v1 aside from encouraging opponents to not blow their burst when the necro is in Death Shroud (which really should be well known anyway in PvP).

Against multiple foes, however, it really starts to shine as a survival mechanism with this cap. Of course, the question that comes up is why 6,000? First, that number is a pretty reasonable DPS from glassier builds that aren’t bursting. Some damage might be mitigated, but not a whole ton. Second is that the average death shroud of a necro (now) is roughly 20k health, so 6,000 is roughly 30%. Even factoring in the natural 4%/second decay, this gives an average necro with 100% life force a guaranteed 3 seconds of death shroud, enough time to make a difference when outnumbered (though not so much as to flat out change the fight). Those that build for durability will be able to extend the duration even longer (as they should, they built for it!). Spectral Armor would extend Death Shroud’s period by (on average) 1 second.

Can Death Shroud as it currently works ever actually be balanced, or is it inherently flawed? As it is now, it is simply impossible to balance as a mechanic, especially between the three gamemodes.

Im somewhat of a Necro noob, but I’ll give my two cents in reference to your comment about it either being too little for multiple enemies, or too much for one.

Could you have the effectiveness of Death Shroud scale up to a certain level depending on how many enemies you are immediately in combat with?

That way, it could be scaled to handle multiple enemies when being mobbed by lets say, a pack of trash mobs in a dungeon, but when in single PvP, it would scale to that one individual you’re fighting.

They could push it off as a “blood lust,” or “Life Drain,” where when you’re in Death Shroud, the more lives around you, the more it feeds the Death Shroud.

That’s just a generic, bad example, but you get the idea. I’m sure we could work in a reason as to why it would make sense for Death Shroud to scale depending on the number of mobs.

That being said, maybe give it a cap; it could only scale up to a certain number of enemies, and then stop.

Or maybe have an extra F key that pops up only WHEN you’re being mobbed by multiple foes. Something that will temporarily cut the damage you take significantly, but also cut the damage and effectiveness of DS abilities by a similar amount.

I’m not a Necro expert, so anyone feel free to point out why these changes would be horrible. :P

While the overall offense/defense balance might need tweaking, I feel the ultimate balancing factor will be linking DS skills, or at least slot #1, with whatever mainhand weapon you are using. This will allow DS to be better tailored to what you build is attempting to accomplish. It can focus on those areas and possibly be more lacking in others (compared the the current situation where its medicore on most all fronts)

IE dagger could get a short range attack that heals your normal health bar.
Axe could get a very hard hitting ranged nuke.
Scepter might randomly apply Bleeding/Poison/Burning
Staff could hit multiple targets and heal allies near the impact.

Etc. Then tweak the durability of DS as necessary after testing with these weapon specific abilities.

@AkiLeaves: Wouldn’t be horrible, but it would require a lot of very complex programming due to the constant fluctuation of enemies you could have. In addition, it could cause issues in WvW where you tag a ton of people with marks and ground-targeted wells before any of them actually start to hit you (yes, this does happen all the time in WvW). A group of necros doing this would have “health” similar to most Champions in group events. I know you said to have it scale to a cap, but that cap would have to be low to keep things sane and might end up being too low for the scaling to matter at all in numerous situations.

I see your point, but I was thinking that it would only scale up to “x” amount of people. Maybe lets say, 6-8. If there were 25 people in a zerg, it would still only scale to 8 people.

It could also have a 600-900 yard range; where even if you are IN combat, the enemy must be within “x” amount of range to count.

Stick to the premise that MMO’s and PvP games in particular are not balanced around 1v1. There’s a reason /duel doesn’t exist in this game afterall.

Now that said.. the other way it’s balanced is the simple fact that this class lacks stability, stun breaks, and escapes. Use this tools to take full advantage of killing the Necro.

If we’re dead set on really nerfing deathshroud, the best thing you could do is buff it in my opinion. Give the Necromancer an ability to use in deathshroud that consumes all life force in favor of doing something. The more it uses, the better the effect.

For example…

A skill when used at above 90% life force consumes all life force, knocks targets away 600 yards and stealths the necromancer for 10 seconds. When used above 50% knocks targets back and stealths for 8 seconds. When used above 25% knocks back stealths for only 6 seconds. When used below 25% stealths for 4 seconds and knocksback. If deathshroud is drained and ends because you run out of life force, it only knocks back.

But that’s only one of infinite possibilities. If you give players a life force dump mechanic, you’ll probably find people would use it more often than deathshroud itself.

@Atherakhia: Your premise, however, is flawed. Death Shroud is indeed balanced along the assumption of a 1v1, but because of that, it is too weak for 1vX where X>1. If they balanced the values for 1vX, it is too strong for 1v1.

And the idea is not to nerf Death Shroud, but rather make it so it is relevant in more situations, but not overpowered in any of them.

Having a Life Force dump is a neat idea, but given Death Shroud is a necros only real defense, I find it highly unlikely that said dump skill would find any use at all outside of the easy PvE content (i.e., not dungeons).

Poster Overkillengine was the first I saw to make the “cap-damage-per-second-in-DS” suggestion in this thread. Additional variations are suggested by other posters, as well, if you’re interested.

Thanks for the heads up on who made the suggestion. I had forgotten exactly who it was.

While I did present an idea for improving death shroud’s functionality (or, more specifically, gave a specific number to go with Overkillengine’s idea), the real point of this thread is discussing if Death Shroud in its current basic functionality can actually be balanced or if the concept is inherently impossible to do so with without some major changes.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

@Atherakhia: Your premise, however, is flawed. Death Shroud is indeed balanced along the assumption of a 1v1, but because of that, it is too weak for 1vX where X>1. If they balanced the values for 1vX, it is too strong for 1v1.

And the idea is not to nerf Death Shroud, but rather make it so it is relevant in more situations, but not overpowered in any of them.

Having a Life Force dump is a neat idea, but given Death Shroud is a necros only real defense, I find it highly unlikely that said dump skill would find any use at all outside of the easy PvE content (i.e., not dungeons).

Really depends. In organized PvP the only thing that matters is pressure and control. The game doesn’t really have much in the way control options, especially for the necromancer. A lifeforce dump as an escape tool (AE knockback and stealth per above example) is very enticing in 1vX scenarios. It’s valuable for getting targets off the point. It’s valuable to positioning.

But that’s only a defensive implementation of a lifeforce dump. What if they gave a skill that consumed lifeforce at a increased rate but made life blast have an increased chance to crit, increased damage, and each crit did something silly like apply torment.

Consume all your life force and grant 100/200/300 power and condition damage for the next 10 seconds for each 33% you used?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

However, there is an inherent flaw in Death Shroud. By being a second life bar, it is either too little for multiple enemies, or it is too much for one. There simply cannot be a middle ground on this.

I’ve been saying the same for ages!

Some of the mechanics in PvE basically say “DODGE OR BLOCK!” and hit for very high damage.

Problem is even if a Necromancer plays perfectly he’s out of Stamina after 2 dodges, and Death Shroud isn’t like Block/Invul, you need to take the hit even if it’s 10k-20k or whatever crazy number.

If devs go “Oh hey let’s up Necro’s Life Force generation so much that they have it back up before the next attack!”
Well… that makes every Necro more powerful pretty much everywhere.

Aaaand it still doesn’t solve the problem of multiple players ganking on Necro to easily spike him no matter how fast he reacts.

The recent changes to the way Death Shroud takes damage were pretty crazy.
I think that they should tone the size of the Life Force pool down, but have defense skills that spend Life Force.

For example what if Death Shroud 6 was:
“Defy Death – Lose 30% Life Force, gain invulnerability for 3 seconds. Disables all skills except “Exit Deathshroud” for 3 seconds."

Essentially you’d sacrifice 30% of Life Force to avoid having a burst or a boss attack murder your face.
(I just thought that up in like 5 minutes so don’t read into the numbers too much.)

Of course stuff like that should come after Necro stops being OP in other ways.
Seriously buffing Necro while it’s OP would be pretty silly.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Thanks for the heads up on who made the suggestion. I had forgotten exactly who it was.

While I did present an idea for improving death shroud’s functionality (or, more specifically, gave a specific number to go with Overkillengine’s idea), the real point of this thread is discussing if Death Shroud in its current basic functionality can actually be balanced or if the concept is inherently impossible to do so with without some major changes.

Agreed. It’s currently an either/or situation as you and BloodRedArachnid (and perhaps others that I may not be aware of) have pointed out.

When faced with two mutually exclusive options on either end of a spectrum, the solution is to find a way to scale between them along that spectrum. So instead of Deathshroud being OP in 1v1 then jumping to ineffective in 1vX situations, it ramps up gradually to keep pace with X+1, X+2, X+3, etc.

The “ramping up” could be one of several options; cap the damage per second at a set amount, reduce incoming damage by a percentage for each additional opponent above 1 (with a cap, of course, so incoming damage isn’t being reduced to zero), etc. Personally, I’m in favor of the second option because it scales directly with the number of opponents the necro is facing. There may, of course, be unintended consequences with that approach which would make DS truly OP. Just brainstorming ideas.

Another option may be to increase the necros defense against CC the more opponents they’re facing. It could work exactly like Defiant. If facing a single opponent, the buff doesn’t kick in at all, ever. Facing two opponents, the DS Defiant kicks in after the first CC is applied to the necro. The necro then gains one stack of immunity to all CC (number of opponents – 1) which must be burned down with a CC skill before the necro is vulnerable to another CC.

This wouldn’t violate the “rule” that necros are to receive no blocks, evades, invulnerability, or additional sources of stability. It’s not quite as good as stability but would still protect the necro from some of the CC thrown their way while still giving opponents a way to burn through it. It’s not a boon in the traditional sense but rather an inherent property of DS; therefore it can not be removed or corrupted except by the repeated application of CC skills.

To balance it a little further, make it so each CC that hits the necro while under the influence of this version of Defiant eats up a set amount of Life Force; 5% would be my suggestion. Furthermore, the DS Defiant does not prevent damage at all; only control effects. All damage – including that from CCs – still impacts the Life Force bar.

As people have been saying, if there was some sort of stacking buff, of X attacks per second. So that 1v1 it’d drop 100%, but 5 attackers being reduced a fair amount where we weren’t at a huge advantage to take on everyone at once, but still not at a total loss compared to other class’s.

I also think, some sort of heals. Even if just our hugely small vamp. (Altho it’d be nice to have some rules about getting heals from others and them not wasting it on us)
Some form of condition removal. Would help make DS feel defensive, and not just offensive burst and a 1 hit shield. (As it currently is dangerous to use it defensively, getting condition stacked & nullifying heals after bursts of dam to the party)

I also, think we could do with say Vigor on Crit like other class’s. Now that we can’t use little life force to mitigate a attack other class’s just dodge.

I’m not sure if 6000 is a good number. Why not make it more of a percentage based on your max health? So you can’t take more than your 80% (or some other percentage) of your max health in damage, when in deathshroud. And the rest still spills into your normal health pool, but it will not be that much anymore, depending on how much DS absorbed of it.

But as the above poster already mentioned, it is currently too easy for necro to be stunlocked, and then burst to hell by multiple players. We need a way to deal with those insane damage numbers while in DS.

This isn’t new. First thing I thought of when seeing DS on the Necro in this game was soul shards from WoW on my Warlock. How in that game you weren’t powerful without them and very powerful with a bunch in your bag.

Death Shroud is a similar mechanic in its do or die to have it or not.

Yet putting artificial caps on it would sort of destroy the whole point of the mechanic, then they should just scrap Death Shroud altogether and give us a new class mechanic.

Because the idea is for Necro’s to get stronger as the fight goes on, at least to a certain point. This is what Anet said themselves.

The way to make scaling mechanics is actually the way the Spectral skills worked before. By scaling them based on hits, they naturally generated more life force when you were focused, but less against one person. By now putting a 1 second cooldown and fixing the LF% per that one hit, it’s no better or worse vs one person or five people pretty much. They went the exact wrong way.

Pendragon.8735:

The way to make scaling mechanics is actually the way the Spectral skills worked before. By scaling them based on hits, they naturally generated more life force when you were focused, but less against one person. By now putting a 1 second cooldown and fixing the LF% per that one hit, it’s no better or worse vs one person or five people pretty much. They went the exact wrong way.

I was about to post something along this line: instead of making Death Shroud change relative to the number of targets, make Life Force generation change to suit the targets. Locust Swarm and Life Transfer both already do this: the more targets, the more LF generated. I suggest adding this functionality to a few of the other weapons, such as on Grasping Dead for the scepter (two skills that generate LF on one weapon??? Clearly I have gone mad) or making Soul Marks actually give its LF per enemy struck. Unholy Feast on the axe could also generate LF for each enemy hit, and possibly a bonus for actually consuming boons. Or axe could actually change into a multi-target weapon, but I suspect it is very intentionally not.

Dagger I think could stay as single target if it maintains its edge on LF generation per second, but that edge would probably need a slight increase.

As for the spectral effects: if they just want to keep them from punishing multi-hit attacks like unload or pistol whip or whatever, just change the 1s cooldown from a global cooldown to a ‘per attacker’, sort of like how Chaos Armor now applies its conditions to enemies. They may need to nerf the LF gains on Spectral Armor though.

They keep breaking their own game rules, and that’s how these imbalances emerge. Most classes have some sort of defense that prevents infinite amounts of damage… and then you have the necro who has a limited amount of HP he can absorb. This is all fine against normal players. But throw bosses into the mix with vastly overpowered attacks, and now you’ve got a problem. I doubt they’ll reduce the damage of all bosses in the game, so they simply need to scale the damage down to something manageable for DS to handle.

DS is fine as it is now. It’s sole purpose is to replace all the other active defense skills COMBINED. The problem has always been access to it, limited by both CD and life force. I have never understood why but imho, everything a necromancer does should be returning at least a flat rate of life force. For example, 1% anytime they deal damage to a target and one elite skill contender for those times when you need a fast buildup. Since the idea is simple enough in theory, as in a faster buildup when dealing with more threats, Im sure they’ve tested it before but decided against it. Im just curious as to why.

I like the idea of max damage taken in DS matching the DPS of a glass cannon so it only affects 1vX, i also think they shouldn’t have added an ICD to Spectrals.

The reason this is such an issue is because with some specs it can take a fair amount of time to reach a large amount of LF let alone 100% LF, then when you go into DS and get CC and bursted down to 0% all your ramp up survivability just gets wasted and you’re literally open with no access to Doom, a teleport or shackles < all of which can help escape.

Personally I would like to know Anets plans for increasing LF gen across Main Hand weapon skills, which they said they would do but not too quickly. I started to use Warhorn again instead of Dagger in my condy build because with a lot of enemies around me it generates sustainable LF.

I think giving Deathshroud a cap on lifeforce lost per second from damage is the best, and probably (codewise) simplest way to fix quite a few of the issues raised both in PvE and PvP. In PvP, with a cap set to 33% of Lifeforce max (per second), it won’t, as the OP points out, effect a 1v1 much at all while still giving a few (3!) seconds of sustainability when focused. In PvE it will return to Necros what we lost in the last big patch, that (required) ability to stop the lethality of one attack during fights that have such a mechanic. The PvE is the big one for me as I neither do, nor much care about, sPvP and i’m absolutely aghast that such a crucial mechanic for PvE was removed due, what seems to be, purely PvP balancing.

Just so long as the final hit that drops shroud is still constrained by the “max damage per second” (ie, it’ll overflow but never by more than “1/3 of the shrouds health”), it’ll fix the PvE one-shot issue which is the thing that matters most to me, and, i’d assume any PvE necro who is enjoying being unable to avoid one-shots right now…

Softspoken.2410:

I was about to post something along this line: instead of making Death Shroud change relative to the number of targets, make Life Force generation change to suit the targets. Locust Swarm and Life Transfer both already do this: the more targets, the more LF generated. I suggest adding this functionality to a few of the other weapons, such as on Grasping Dead for the scepter (two skills that generate LF on one weapon??? Clearly I have gone mad) or making Soul Marks actually give its LF per enemy struck. Unholy Feast on the axe could also generate LF for each enemy hit, and possibly a bonus for actually consuming boons. Or axe could actually change into a multi-target weapon, but I suspect it is very intentionally not.

These are all good ideas. Scepter definitely needs LF generation help. I mentioned putting a 3-5% on Putrid Curse (auto 3), but yours probably makes more sense since it would scale, and can even be easily imagined thematically, with the hands of the dead pulling out their Life Force.

However should note, offensive Life Force generating skills can be harder to land and less reliable vs defensive ones, if you are being focused. Necro slow cast times means sometimes you are just being pinballed and can’t get much off. They may have to look at some of the defensive stuff again too.

Not to mention further exacerbating stealth thieves… you cant hit them to generate LF to survive their hits…

Draehl.2681:

Not to mention further exacerbating stealth thieves… you cant hit them to generate LF to survive their hits…

On the bright side, Necros have some really good skills to hit thieves in stealth. Marks, unholy feast, life transfer, tainted shackles…

You know, another thing that I’d like to bring up, in light of this recent tPvP patch, is the whole idea of making last minute changes to a class just before a tournament. Isn’t that a bad thing to do? You’re not giving necro players the time to adapt to this change. I think if you’re going to have an important pvp tournament, any changes to any of the classes should be in at least a month earlier.

Believe it or not, DS was balanced in Beta, 5 people or 1 person, didnt matter the damage you would in total take and could dish out was around the same, problem was wells pulsing protection and spectrals were op as hell (50% reduction of damage on Sarmor for 10 seconds and massive LF on hit, it took half a wvwvw zerg to burst a necro, then if he popped lich form on a good location, you were facing pretty much cthun from wow pre fix patch, remains of 40 people on the floor)…
Since WoP and Wurm weren stun breaks, DS entry being one was ok (since no it wasnt a 10 second SB since you would spend like 20 seconds in ds).
I miss Shade…

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

You know, another thing that I’d like to bring up, in light of this recent tPvP patch, is the whole idea of making last minute changes to a class just before a tournament. Isn’t that a bad thing to do? You’re not giving necro players the time to adapt to this change. I think if you’re going to have an important pvp tournament, any changes to any of the classes should be in at least a month earlier.

My opinion is it’s working as intended; not that I support it. By this I mean the recent buffs to necros arguably made us OP in tPvP; not in a global way but only in a flavor-of-the-month way due to the Dhuumfire build. With the upcoming PAX tournament, ArenaNet needs to put its best foot forward. They would have looked like total failures to the gaming community if the flavor-of-the-month Dhuumfire necros were roflstomping through the tournament at will. This would demonstrate that they don’t know how to balance their own game and would make them look incompetent.

To avoid this scenario, the last minute hotpatch for Dhuumfire was absolutely essential. As much as we may hate this fiasco they’ve inflicted on both themselves and us, there’s really no other option at this point. Though we rail against the over-reliance of using tPvP to balance the game, for better-or-for-worse, that’s where we find ourselves at present.

If they’re going to successfully market the game through PAX tournaments, then those tournaments have to go as smoothly as possible while giving the impression that the game is balanced; even if it’s a contrived and short-sighted balance.

It’s healthy for the game as a whole to bring in more players. Of course, it’s equally un-healthy to balance the game around a statistically insignificant portion of the player population. However, it is what is and one can only hope that after PAX is over, reason and foresight will prevail when it comes to balancing the game and its professions.

If you give us stealth…omg the QQ that would pour from the guardian/ele community. It would never end. They MUST have their way or they will continue tantrums!

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

You know, another thing that I’d like to bring up, in light of this recent tPvP patch, is the whole idea of making last minute changes to a class just before a tournament. Isn’t that a bad thing to do? You’re not giving necro players the time to adapt to this change. I think if you’re going to have an important pvp tournament, any changes to any of the classes should be in at least a month earlier.

I don’t think they want necros in the tournament at all. At least not while people are watching….