Guild Wars 2

Disclaimer: I play necro as bloodmage/vampire. I don’t use/rely on conditions for my damage. Thus, I have little to gain if the following suggestion were implemented; I’m relatively neutral on the subject. I make the suggestion in the interest of addressing what I have picked up to be a common complaint in the necro forum; namely, that conditionmancers lack sufficient sustain.

The suggestion:

Curses – Hemophilia (II)
Siphon X amount of life per bleed stack.

The rationale:

I don’t play conditionmancer, but my guess is necros that do already have plenty of increased condition duration from other sources. Losing the 20% increased bleeding duration that Hemophilia currently grants (assuming they even use it in the first place) would not be a major loss to conditionmancers. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong, of course.

In exchange for losing 20% increased bleeding duration, the revamp of this trait now gives conditionmancers (or any necro; but primarily conditionmancers) a source of life siphoning for a little extra sustain during a fight.

Obviously, it will have to be balanced in light of how many bleed stacks can potentially be placed on an opponent and the fact that more than one opponent can be bled at a time. We’d also have to take into account Blood Magic’s Bloodthirst trait which improves life siphoning by 50%.

My initial suggestion is each bleed stack will siphon for either 2 or 4 health. That may sound low on paper. However, if we assume a conditionmancer can reliably maintain 10 stacks of bleeding on an opponent perpetually (all things considered; target condition cleansing, stacks reaching the end of their duration, allies placing their own stacks which then bump your’s out when the 25 stack cap is reached, etc.), this translates to 20 to 40 health per second. Add Bloodthirst to the mix and now you’re siphoning an average of 30 to 60 health per second while you maintain 10 bleed stacks on an opponent.

I realize this doesn’t sound like much to be worth it. However, I’m not going to ask for the moon because I know ArenaNet won’t grant it. It needs to remain balanced within the context of the current life siphoning options. When a blood necro is only siphoning 25 life with each hit from Vampiric or 38 life when boosted by Bloodthirst, then 20 to 60 health per second for a conditionmancer is pretty decent. Even more so when the conditionmancer can bleed multiple targets (e.g. Epidemic).

Furthermore, these suggested numbers keep life siphoning balanced across the different necro builds. The true blood necros still win the life siphoning game because they will trait further into the Blood Magic line to gain Vampiric Precision, will equip life siphoning sigils, use life siphoning foods, and have the same access to this new version of Hemophilia as a conditionmancer. Since the blood necro will likely have greater precision than the conditionmancer, they will benefit from the synergy between Barbed Precision and Hemophilia should they choose to invest 10 points into the Curses line.

Even so, it still prevents the blood necro from becoming OP because their damage tends to be single target. They may stack up a few bleeds against a lone opponent from Barbed Precision and siphon some life due to Hemophilia, but it won’t be anything on the order of a conditionmancer who is causing massive bleeding to multiple enemies.

This suggestion now gives conditionmancers access to a source of sustain and a little bit of a damage boost (life siphoning counts as armor-ignoring damage) while blood necros gain access to an additional source of life siphoning to boost their currently lack-luster build-defining mechanic should they choose to invest points into the Curses line; all while keeping it balanced (hopefully; feel free to critique anything I missed that may lead to this being unbalanced). It also makes necros…well…more necro-y! Everybody and their brother can cause bleeding; necromancers would become the only profession to life siphon with their bleeds.

Lastly, it’s a relatively small change; which is consistent with ArenaNet’s approach to buffs and nerfs. We’ve seen the devs’ willingness to change an entire trait of other professions with the previous patch. Asking the same be done to a necro trait is therefore not without precedent. Now if they could just do something about Reanimator…

I like the idea, and similar ideas like it (add siphoning from conditions to Blood Magic 15 trait).

One problem with condition spihoning is, condi necros already are the superior ranged firepower setup (rangers on flank being the only guys that can efficiently outrange us with true/not hybrid focused setups), also imagine 25~28 siphons pre second, it would really have to use the 25 hp pre tick thing vampiric has right now not to be broken.

Also why did noone care about https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Idea-for-life-siphon/first#post2004944 …

Blood is life. I like it.

And you are correct, Hemophilia is often useless due to duration elsewhere. sPVP players may feel different with no access to food, but I never use it anymore as a conditionmancer, as it would be pushing my shortest bleeds at 8 seconds up to 10. Few actually run that long against live opponents.

Actually sPvP players almost never run bleed durations because it is very rare that your bleeds will run even their full base duration.

Andele.1306:

One problem with condition spihoning is, condi necros already are the superior ranged firepower setup (rangers on flank being the only guys that can efficiently outrange us with true/not hybrid focused setups), also imagine 25~28 siphons pre second, it would really have to use the 25 hp pre tick thing vampiric has right now not to be broken.

Gibbly mentioned a similar thing in the podcast we just did. Basically you just make the siphon values very small (10-20) so its like an extra regen.

Andele.1306:

One problem with condition spihoning is, condi necros already are the superior ranged firepower setup (rangers on flank being the only guys that can efficiently outrange us with true/not hybrid focused setups), also imagine 25~28 siphons pre second, it would really have to use the 25 hp pre tick thing vampiric has right now not to be broken.

Also why did noone care about https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Idea-for-life-siphon/first#post2004944 …

Fair enough. I don’t play conditionmancer, so I don’t know what an “average” stack of bleeds is. I picked a conservative number – 10 – given the mitigating factors I listed (condition cleansing, duration expiration, being bumped out by an ally once the 25 stack cap is reached, etc.).

However, I do agree that if a conditionmancer reliably achieved 25 stacks of bleed on a target – gaining between 50 to 150 life siphoning per second in the process (using my original post’s numbers and whether or not Bloodthirst is traited) – that it would be a bit unbalanced.

The simple solution would be to reduce the amount of life siphoned per stack. If it became 1 or 2 life siphoned per stack instead of 2 or 4, then the life siphoning at 25 bleeds stacks would decrease to 25 to 75 per second (depending on whether Bloodthirst is traited or not). This would bring it more in line with the Vampiric trait.

My concern in the original post was that using too low an amount of life siphoning would make the trait near-worthless. This was based on an assumption that it’s rare for conditionmancers to reliably achieve a persistent 25 bleed stacks. I wanted to ensure that a “real world” amount of bleed stacks would still provide a reasonable amount of life siphoning; I settled on 10 as that number. If I’m way off base in that assumption and conditionmancers consistently achieve higher bleed stacks in the 20 to 25 range, then it would most certainly make sense to decrease the amount of life siphoned per bleed stack.

^ It would be easy to separate the amount leeched in PVP vs PVE, as in PVE you can get consistent large stacks far easier and longer.

Applying a bleed to enemies heals you.
— In-game description

At level 80, the amount healed per bleed is 69 + 0.01 * Healing Power

Done, good trait. Should be Grandmaster though.

Daecollo.9578:

Applying a bleed to enemies heals you.
— In-game description

At level 80, the amount healed per bleed is 69 + 0.01 * Healing Power

Done, good trait. Should be Grandmaster though.

Problem 1 – Curses GMs are already good and have dual use
Problem 2 – So when does the skill siphon, is it on bleed tick, is it just on applying bleeds, does it work with secondary bleed effects/indirect application (epidemic, barbs, self bleed BIP, etc) and is there a cooldown.

I wouldn’t put it on GM, the only siphon we have as a GM trait is wells, the rest are 10-20.