Guild Wars 2

As of now, Necromatic Corruption is a 10% chance to remove a boon with each minion hit. Even assuming you have your full 6 minions out, all of them magically attacking without any kind of interference, that is a 60% chance to remove a boon every full attack rotation, which averages out to every 3 seconds. In other words, every 5 seconds, on average, a condition will be removed in ideal situations.

And lets face it, it isn’t often that your minions will be getting free hits in perfectly. Your enemy is going to kite them, they’ll eat CC, your opponent will dodge/stealth/block/other damage avoidance, they’ll be killed, they might even kitten . So you’re looking at even in still pretty good situations, a 30 point trait that gives you comparable boon removal to Spinal Shivers.

Basically, not much, especially not when you compare it to the contender for the Grandmaster slot: Death Nova. Death Nova applies poison, leaves poison fields that self-combo with the entire build to apply even more poison and weakness, and deals around 1.2-1.5k direct damage per pop.

I think most people tend to agree, this trait is lack luster. It isn’t terrible, but its subpar. So I’d like to open a discussion on changes to it.

My own suggestion would be to expand its uses, not necessarily by just making it a higher % chance to hit, but by giving an effect when it does. This trait synergizes best with sustain-based MMs, ones that want a lot of minions, and want to keep them alive. I have two basic ideas, both of them playing off keeping the minions alive, taking effect when a boon is stripped (to maintain the general play/counterplay of MMs and opponents).

Suggestion 1:
Add in an AoE heal when a boon is stripped. The minions “eat” the boon (just like CC does) and share its essence with surrounding allies, healing them for a small amount, base 200-300 with a healing power scaling up to maybe 500 max with really high healing power builds.

Suggestion 2: Minions steal the boon and share it with allies. For balance reasons, I think this might need to be limited to less than 5 recipients, but in general I think it would be removing the really quickly re-applied (and low duration) boons, and so not too strong.

Reasoning for both is to make the “MM mini game” more pronounced. The mini game is the game you and your opponent play while you are an MM; you try to CC them and otherwise get your minions in range and attacking to maximize their DPS, while your opponent tries to keep them from attacking through CC and block/dodge/etc.. This rewards you if you can keep them in range, as the secondary effect will proc more, and also rewards the enemy for not allowing them to land attacks.

Anyway, what do you think? Both to the idea of changing it in general, and anything I put myself.

I agree that it does need a change (though I believe Bone Fiend has a 19% chance to remove a boon, 1% chance to remove two, when it attacks due to the double-shot nature). Right now, Death Nova does far and away win because, as my charr puts it, “they’re so disposable.”

I think the boon stealing would be better. One, it may take advantage of the boon duration in the Death magic trait line (though in that case, I’d suggest that it applies a set boon, rather than stealing the one), two, having the AoE healing might be too much sustain for the necro himself (since he’s probably running Vampiric Master as well).

The current way “stealing” works is it copies the duration, just like Epidemic’ing a 10 second Bleed copies that 10 second bleed (no condition duration bonus).

But I do like the idea of it applying set values, maybe applying the same boon that was stripped, but at a set duration? For example if you strip any boon, it applies that same boon AoE for 2s. So even if you corrupted a 30s long protection, they’d only get 2s (and thus would limit anything super strong, like stealing a huge stability duration off an elite).

As for the healing, it wouldn’t add much to the Necro. Assuming even the highest amount I put down which was 500 (with really high investment from healing power), that is at best an addition of 100 HP/s, assuming your minions are all auto attacking constantly, never missing, and the enemy always has boons on to corrupt. I do see your point though.