Guild Wars 2

So, now death nova does direct damage, except when you activate the pet skill like heal pet or bone minion explosions. Is this a bug or working as intended, and if not is there word on a fix?

Working as intended. I’m not sure I agree with it not working with the heal/tele (frankly, more power to you if you can actually get someone close enough to your wurm to make it work), but the Putrid Explosion makes sense, at least from their side.

Wiki lists it as a bug. Where did you hear that?

From a developer and a player who talks a lot with the developers and (I believe) helps with “beta” testing changes like this. They felt like the damage was too much when Putrid Explosion and Death Nova’s damage (over 3k per explosion, so 6k+ damage per go) were combined.

bug, until you hear it from a dev.

Bhawb.7408:

From a developer

I am answering this Jay guy. I mean it’s a bug unless a dev post an official statement on the subject.

It don’t make any sense death nova doesn’t work with putrid explosion. it’s just a tiny extra damage with an investment of 30 points in death magic. The kittening bone minion doesn’t even run to the target before exploding. It has to be a bug for sure.

I’ve got this listed as a bug in the list, but it may very well be the intended behavior. However, they’ve got the wording as “Whenever a minion dies” not “Whenever a minion is killed”. Right now, there’s three mesmer traits that use “is killed” to differentiate between dying from combat damage and being shattered: I think it’d be fair to use the same wording for minion sacrifice, for clarity.

tl;dr – The tooltip doesn’t quite agree with the behavior, but the behavior is probably correct.

Probably intended, seems Anet is nerfing the builds that have ‘pets’ do the work.

I’m ok with that, the best or even good dueling specs should not involve letting AI do the work for you for any class. Make pets pve realm viable not pvp/wvw

And if you read the patch note :

Death Magic

Death Shiver: Vulnerability applied every 3 seconds while in Death Shroud has been increased to 3 stacks for 10 seconds (up from 1 stack).
Death Nova: Minions now deal damage when Death Nova is triggered.