Guild Wars 2

Okay, so one of the main ideas of anet for why necro isn’t actually underpower and weak is death shroud. I don’t want to slam anet or anything, personally I believe necro is an okay class, we don’t have the best DPS or survivablility but when minion AI gets fixed it won’t be so bad. However I have to call them on all their claims that DS makes us evened out. For starters if you enter into a 1v1 battle without any previously built life force it is very unlikely you will be able to build up enough life force in the fight to get close to 100% or any amount of extra health that actual helps you significantly. You could help this of course by putting trait points into improving DS, but then I have to take away from my DPS or other survivability. As a necro you need the DPS as we have very low attack capabilities and spending your trait points on toughness or vitality will be a much better use for survival. Yes vitality also increases your health in DS, but it still isn’t enough to give you the actual great advantage and amazing health that anet builds it up to be. Also personally I believe that survivability in the long run needs at least mild DPS to go with it, unless you are just running you need DPS to be able to take down your enemy before they wear down your health, toughness and vitality or not. This is another shortcoming of DS as the skills included in DS consist of:

One auto attack, which gives poor damage if you are fortunate enough to have full life force when you enter DS, and as the battle progresses the damage this skill does lowers significantly until when you are at low DS health you are basically poking at your enemy with ridiculously low amounts of damage.

One chill and bleed skill that teleports you to your opponent, offering low range, bleed, and base damage.

One 1 1/4 second fear which is a very low fear and is of little to no use unless you are knocked down, and even then it most likely won’t protect you for your whole down.

One 600 rage aoe that does low damage and barley makes any effect on the loss of life force.

So, if our amazing DS is so great why do we not have skills that can at least do 1/2 of our normal sets damage? Basically when you are in DS all you are doing is delaying your death, if you cannot DPS your enemy whilst in DS then it is just a little more health for them to rip away while you do maybe 5k damage to them, not changing the overall outcome of the battle. The only legitimate use for DS as it stands is stalling if you have allies 10 seconds away or using it to sit there and not have your normal health eaten away while you wait for a heal or attack to finish it’s cooldown. DS isn’t this horrible thing I wouldn’t dream of using, but it isn’t what anet builds it up to be. It doesn’t make our pvp battles more even unless you have allies 5 seconds away or your enemy has 2k hp left, it doesn’t improve our win rate without the DPS to go along with the slightly increased health, and it offers no way to do any kind of DPS an enemy might find semi-threatening. To me DS sounds more like a mediocre utility or a horrible elite skill that nobody would dream of getting than an actual form that makes up for our very low DPS and horrible survival rate compared to other classes.

If you actually wanted to make DS a legitimate form that actually helped necromancers you could:

Make the auto attack (#1) skill do consistent damage regardless of the life force amount and reduce it’s CD time to 1/2 or 1/4 of a second.

Make the #2 ability come with a longer fear + another condition perhaps chill to keep them away from you longer or bleed for some DPS.

Make the #3 skill have a longer range and do more damage.

Make the #4 skill add more life force and slightly increase damage.

Make life force not naturally diminish when in DS so we only lose life force if we are being hit. If anet is worried about necromancers just running around exploring in DS I don’t know why. It’s supposed to be our second health bar right? Might as well let us use it. If you are for whatever reason so opposed to us being able to stroll about in DS without losing life force you could make it so that if you are in combat your life force doesn’t automatically diminish without people hitting you, even though I can’t see why we shouldn’t be able to stroll around out of combat with death shroud up and not continuously acting as if we are a Jagged Horror and bleeding ourselves out.

Add some good DS improving trait benefits that aren’t all in one trait line so we don’t have to waste our trait points.

That’s all I have to say about DS for now, like I said I am personally a fan of the necro class (it is my main class) it’s just that DS actually isn’t really good for anything but running and delaying death 10 seconds without actual helpful skills that do more than the absolutely horrible damage they do now.

DS is a really powerful tool, I will admit it really only scales with power. It’s pretty much just a weak damage shield in a condi build. With a power, crit build your life blasts will crit from 3-4k which is a lot of damge, not to mention the life transfer does about aoe 4-5k. If you trait path of midnight in the SR tree it will reduce your cooldowns making the teleport and fear much shorter.

Yes, but as I previously mentioned if you are going into a 1v1 fight with no life force already build up then you will not always go into DS with the highest possible damage on the autoattack, and even if you do have 100% by continuing to fight in DS you are weakening your skills. Also, while crits with the #1 skill can reach up to 3-4k that is assuming you are always crtitting and have very high crit damage, if you scaled other weapon autoattacks such as dagger so that it always crit and had high crit damage it would still scale to be higher than the autoattack for DS, and the power of DS autoattack diminishes significantly over time making it’s DPS even worse compared to other power scale autoattacks. Also it can be easily countered, it takes one second just to cast one auto attack so that gives your enemy more than enough time to see it coming dodge, knock you down, daze, get out of range, etc. On top of that the enemy doesn’t even need to keep doing this, only until you get a little lower on life force and then even in the 2nd highest stage of damage the DPS gets WAY worse and can’t hope to compare with normal damage. On top of that a lot of necromancers consider CD to be the most viable build for a necro, and DS doesn’t give CD necromancers a whole lot to work with. So basically you have to have power to make it do decent damage in it’s highest stage of damage and after the highest stage which can be easily avoided by waiting a few seconds DS has little power and is once again as I said reduced to a 10 second stall that doesn’t do much for the outcome of your fight. Make the auto have 1/2 or even 3/4 sec casting and make it not diminish with diminishing of life force and then it can make an impact. Then you still have the other 3 skills to work on, and as you said you can improve the DS skills by catering to them in your traits, but then that takes away from your normal attacks which is where the actual DPS is coming from. I’m not saying DS isn’t useful I’m saying it isn’t useful enough that anet can say it makes up for our DPS and is this amazing skill that necromancers can use to be an amazing class.

Good points.

DS is too hard to regenerate in fight, or starting from zero, compared with regeneration and sustainability for a guardian or ele say.

DS is not compatible with condition builds, who need it most to survive, because your DPS and condition application falls to near nothing while in it. It also locks out your utilities which hurts. It is better for power builds, but still doesn’t offer them the burst of top DPS builds.

DS is strong as hell… for power builds… and when you have LF. It’s true the start of the fight is when we are weakest but we can build to accrue LF reasonably quick in group fights. 1v1 is harder though.

That being said though I really feel like LF should accrue and expend at pace more consistent with the games combat i.e. much much faster.

Someone posted an idea recently of having the DS skills change based on the weapon choice. I thought that idea was spot on.

Death shroud feels kind of useless in means other than meat shield for condition necromancer… I use it to eat thief and mesmer bursts and prevent thieves from going stealth and opponents from healing as the fear is one of the fastest 1 target interrupt to pull off in the game with somewhat moderate cooldown.

I think they should make it something like, you would regenerate your shroud to 50% when out of combat at the same rate ranger pets revive them selves. Having it regenerate to 100% would be OP though…

ANet ment DS to be defensive so I don’t get the point why there are some offensive orientated skills in it (1 and 2)… 1 can be used for might stacking and vulnerability stacking, though, so you can burst better with power builds after getting out from DS.

Imo they should make 2 almost instant cast and ground targeted as necromancers lack leap abilities… The only ones being nr 2 in DS (requires an opponent) and flesh wurm with cast time that lasts for ages if trying to pull it off in the middle of the fight. Ofcourse spectral walk too is a teleport but it has no use outside of swiftness when in wvw. Maybe make it like this and reduce the damage as it does very little even now and improve the chill by making it a small aoe (130 radius or something) and even add a finisher too (leap or blast) as necros lack finishers. This way it could be used defensively to get away or aggressively to apply chill (and weakness with chillbane) and increase opponents skill recharge and decrease their direct damage.

I don’t think the life force draining should be deleted as DS is your alternate form not your main form, but the 50% shroud would be usefull then for getting from point to point a bit easier and letting you have some death shroud at the start of the fight. Even 25% would help. Ofcourse this should not drain any life force if you have over 50 at the end of the fight.

I like the idea of DS beign more cc and “defensive play” oriantated but at its current state it does everything but not so well.

Also DS dancing is feels quite akward, I think exiting DS will have an aftercast of 0.5s? Should be max 0.1 for shroud dancing to be effective with the 50% DS cdr.

Life Blast – Blast a foe with a plague that transfers one condition to them.
Dark Path – Send out a claw. If this attack hits a foe, you teleport to that foe and chill nearby foes
Doom – Make your foe flee in fear
Gathering Plague – Draw conditions from nearby allies to yourself, and inflict weakness on yourself.

perfect DS skills for condi necromancer, but unfortunately you have to jump into the water to use 2 of them :/

So you say that life force takes a while to build up unless you put trait points into it. I agree. But then you say that in order to put trait points into life force regeneration you have to sacrifice damage. What the what?? The Soul Reaping line gives critical damage and Spectral Attunement is in the Curses line, you know, the one that improves both direct and condition damage?

I think the problem is that you have a build that does not take advantage of these things, nor are you a power build, or maybe you have had some bad experiences fighting other players and thus you feel DS is weak. My own experience runs counter to everything you say in your posts. I’m gonna go through your second post point by point to show you what I mean.

Yes, but as I previously mentioned if you are going into a 1v1 fight with no life force already build up then you will not always go into DS with the highest possible damage on the autoattack, and even if you do have 100% by continuing to fight in DS you are weakening your skills. – If you don’t have a good way to build life force from scratch, then that is a choice you made while designing your build. Life force generation is insane with the Spectral skills. With Spectral Attunement, one cast of Spectral Grasp is 15% life force. Fifteen percent! You get 5% from Wall and Walk, plus Armor activates automatically below 50% hp, and both Walk and Armor give you 3% every time you are hit. PLUS the 10% additional life force from Gluttony. If you are a condition build, then a staff with Soul Marks works well also. I wouldn’t call fighting in DS “weakening” your other skills, either, you are just saving them for later.

Also, while crits with the #1 skill can reach up to 3-4k that is assuming you are always crtitting and have very high crit damage, if you scaled other weapon autoattacks such as dagger so that it always crit and had high crit damage it would still scale to be higher than the autoattack for DS, and the power of DS autoattack diminishes significantly over time making it’s DPS even worse compared to other power scale autoattacks. – Sure. But it’s ranged and homes in, while dagger isn’t and doesn’t. And once you go below 50% life force, you can simply drop out and go back to your other skills. The cutoff is 50% between high and low damage, it’s not a sliding scale.

Also it can be easily countered, it takes one second just to cast one auto attack so that gives your enemy more than enough time to see it coming dodge, knock you down, daze, get out of range, etc. – If an enemy wastes dodges on my life blasts, I laugh a little inside, then drop out of DS and immobilize or snare them because they can’t avoid it anymore. Same thing if they waste knockdowns or dazes while I’m in DS, it means I’m not taking that to my actual health, and they won’t interrupt my normal attacks – which you admitted do more damage anyway. You should WANT them to waste all their avoidance while you’re in DS, then you can have your way with them when you drop out of it.

On top of that a lot of necromancers consider CD to be the most viable build for a necro, and DS doesn’t give CD necromancers a whole lot to work with. – True, but I saw a stream of a high-level condition-spec’d necro use it to great effectiveness. He didn’t use it for damage, he used it to kite. Whenever anyone got close to him, he’d enter DS (which triggered the auto-cast of enfeebling blood), dark path, fear, exit DS and dodge backwards. Now they are chilled, have weakness, some bleeds, and there’s space. Every 15s. Point is, DS has uses in any build.

as I said reduced to a 10 second stall that doesn’t do much for the outcome of your fight. – DS is a pressure/attrition tool, not your main source of damage. The opponent has a decision to make: does he dodge the life blasts, and thus be unable to avoid stuff later on? Should he spend a utility or two to burst even though you could just absorb it with life force? And if he waits too long to make these decisions, or decides incorrectly, you have a big advantage.

I’m not saying DS isn’t useful I’m saying it isn’t useful enough that anet can say it makes up for our DPS and is this amazing skill that necromancers can use to be an amazing class. – Again, it doesn’t make up for our DPS because it’s not intended to be a DPS tool, I don’t think, but a pressure/attrition tool as I said above. Right now it is very good at that, and really makes the necro unique to play as and against.

Yeesh, that’s a wall of text, ain’t it….

@Lettucemode
Yes the trait line for DS has crit damage, but that doesn’t make up for other power losses. For instance spite line increases power and condition duration as well as boasting more trait skills that increase damage. Or what if you had to take away from curses, then you lose condition damage and precision. Also there is the matter of critical hit chance, to even get crit damage to be worth getting compared to other stats you have to have precision to go with it. So it sounds like soul reaping trait would be okay for a glass cannon necro, but personally I’m power/toug/vit and have a crit rate of 5%. It also won’t work well for condition necromancers who don’t use their base damage but bleeds and poisons. So it wouldn’t hurt all that much if you were glass cannon, but that is an uncommon necromancer build and most prefer CD so DS’s trait line is dependent on you being a specific kind of necro that can actually use crit damage more than benefits from other trait lines.

I do run power and damage in DS still doesn’t do as well. I have had many great experiences with DS and it is a great alternate form however still not the amazing gamechanger that anet makes it out to be.

For a lot of the points you made you have to cater to DS in your build, which as I went over weakens you unless you are a glass cannon and even then you cannot access better power increasing trait skills from other trait lines.

For weakening skills I mean weakening your DS number one skill, not your normal skills.

For going out of DS at 50% to keep your #1 strong that is not being able to use your whole alternate health bar, adding a CD if you want to go back in, and you might not even start at 50+% life force.

True that if they waste all their dodges and knockdown on you whilst in DS it saves you from it in battle, but unless you have pre-built up life force going in you don’t even have the option to start off like that and you are likely going into DS at a last resort at low health so when you go out again you still weren’t able to kill them and they don’t need knockdown and dodge to kill 2k hp.;)

I’ll take a break on your CD point, I personally hate CD have tried the build tossed it in 15 mins so I don’t know all that much about it but seems to me it’s even harder for them to DPS in DS.

For your point that it is a pressure skill saving you from having to worry about knockdown and dodges in normal health again the explanation is can’t go into DS at the start in a lot of situations.

Finally yes I know it’s goal isn’t for DPS, but it doesn’t have any skills for protection or differing your enemy other than a 1 and 1/4 fear either.

@Darn Devil IV
I love your idea of regeneration to 50% when out of combat, makes it easier to build up and actually be able to do some mild DPS with it. Also I don’t care if DS if a defensive or offensive skill but right now it can’t do either so if anet would pick one that would be great.^^

@Hackks
The idea of wepaon sets changing DS’s skills is amazing, if they changed nothing else I would be happy with them changing this. Then at least the DS skills can match you’re build so it’s not some half and half that can’t defend or fight well.

So it sounds like soul reaping trait would be okay for a glass cannon necro, but personally I’m power/toug/vit and have a crit rate of 5%

I’m similar – almost full Knight’s (Toughness/Pow/Pre) with some Valkyrie’s (pow/vit/crit. dam) thrown in. So I crit a lot, but I’m not a glass cannon :-) the build has less HP than straight PTV, but more toughness and lots of crit to work with for sigils and whatnot. The soul reaping line is amazing for me. With 30 points in that, 20 in Curses for Spectral Attunement, and all Spectral utilities, I never enter a fight without 50% or more life force, so I can afford to use it just to wear people down at the start of a fight.

If you can get the gear, I suggest trying it out – it’s a cool variant on the Juggermancer, and the strength of DS really shines. I understand where you are coming from though

Yeah, DS can be put to really good use. I’m just saying I don’t think we should have to be of a certain type of build or have to fill out a trait line to make it do decent damage. I love DS and it is good if I need to stall for CD on heal but it really isn’t the whole revolutionary thing that makes us as good as warriors. :p

I play tankromancer. Best survivability in the game. Over 34k base health, over 46k health in Plague form and life force as a get out of jail free card or dive into the zerg for lols card, which is almost always full. I can remove any condition on me instantly and send them to my enemy, except for knock down where I have to pop spectral. I can revive 3 allies instantly. My staff skill allows me to constantly have regeneration. I can slow, cripple and fear every 10 seconds or so. Damage on single targets is less than other classes, but I find does significantly more on AoE targets like zergs in WvW whilst also being able to control the zergs movement.

Ok to clarify my previous points cause I think I’m coming off a little bit on the negative side:

DS is a viable tactic that is an amazing asset for necromancers, however I do not think that we should have to cater trait skills and have specific stat points to make the trait line for DS more viable.

I think people have brought up some great ideas to make DS better, and how you can use it now to great affect though again I don’t like having to be of a specific stat build to use the trait line properly. My favorite had to be DS skills change with weapon skills. This would solve the half DPS half CD build and give anet an opportunity to maybe even out skills a bit more. The life force regenerating at the same rate as ranger pets up to 25-50% I feel would also solve some issues of not being able to use it well if you had no chance to build up life force previously.

Also I have to say it one more time, I think DS is great and viable but we shouldn’t have to have specific stats to cater to the trait line more and it really doesn’t make us even with other classes. However it is very useful, if devs could manage to change it up a bit I think it could actually be the big save for necromancer that they make it out to be.:)

And bump for any other ideas and opinion concerning DS.

I think the main point of this thread and to me the most important is that the devs say this is the game-changer for us and one of the core of our mechanics and just these few posts here prove that it falls short.

DS #4 Drop the last tick of damage and replace it with a burn affect, to make it scale with condition damage.

Maybe the devs are thinking that epi is the big-cannon AoE for conditionmancers, so DS is the big-cannon AoE for power/crit players.

lettucemode.3789:

So you say that life force takes a while to build up unless you put trait points into it. I agree. But then you say that in order to put trait points into life force regeneration you have to sacrifice damage. What the what?? The Soul Reaping line gives critical damage and Spectral Attunement is in the Curses line, you know, the one that improves both direct and condition damage?

still, critdamage is a very specific/particular stat and not that useful for a conditionmancer or any necro-spec that hasnt a high precision-stat.

If you are a condition build, then a staff with Soul Marks works well also. I wouldn’t call fighting in DS “weakening” your other skills, either, you are just saving them for later.

You could call it that, yes, but still, why are powermancers allowed to proceed dealing high damage in DS while ‘saving their skills’ and Conditionmancers not?

I dont think it would be imbalanced when Ds#1 applies a bleed too, just like the scepter.
And if that is OP, Life blast should be swapped out for plague blast while youre wearing a scepter.

On another note:
Life Blast behaves like a projectile, can be reflected etc., so why the hell isnt it a projectile finisher (100% pls)?
It wont make that skill OP imo and this way every necro-spec gets another finisher (a very common complain).

If DS #1 fired more rapidly you could use it for might stacking on your existing conditions, hence making DS not a total waste of time for a conditionmancer.

DS 1 hits very hard, to the point I have stopped slotting Lich since I found I wasn’t using it much

I gear with mostly berserker and some toughness gear and I can hit up to 6k + Lifeblast crits.

3k range would be low average and average would be 4-4.5k

why would you expect it to hit hard on a condition build where you can spike 1 damage stat and commit the other 2 stats to tough/vit for huge survivability.

The real problem with DS and “bursting” damage is that it’s negated by someone elses burst. I find other burst classes can take me from 100% to 50% lifeforce faster than I can get 1 or 2 lifeblasts off and then the damage is quite weak.

Everyone can dodge and CC to some extent so that works for stopping all classes Burst and that is fair on both sides. But when the opponents burst negates my burst automatically then that is a failure in design.

Both classes need to wait on cooldowns to burst again but the necro has to both work on survival and building lifeforce which can also be cooldown dependent and not available.

Dear Anet,

Don’t let them burst my burst…

another idea to make DS more build friendly

allow us to slot what we want, for example allow power builds to slot lifeblast in both DS and underwater DS and allow condition builds to slot plague blast in DS as well as underwater. Let us choose if we want to single target fear or the cone fear in either or both.

Simple and easy

yesterday i realized that we have the worst teleport skill in the game
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Dark-Path-necromancer-teleport