Guild Wars 2

I’ve been mulling this over in my head for a little while.

I was mainly thinking about how, as a class that’s designed to absorb hits as opposed to avoid them, Death Shroud/Life Force having a flat dmg/hp value, becomes inferior to avoidance with dmg (in general) being so high.

PvP, and dungeons mainly, there is high dmg everywhere being thrown around, simply having 2 life bars is not as good as being able to avoid most of it completely, or avoid it when it really matters.

On top of that our self healing really isn’t that great, you would think it would be considering the Blood theme/lifesteals etc, pretty much all of our strong healing is tied to one overpowered Healing Skill (Well of Blood) with healing power. However this is completely different topic.

Back to Death Shroud, something that made of me think of this was one shot mechanics you find in spades in Dungeons. Being able to Death Shroud at any % and completely ABSORB an entire One Shot mechanic, feels…. incredible, and unique (although not too different from a block/dodge/invuln of course). So I was thinking, perhaps instead of having a flat HP value, Life Force/Death Shroud could instead be sort of like a flexible Distortion (mesmer) effect.

For example, while in Death Shroud, you would be completely invulnerable, basically completely absorbing whatever is thrown at you with no effect (Or just basically taking 0 direct and condition dmg). And instead of being reduced by the dmg dealt, it will simply decay at a much higher than that it does now, say 10% per second.

Obviously this sounds kind of broken, and it would definately need to have the rate at which you can gain Life Force changed a bit. At the same time, this would affect our dmg considering we rely too much on Life Blasts (in power builds) for dmg. My thought was Death Shroud skills would be completely about Utility and instead we’d have access to our weapon skills while inside. The 3 skills could simply be made to be our f2-f4 skills. Atleast this way our weapon skills don’t need to suffer at the expense of Death Shroud.

You could also take this a little further, and have your weapons skills be SLIGHTLY improved or adjusted while inside Death Shroud, some slight extra effects, or procs, or something rather than just extra dmg. The point is to keep Death Shroud MAINLY a defensive mechanic that gives access to some utility skills, and not be our main dmg tool.