Guild Wars 2

Skyro.3108:

Well you also have to factor in that the equivalent EHP gain in LF is much easier to build up than healing for an equivalent amount.

That really depends on build, its certainly not inherent to build it up fast, other than stuff dying. In my current build, my only real good source of LF gain is getting hit in spectral walk.

And while crit dmg isn’t great on a conditionmancer it is far from useless since you would have a high crit % anyway. I have a DPS spreadsheet that I look at for stat optimization and the higher your crit is, the close crit dmg approaches power in terms of added DPS. At high levels of crit chance, crit dmg is starts to get fairly close to power (but power is still superior).

It’s still helping you the least of all offensive stats. You would far rather just have a higher crit chance than more crit damage, since crit chance is giving condi builds more bleeds, and thus more DPS.

Also the problem is, as you say as a conditionmancer you have high crit (and high condition damage) but you have no power, so your base hits are so weak that even when they get upgraded into crits its not doing much. I think I figured that on my average rotation of all abilities on both weapon sets, that 10% crit damage is giving me like 10 more damage per crit or something. Considering you might only get 10 crits in a short combat, that’s really bad compared up against 100 power, precision, or cond damage.

Looking over the LF skills it definitely shows a design principle of the longer range/safer skills and weapon sets provide less LF than the shorter range/difficult skills do. I think this is what that ANet dev was implying when he was saying Necros generally weren’t utilizing DS to it’s maximum potential, in that high LF generating skills, and thus LF itself as anything other than a defensive-mechanic, is underused.

I just don’t think that with Death Shroud being our class mechanic it should be so heavily bent toward synergizing with power builds only. It needs to function well for all our builds and really doesn’t. True there are amazing LF regen builds out there, but they involve melee, and Necro does not have the mobility, escape, stability, or useful utilities of some other classes to really compete on even footing in melee imo. And even if you are there at point black range generating LF real fast, I think a great point was made in the necro BoC podcast, in that you still need DS as a defensive tool, and if you are using it offensively, good chance it might not be there when you need it to soak damage.

Thanks all for confirming these numbers, especially Arvid.

It explains why DS feels so very weak even with Soldier gear on. It’s a handy HP sponge and great for dipping to get buffs/purge conditions, but it’s a little weak for me to enjoy the way I’d like to.

Also, note the absence of any devs popping in back when we were testing our own class to correct us. Sod ANet.

@Pendragon:

re: crit dmg – I think you may be overrating how much damage precision adds to condition damage builds via crit procs. Any build will have some form of direct damage, and as a condition build you are already maxed out on your precision line regardless. Why power adds more damage than crit damage even at high levels of crit however is quite valid, and I’m not sure why this is so. I definitely have to have much higher than 50% crit for crit damage to approach the level of power (assuming a 1% crit to 10 power trade-off).

re: LF generation/DS usage – It is a conscious choice to choose skills/builds that have low LF generation, which was sort of my point on my interpretation of what the ANet devs meant when they said DS was underutilized.

And DS being relatively useless to a condition build isn’t much different from shatters being relatively useless for phantasm mesmer builds. If you make your build in such a way that completely avoids leveraging the strength of your class mechanic, whose fault is that exactly. Like you often see suggestions to add more condition based damage on DS skills to better compliment condition specs. Ok, then what about minion specs? Should we add a minion skill as well? And it’s not like DS is useless. It will always be a defensive tool regardless of the build.

And while yes dagger auto-attack does generate a ton of LF in meele, there other ways of generating LF quickly. The 3% LF from marks is one, focus 4 skill is another, as well as the LF on crit trait.

re: Symbolic on BoC: He was speaking strictly from a tPvP perspective, and his comments regarding mobility were in relation to Necro’s role in tPvP, and how they were not effective outside of a team-fight environment (e.g. they are poor at assaulting the enemy’s close point due to lack of a way to escape from the fight), and I agree with him.

And his point about DS not being there when you need it as a defensive mechanic was in response to a build idea brought up about triggering “X on DS” traits by constantly popping in and out of DS. I assure you he did not mean that DS should never be used in an offensive manner.

Yes, Symbolic was responding to something we were asked in a thread, and also a build I personally use, and wanted his opinion about. I believe he stated later (maybe off the air) that he doesn’t necessarily believe it is a bad thing to use it for swapping, just that he personally doesn’t do it because he really wants it up for defense, and that using it for swapping means you need to be careful and not let it be on CD when you need it.

@Arvid: Thank you for testing this more. If you have the actual damage numbers from that fight (total damage done in death shroud, total health you have out of death shroud), I’d love to see them.

I want to offer a possibly hypothesis, which hopefully I’ll have time to test in the mists sometimes. ~19k death shroud health is really close to a necromancer’s natural health without any vitality. Could it be that vitality does not affect death shroud health at all, as previously asserted?

Arvid, if your tests were done without vitality gear, then we can probably count this hypothesis debunked right now. But if you were also using vitality gear, like the original poster, then maybe this is a possibility?

Death Shroud very definitely is affected by vitality, the only real question is by how much.

I posted it in the other thread, it’s a linear relationship between HP and LF.

When I did my tests , I had some bonus vitality from blood magic. Death shroud still appeared to be about 60% of my maximum health. I strongly suspect death shroud’s total is just calculated based on maximum health.

That’s what I mean. I compared my HP and LF when at full, then went into range of the seigerazor buff. My original max hp was 79% (or whatever I said in the other thread), and the LF% matched that number, meaning there is a linear relationship between the two.

Bhawb.7408:

Death Shroud very definitely is affected by vitality, the only real question is by how much.

War Mourner.5168:

I posted it in the other thread, it’s a linear relationship between HP and LF.

Thanks, I stand corrected. I’m rather new to the game and haven’t had much time to test stuff yet. I’m glad we’ve got people who have though. Hoping to test it out a bit myself eventually.

Skyro.3108:

If you make your build in such a way that completely avoids leveraging the strength of your class mechanic, whose fault is that exactly.

Sorry, but Anet’s. Because ‘leveraging the strength of my class mechanic’ actually makes a condi build weaker, and the traits and abilities to make it (DS) better are not competitive to what I would be giving up to gain more LF regen. And they should be competitive, it should be a hard choice, but its not, I just don’t want them. There isn’t much strength to leverage there once you don’t go power.

And it’s not like DS is useless. It will always be a defensive tool regardless of the build.

Of course it’s not useless but it not being useless is not the litmus test for if it is versatile or good enough either. I.e. Some people like Dark Path, and I find uses for it, but for an attrition class, they should have left it the way it was in beta, as a port.

re: Symbolic on BoC: He was speaking strictly from a tPvP perspective, and his comments regarding mobility were in relation to Necro’s role in tPvP, and how they were not effective outside of a team-fight environment (e.g. they are poor at assaulting the enemy’s close point due to lack of a way to escape from the fight), and I agree with him.

Lack of mobility is even more punishing in WvW, where the mode is not won by fights on a small circle and where getting someone else to run away does little for your overall objective. It is even more punishing for power builds with high LF regen, because needing to escape sudden bad situations with 100s of players on a map happens all the time.

I assure you he did not mean that DS should never be used in an offensive manner.

I didn’t take him to mean that at all.

re: crit dmg – I think you may be overrating how much damage precision adds to condition damage builds via crit procs.

Well in comparison to crit damage it’s a lot. 100 precision will give me another crit about every 20 attacks. The crit alone might be worth 150-200 damage on average. It will then be worth another ~140 from Barbed Precision on a 2 second bleed (66% proc). It will be worth ~480 damage considering my Earth Sigils will proc 84% of the time on that extra crit. So about 750 damage in total. Likely 500 at minimum even if the Sigil proc is cleaned after a few seconds.

By comparison 10% more crit damage over 20 attacks, again for condi build, might add between 100-200 damage, depending which abilities crit, but which can be averaged.

Getting back to DS and its trait line, Soul Reaping, how Anet designed is to usually split up the attributes that a trait line will give you, often forcing a good/bad attribute in each, so as to avoid cookie cutter builds. Yet in Soul Reaping from a Conditionmancer perspective, both crit damage and more LF are both bad attributes.

Pendragon.8735:

Sorry, but Anet’s. Because ‘leveraging the strength of my class mechanic’ actually makes my build weaker, and the traits and abilities to make it (DS) better are not competitive to what I would be giving up to gain more LF regen. And they should be competitive, it should be a hard choice, but its not, I just don’t want them. There isn’t much strength to leverage there once you don’t go power.

Of course it’s not useless but it not being useless is not the litmus test for if it is versatile or good enough either. I.e. Some people like Dark Path, and I find uses for it, but for an attrition class, they should have left it the way it was in beta, as a port.

I think you are going off on a tangent here about balance. There’s a difference between design intent and current balance. There’s nothing wrong from a design perspective with certain builds leveraging the strength of their class mechanic more than others builds. That’s by design. Each class even has a trait line devoted to their class mechanic.

Lack of mobility is even more punishing in WvW, where the mode is not won by fights on a small circle and where getting someone else to run away does little for your overall objective. It is even more punishing for power builds with high LF regen, because needing to escape sudden bad situations with 100s of players on a map happens all the time.

You’re confusing two issues here. The original assertion you were trying to make was linking power necros not being viable due to having to be in meele with what Symbolic said on BoC. First of all power necros don’t have to be in meele, cuz axe is also a very strong power or hybrid weapon after the recent buff. And second, like I pointed out above, Symbolic’s comment has nothing to do with power necros or being in meele at all (Symbolic feels power necro’s weren’t viable due to being very “all-in” with their burst). His comment was about how necros are not good roamers because they cannot disengage from a fight. It doesn’t matter what spec it is, necros cannot disengage. Your condition spec isn’t going to be running away from anybody either.

Well in comparison to crit damage it’s a lot. 100 precision will give me another crit about every 20 attacks. The crit alone might be worth 150-200 damage on average. It will then be worth about another ~140 from Barbed Precision on a 2 second bleed (66% proc). It will be worth about 480 damage considering my Earth Sigils will proc 84% of the time on that extra crit. So about 750 damage in total.

By comparison 10% more crit damge over 20 attacks, again for condi build, might add between 100-200 damage, depending which abilities crit, but which can be averaged.

Sigil of Earth has a 2s cooldown. Once you get a high enough crit to proc it consistently adding more crit has very little effect on it. The main bonus of precision outside of that is barbed precision which does not have a cooldown, but the DPS difference between precision and crit % will favor crit % (a very ballpark figure is >50% crit, +1 crit dmg % adds ~2x the direct damage as 10 precision, with this discrepancy getting higher the more precision you have). Go and put it in a spreadsheet with the DPS formula in there and you can see for yourself.

Adding 2x the direct damage isn’t that valuable when direct damage is only accounting for like 30% of my damage vs condition damage. I also don’t think you are appreciating the damage that being able to use food in PVE and WvW confers to precision vs crit damage, via duration.

As for the balancing stuff (viability of power), I don’t want to derail too much further, suffice to say it sounds to me like you are more of a sPVP player and I play WvW, the game modes are just so entirely different the class cannot be compared the same way across them. 600 range vs 900 or 1200 range playstyle is massively different in WvW, and changes the risk factors when choosing a power style even if you try to stay out of direct melee.

At 900 – 1200 you can always manage to be on the far edges of a fight even just to temporarily disengage. When you suddenly go in front of half the people to get to 600 you become a much bigger priority target, and at that point having more life force or LF regen is not close to as good as having something like Mist Form or Endure Pain to disengage.

As the number of opponents in a battle increase, the value of abilities that get you out of dodge extremely quickly (blink, RTL, stealth, etc), or in fact make you invulnerable altogether, rises massively against something like LF which is just a sponge where you have to stick in there and still eat all that damage.

This is why I think DS and Soul Reaping need more viability to a condi spec in an offensive manner. And seeing that DS is only 60% of your health, not 100% or more as once presumed, is as I said, disappointing and only further reinforcing of this point.

The problem with Soul reaping is that crit damage is a unique stat in that it is completely useless without another stat, specifically precision. This means that if you invest into Soul reaping your crit damage is wasted unless you’re also investing in precision in some reasonable way. This makes it a significant disincentive to invest in soul reaping for a lot of builds. This is then compounded by the fact that DS isn’t the best tool for condition builds, who have even less reason to invest in precision (and therefore crit damage) because it doesn’t directly effect their primary damage, which is conditions.

This means you have to build in a specific way to take full advantage of the stats you’re getting, thus limiting variety. This is why I think it’s a bad idea to have precision and crit damage on different trees, although this isn’t a necro specific problem, warriors, guardians and engineers (I’m not missing anyone am I?) also have the same issue.

Also more related to your discussion on crit damage vs precision in terms of damage, it depends on the source of the stats, as they don’t have an equal exchange rate across all gear and traits. For example, 30 in SR gives me 1.2% more damage compared to 30 in curses (a 10:1 ratio of stats), while some things are on either side of that ratio such that it changes the comparison quite significantly. (the ‘jewel’ in ascended stuff is closer to a 5:1 ratio).
Of course at lower crit chances, precision gets better returns, but there are still plenty of item types that can swing it crit damage’s way.

War Mourner.5168:

The problem with Soul reaping is that crit damage is a unique stat in that it is completely useless without another stat, specifically precision.

But also Power, it needs Power as well to make the criticals scale better.

The necromancer (or at least condition one) is probably stretched too thin on multiple stat dependency, tying precision in to their bleed procs, seems an odd choice, as it kind of temps you to think crit damage goes with your high crit rate, but the payoff isn’t really there because of how you can’t afford power.

Death Shroud only complicates matters, because if you want to think about a build where you use Death Shroud a lot more, you can make your ‘second life bar’ be bigger and fill faster yes, but the skills that go with it do not align stat wise with your normal form skills, and this is the biggest incoherency. When I’m in DS, my DPS falls through the floor as well as my ability to keep pressuring an opponent via conditions. It’s too severe. That DS degenerates on its own if you just sit it in, should be plenty of trade-off itself that it doesn’t also need to make you a very very weak threat without power.

Stepping back and looking at this makeup, one might logically assume the Necro’s ultimate answer is hybrid. But in practice most all games far more heavily reward specializing in terms of min/maxing. And you see that in GW2 here with bunker, or alternately glass cannons, which are squishy but still very viable for certain professions due to very specific abilities that alleviate squishiness (mobility and stealth primarily).

Of course investing in crit damage without any investment in power is a poor idea, but as long as you are cirtting it does at least something. So from purely a game design view crit damage is dependent on precision to function. That’s why I like a lot of the ideas in this thread. (The last time I bumped it it got a dev reply, although was only about the UI issue, which of course still isn’t resolved…).

I forgot about Jon’s post there. He said UI change was a ‘first step’ for DS, that was over 2 months ago… Yeah.

So with 30 pts in soul reaping you get around 90% of your health in death shroud? since it’s believed to be 60% initially?

that’s 30% of the initial 60% (or whatever the exact number is), so it would be around 78%.

That’s pretty bad then, I knew something was wrong with the life force pool it wouldn’t soak as much damage as I thought and without vigor, utility stability or a reliable blink we need it to be 100% for necro to feel a little more balanced.

Someone should bring this in Game Discussion or Game Bugs, things get more attention from devs there than here that’s for sure.

I think we have a million life since i can absorb all fall damage. Remember how we wern’t rallying people along with warriors vengeance? Remember how we couldnt use skills after leaving DS? I now hear of some weapon swapping issues? I wouldn’t bother with the math. I dont think death shroud has been working as intended since the game has been released. I bet if you asked a dev they couldn’t even tell you the details of the “intended” deathshroud mechanic as it changes too often to fix bugs.