Guild Wars 2

Did a somewhat controlled test just recently to guesstimate on the Maximum HP pool on Deathshroud for my particular build.

HP pool of approximately 30k, no WvW buffs, consumables, etc etc. 15 in Soul Reaping (Ie, 15% more Lifeforce pool), taking Vital Persistence Major. That Trait makes your Death Shroud tick down 3%/sec. Extremely easy to figure that much out; Hop into DS, taking note of the % you go in at, wait for it to tick down once, hop out and check remaining Lifeforce.

Assuming the above to be true, five seconds inside of Death Shroud should leave me with 85%, if entering at 100% Lifeforce. So with that said, it’s relatively easy to figure out an HP figure. I went to Orr, hopped into Death Shroud at 100%, let an Orrian beat on me for five seconds, popped out and ran away so as to not skew any of the Lifeforce numbers (Ie, using any abilities, killing it, and avoiding nearby deaths).

Over the span of five seconds, I had taken 2023 damage, leaving me at approximately 76% Lifeforce. So 2023 damage was approximately 9% of my Lifeforce pool. Which means that 100% Lifeforce was ~22k HP. Without Soul Reaping, closer to 19k. With a 30k HP pool. Imho, that’s pretty kitten if this is the case.

First off, can anyone find anything wrong with how I obtained these numbers? Did I miss something? And does anyone want to try out a different build and number crunch a bit? If DS is supposed to scale off of Vitality, then I’m somewhat terrified of what the base ~18k HP actually turns out to be in DS.
I’m going to bed for now, so I’ll check back tomorrow.

Edited in; Not particularly complaining nor claiming this to be a bug. Simply curious about what the actual numbers are, or what some kind of figure would be.

TL;DR Those claiming they feel squishier in DS really are. 30k HP supposedly = ~19k DS without Traits.

Not entirely sure about your method, you say that Vital Persistence makes it tick down 3%/sec, but surely that percentage depends on the amount you put in Soul Reaping! If you have a bigger life force pool, will it still tick for 3% of your max life force? I don’t think so, otherwise you’d only get the same amount of time in death shroud no matter how large your life force pool is! Which may actually be the case for all I know, though I doubt it.

I think a more reliable method might be to build up to full life force, no points in soul reaping, enter death shroud, count how long you can stay in it. Then optionally do the same but with 30 points in soul reaping, but no traits equipped. See how much longer you stay in there, so you can gauge what that 30% extra means. Theoretically you should be able to stay in DS 30% longer. It might not though: the extra life force might simply degrade faster, for all we know! Then equip Vital Persistence, and see if it does indeed let you stay in there an extra 25% longer on top of that.

That’s not all though: we don’t know whether life force degrades by a percentage or by a fixed amount of “HP”. ie. 100% life force might degrade more slowly if you have a larger HP pool. The only way to really be sure is to do the above tests at 2 different levels of HP. (Go to the Mists, get a +vitality amulet, and do the same test with it on and off, just go into death shroud from full life and see how long you can stay in there) It kinda makes sense it should run down by a fixed number of HP rather than by a percentage.

It is entirely percent-based.

did it some time ago:

with no traits an armor I could use the same amount of lifeblasts as with high vitality and traits. Lifeforce depleted the same, no matter how much lifeforce I had. So the trait bonus is bogus and high toughness probably benefits ds more than high vitality, if taken damage.

Dumb question: why would you let an Orrian beat on you. You lose 3%/sec just being in DS….so taking combat damage would skew that wouldn’t it?

I’ve estimated Death Shrouds health at roughly 18K at 100% and 23k at 130%

Dumb question: why would you let an Orrian beat on you. You lose 3%/sec just being in DS….so taking combat damage would skew that wouldn’t it?

4%/sec is the baseline Lifeforce loss while in Deathshroud. 3%/sec is with the Vital Persistence trait. But that’s not the issue; I wanted to find out how much actual Health we have in Deathshroud, and a percent doesn’t really do that for you. Because we don’t have any numbers on our Lifeforce bar that show the actual HP, I took damage and found what percent that damage number made up, and used that to get some kind of estimate as to the numerical number of our Lifeforce bar. I just noted that I had the Vital Persistence Trait and then took off what percentage of Lifeforce I would normally have lost while in Deathshroud during the timeframe I was in it. Whatever the difference was between the estimated and actual is what I assumed to have been taken off of due to damage taken since there wasn’t exactly any other way to have lost that Lifeforce.

I’ve estimated Death Shrouds health at roughly 18K at 100% and 23k at 130%

How much Vitality was that with, if you remember?

In other words, if i read that right, THEIR DAMAGE scales with our life force…..that is plain dumb and poor design as we get no benefit at all from the extra life force.

Why do I get the feeling we are becoming more broken every day…..no wonder I have stopped playing…waiting for some dev activity to prevail in fixing our bugs.

Oldbugga.7029:

In other words, if i read that right, THEIR DAMAGE scales with our life force…..that is plain dumb and poor design as we get no benefit at all from the extra life force.

Why do I get the feeling we are becoming more broken every day…..no wonder I have stopped playing…waiting for some dev activity to prevail in fixing our bugs.

You aren’t reading it right. The only “damage” that scales up with increased life force is the amount that each tick removes because it is based on a percent of total life force. So more Life Force = more loss per tick (but the same percentage).

To the OP: I did similar tests like this. What I did, and what I think is a better way to do this, is to perform the tests in the Mists using fall damage. There are numerous advantages to this: you can use the Amulets and jewels to test the effects of Vit etc., you can freely adjust your relevant traits, you can easily regain your LF from the golems, and fall damage is relatively constant (maybe +/- 100 dmg). I’ll look and see if I still have the data that I collected somewhere and post it here. I think I got similar results to what you have here, but I think I had some issues when comparing traits etc..

I haven’t tested this but, I’ve had suspicion that Death Shroud actually calculated damage as a percentage…instead of straight damage. That would explain why some of your data fluctuates based on your damage test. I can’t say for certain because I’ve never tested.

Fall damage is no good as it takes a percentage based bite out of health. This so that a level 1 and a level 80 dies after dropping the same distance.

If the damage is a percentage of the players death shroud life force then we logically can only take the same number of hits? IE bigger life force =bigger individual hits as % stays the same…in other words the damage scales directly with the size of the life force???
EDIT: der
OK I see it now…..you would still think the ticks should not scale with the increased life force…but I can see why they have done it that way…ease of coding.

The question I’ve been wondering – Which contributes MORE to a higher total DS healthpool, 30 points in vitality, or 30 points in Soul Reaping?

Also, as a profession with naturally high health, and a second (although much smaller) healthpool would it be better to invest in Toughness, since we don’t really need a ton of extra hp?

OR, with vitality contributing to death shroud, would say 30 points in blood magic instead of 30 points in death magic contribute more overall damage mitigation purely through extra health and extra death shroud health?

Anyways, interesting find Arianna. I had always been under the assumption that death shroud was = to vitality, + the life force %. Makes much more sense now getting my entire life force bar depleted in two good hits from many professions

Right, the actual time in Death Shroud does not change, regardless of how much HP or +Lifeforce% you have while actually in Death Shroud.

You could have +5000% Lifeforce from something, and have 50,000 HP, but the actual time you are able to stay in Death Shroud, excluding external damage, is the same as someone with +0% Lifeforce and 20,000 HP. It ticks at a rate of 4%(3% Traited) Lifeforce drained per second. Abilities do not consume Lifeforce. Nothing but damage and the amount of time while actually inside of Death Shroud will take off from your Lifeforce.

The only thing additional Lifeforce in a numerical format will give you is an additional buffer against actual damage sustained while in Death Shroud. It does not change the total percentage of Lifeforce; This is and remains capped at 100%, regardless of Traits or additiona Lifeforce%. However, you will be able to sustain more damage than someone with a smaller Lifeforce pool, because your actual pool will be larger. But both of them will equal 100% when full.

What I wanted to find out (And what another similar thread that I missed seems to be attempting to find out) is actually how much the value of Lifeforce is. I don’t want 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%. I want actual numbers, equivalent to what our normal Health Orb shows.

And Fall damage is definitely a percentage of your maximum Health, which would skew results. Otherwise it would have been a fantastic test for it. The only thing I can think of in the Mists that would be equivalent to an actual battle is with Svanir or Utahein beating on you, which would be much harder to actually pull off and compensate for than having a few Undead beat the crap out of you. The Fire Pit is also based on your maximum Health, so that more or less rules that one out too. You might be able to pull a test off with one of the Profession trainer guys in the Mists, but that’s about it as far as a controlled test goes. It’s somewhat troublesome, honestly.

Arianna or anyone who is online now, if you want to do some death shroud Health testing im all for it, we’ll find an empty server in mists and test.

Note: I’ve just recorded 3 different tests and am currently working out the stats will post in about 10 mins

Test Number 1: 0% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 17.1 seconds (68.4% LF)
Took 6,607 Damage (31.6% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 20,908

Test Number 2: 30% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 17.24 seconds (68.96% LF)
Took 7,051 Damage (31.04% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 22,715

Test Number 3: 0% Life Force Boost, 1,839 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 19.24 seconds (76.96% LF)
Took 7,850 Damage (23.04% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 34,071

From these tests we can therefor say:

• Base Death Shroud Health before Vitality or Trait boost is roughly 21,000 HP
• 1 Point of Soul Reaping increases the base Death Shroud HP by 0.27% instead of 1%
• 1 Point of Vitality increases the base Death Shroud HP by 0.05%
• 1 Point of Blood Magic (+10 Vitality) increases base Death Shroud HP by 0.5%

Conclusion: Blood Magic will provide more DS-HP then Soul Reaping.

This formula should apply to everyone testing this out (hopefully):
Your Death Shroud HP = (20908 + (12.3 * (Vitatily – 916))) * (Soul Reaping Points * 0.27)

@Arianna

Im sure by the other thread you mentioned, you mean mine. I have ton a lot of testing in the past day and today.

Findings:

- Your life force drains by percent (4%/sec) regardless of how much hp you have or how much points you invested in Soul Reaping. It will always deplete at the same speed unless you use Trait II (3%/sec)

- By changing your vitality around you will notice a fluxuation of the life force bar which adjusts accordingly in a manner that implies the DS hp is equal to your regular health bar.

ie- if you have base health in the mists at 18,372 and add a soilders amulet it will drop to 74% because 74% of 24,812 is 18,372. The 24,812 being your new total hp with soilders amulet.

- We also know, or at least I do, that if you jump into plague form at base health in the mists you get a 100% increase to hp. Lich form gets a 50% increase to hp. These numbers drop about 5% or so for each 100 vitality you add to your base health.

ie – if I add 1000 hp to my character I will get a 95% boost in Plague form instead of the 100%.

• I mention this only because I originally thought we recieved a 20% boost to hp in DS and could match Lich form by traiting into DS with 30 points.

- Also I have found regardless of hp or trait points spent into the Soul Reaping line that the damage out puts the same remaining life force.

ie – I take 3000 points of damage in DS. I have 0 points invested in Soul Reaping. My life force drains about 8%. I then invest 30 points into Soul Reaping. I take that same 3000 points of damage and find that, again, I am left with 8% drained from my life force. (The testing part of this has been tried in number of fashions by both me and other individuals to come to similar conclusions).

With the above info I hope I have shed some light on the subject. In the current set up I have calculated different amounts of total hp for DS which change only based on how I decide to incur damage to myself while in that form. Because of that I really cant tell how much actual hp we get.

However, I am now starting to think it is all % based and the actual amount is not important as how much each 1% is equating to. I say this because in the thread I am normally posting about this topic in, I make mention of the analogy to our DS being like a computer hard drive. Hard drives take data in small chunks ( like percents ) and store files based on those chunks not the actual size.

ie – you store a 200 byte file in a hard drive that uses the standard 4096 segments… that means you lose all that extra data space because the file is so small. However, with a larger file its not as penalizing because you match or come close to it.

• analogy relates to topic in the manner that most people want to know how much hp is in there DS for judging the amount of damage it negates… if a person uses tons of tiny hits your wasting hp because the 1% chunks of life force might be 4096 points worth of damage even though your getting hit for “500 points at a time.” Although if you get for 15k you only use 4% life force because of the size of 1% chunks…. These numbers are all totally exagerrated to make the example easier to follow, remember that. But you get the idea.

@Ascii

I like your info, but I am wondering how you tested to get your results. I find that it seems like there are a lot of variables in there by the differences in damage. Also were there just 3 straight forward tests, or did you replicate each test several times to get the exact same answer….

I only ask because I used Blood is Power to get 1200 points of damage on myself and sat in DS for 10 seconds. This meaning for the duration of the incoming damage I was in DS. Also that 10 seconds would negate 40% of my life force bar. Each tick of damage was a constant 60. This test can be repeated exactly every time.

There were no random crits, nor were there an inconsistancy of auto attacks that say they hit for 400 but hit between 380 and 422 and sometimes crit for 588 to 634. The numbers are all straight from thin air but you get the idea.

I changed amulets around for different hp amounts and found that with or with out Soul Reaping I would have about 8% damage every time. I will let you do the math on what my hp would be, but I should not have the same damage amount to life force if I am changing my HP value, or more importantly to me —-> adding 30% life force from traits. That 8% should get smaller with each upgrade due to a larger pool of health for my DS.

I myself need to do more testing because I have an idea that my results will change if I use a large spike of damage as to several small hits of 60. I currently have no way of getting a consistent hit from something that is a large enough number though so it is hard to get a proper result.

• Just in case. I dont want you to think I am trying to imply anything against you or bring down your findings. I just am curious is all. Some people shared their methods as well as their findings in the other thread so we could better understand how the mechanic in itself may or may not be working.

Thanks for the tests Ascii, I’ll try to get around to double-checking ’em when possible.

Red, as far as the Elites go, I’m -almost- positive that they’re doing something with the BASE stats. Ie, I believe Lich Form doubles your 916 Base Power and then adds on whatever you have via Traits/Gear. I’m not entirely certain on this, as I haven’t really done much testing on either of them, but I believe that to be the case as far as Lich and Plague are concerned. They may very well be altering Vitality in some similar manner.

Outside of that, thank you for the information; I’ve been reading through your thread as well. It’s honestly very strange how awkward the numbers are. Frankly, the only thing that comes to mind is something very similar to your Harddrive analogy; That is, Deathshroud is based around percentages, and not actual numbers. Which means whatever rounding they’re using could throw god knows how many calculations out the window.

Edited in; Actually Red, that might be -exactly- what it is. If a number is over some sort of threshold, it rounds up to 1%, regardless of how low the damage may actually be in comparison to what percent of Death Shroud it may have actually taken out. I recall that while doing my test, the Orrian used the one multi-hit skill with the same animation as Necrotic Bite. That’s ~5 hits of semi-low damage, which may very well have skewed results drastically if each one of those hits accounted for 1% of my Lifeforce bar every time. It would also explain why my Lifeforce seems to drain so rapidly while under heavy Conditions. It would even explain why low-damage, many-hit channeled abilities seem to destroy us (Or at least me).

If that’s the case, well… That seriously sucks imho. That more or less guts a lot of the use of Death Shroud.

Edited edited in; If the above holds true, this would also probably explain why Soul Reaping is seemingly doing absolutely nothing in your other thread. It may very well be doing -something-, but it would be such a marginal increase due to how percentages are handled that it may as well be negligible.

Lich form is a direct boost on base stats i can confirm that as i tested while go.

300% base power increase, 200% precision and vitality increase and it will actually remove all weapon bonuses too (1,044 toughness with my Bifrost on, 916 in Lich Form)

@Arianna

In regards to the Plague and Lich forms I believe i stated the percentages at which they become effected.

That being Plague almost doubles your HP on a character with base health, while Lich gives an almost an addition 50% health (1.5x your normal hp). Both get deminishing returns based on stacking more vitality, from my calculations about 4-5% (more or less) is dropped off the total value in these forms for each 1000 points of added hp to your character.

I actually did the math every 1000 health. At 18372 hp you were put at 36692 health in Plague, and 27532 in Lich. If you add 1000 hp you get 37692 in Plague, and 28532 in Lich. If you do the math its between those percentiles for each 1000 points gained.

As for the analogy I mentioned before, Im pretty sure that is how our mechanic works. I just need to find a way to test it with consistant burst numbers. I too have felt the same way about my DS form. I find that sometimes it feels extremely squishy although I know I am not taking severe damage as I can read the outputs in my combat log. Other times with high burst damage, that I know can amount to more then the smaller ticks of damage from other sources, I find I easily eat the large hit and keep it moving with very little life force lost.

As i have stated many times before in prior posts, I originally thought the bar expanded on our hp pool by adding a slightly larger one then our own. Although now I am pretty sure the two bars are identical in hp, and only grow (or should grow) with an increase to Soul Reaping Traits… although I think the bar should be indicated as 130% instead of the 100%. Honestly, I feel that it supposed to work like that, and for that reason alone is why I see no difference in number value when test traited or untraited.

Overall, I dont think deathshroud is a bad form. If used in the appropriate manner (large hit absorbtion, combo’ing, using the shroud dance in a manner to add buffs -retaliation/fury/stability – , or add debuffs – weakening shroud -) it is a real nice tool. However, not gaining an additional 5% life force from skills that add to my life force pool “as well” as not getting the additional 30% life force added into my bar really hurts the potential of the mechanic. So many people complain about generating life force or that it dissapates to fast in certain situations… if these traits actually worked all that complaining would dissappear ( aside from the regular cry babies who have to nit pick at every little detail ), but over all deathshroud would feel tanky as intended.

I am not saying that I dont feel the tankiness of our class, I do. Especially in PvE. I pretty much have face to face chats with veterans. I rarely worry about moving out of the way of stuff unless it is a champion or im in a dungeon. However, in sPvP and WvW certain attack methods that shouldnt really be blazing through my DS just destroy me. (example being sometimes a theif will try to jump me and I catch on and eat the hit -normally a 10 to 15k hit – and only a portion of my DS bar is gone, but if someone like a ranger unloads a series of fast shots at me which can equal the same damage… the bar is gone.)

I guess maybe this is just really another post supporting the threads for fix Gluttony and now “can we get that 30% we spent the points on?”

Idk, its late by me and im rambling at this point. Any other findings post here or in the other thread im watching. I will check back again later or tommorow.

The issue with the Soul Reaping Traitline, if it is indeed working under that assumption, isn’t so much that we’re not benefitting from it, but that the rounding is shaving off nearly all benefits we’re actually gaining from it.

Ie, assuming Lifeforce to have the value of 1,000, and you are hit repeatedly for 5 damage, 5 times. -Normally-, this would drop you down to 975 Lifeforce value, or 97.5%. However, if it is handled via percentages, then each one of those 5 hits would drop you down 1% due to rounding (We can’t take 0 damage from an attack). So you would come down to 95% Lifeforce, instead of the estimated 97.5%, due to being hit for minimal damage, but being hit five times, all because of the percentages rounding up to actually do damage. Essentially we’ve lost out on 2.5% of our Lifeforce pool because of that.

Even if you added that 30% Lifeforce via Soul Reaping, your maximum HP would go up to 1,300. That same damage would normally drop you down to 1275, or 98%. However, again, due to the same rounding as above, it would drop you down to, once again, exactly 95% Lifeforce. In this case we lose out of 3% of our Lifeforce pool (From what the estimated drop would be compared to what the actual drop would be), even though we did technically gain that 30% additional Lifeforce.

If this -is- how it works, it seriously does suck. That doesn’t really mean a fix for Gluttony nor the 30% additional Lifeforce would fix it. That means they would have to actually give Lifeforce a numerical value instead of going off of percentages, and treat it as if it were a secondary HP bar, assuming they wanted it to work as intended and not chalk it up to a ‘Feature’. It means that Lifeforce scales depending on how hard you’re being hit, and not how often; If you’re being hit often, but for small amounts, Lifeforce will be shredded, whereas getting hit for large amounts, at a slower rate, will be far more beneficial due to being able to fill the percentages out, if that makes sense (Getting late here as well, so I’m more or less rambling in an attempt to get my thoughts out before I go pass out.).

A bit off tangent of the original post, but I believe Gluttony is partially working; Is the amount of Lifeforce gain on enemy death supposed to be 10%? If it is, you actually gain 11% with Gluttony Traited, and I would assume Arenanet finds this to be ‘working as intended’. If this is also the case, then this only solidifies the percentage rounding that I used in the above example.
Edited in; Just double-checked Gluttony, and I’m pretty sure it can be chalked up as ‘Working as intended’, it’s just a tool-tip error, sadly. 10% Lifeforce is gained upon killing a foe without Gluttony Traited, whereas 11% Lifeforce is gained with it Traited. Not a single skill (Including the Spectral w/ Trait) was being benefitted from Gluttony. So I’d honestly chalk that up as working as intended. Imagine that, a typo in a core gameplay mechanic nearly two months after release. Yeah, we’re definitely not being ignored or anything. Honest.

Gluttony doesnt work. After testing it out here and there I see no increase no matter what skill I use. I always get 10% for my kills. I have seen 11% here and there, but can’t seem to think anything of it then it being a fluke as I will get 10% gains multiple times in a row.

As for DS I was almost sure that I have heard from sources that it is supposed to be based on actual hp numbers. I’ve heard that when it comes to calculating numbers in general that this game has some really round about ways of doing it as if it is to disuade you from being a math geek about it. Makes me think this is just yet another attempt at keeping us in the dark with how the mechanic actually works by showing a percentage. Idk…

going to sleep.

sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep…. maybe food… nom nom nom….

So I did some testing of my own.

Methodology:

Condition tests: In mists, naked with staff, get to 100% life force and cast blood is power/corrupt boon to self dot, and jump into death shroud at same time. Wait until dot stops ticking, record time and round down (because decay only ticks every 1s, so there are no fractions).

Tested with 916 vit and no traits, 916 vits and 30 soul reaping (+30% life force), and 916 vit 1839 vit. I also did tests with 0 condition damage and 750 condition damage.

Power damage tests: In mists, got 100% life force, then went to the engineer npc and aggro’d her (auto attack with scepter), then immediately hopped into death shroud and started a stop watch awaiting the first attack. Canceled death shroud and stopped my stop watch as soon as I took the first hit.

Tested with 916 vit and no traits, 916 vits and 30 soul reaping (+30% life force), and 916 vit 1839 vit.

For the power damage tests my results were the same as ascii’s. Effective hp in deathshroud is about 20-22k (I assume rounding to % on server side causes the error), and with 1839 vit somewhere around 32-34k effective hp.

But when I did tests using blood is power, and corrupt boon for getting condition damage on myself effective hp while naked was closer to 11k and with 1839 vit it was more like 17k.

I was suspicious that with larger dot ticks the effective hp I was seeing would increase because of how damage was rounded to life force % (i.e. every tick of damage converts from float to int, but that would be a dumb rookie computer science mistake), however increasing condition damage didn’t affect the result.

It seems like we take 2x damage in death shroud from conditions. Can anyone test this to confirm my results?

Also wanted to add that soul reaping didn’t have any affect. That trait line is completely broken.

Ascii.9726:

Test Number 1: 0% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 17.1 seconds (68.4% LF)
Took 6,607 Damage (31.6% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 20,908

Test Number 2: 30% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 17.24 seconds (68.96% LF)
Took 7,051 Damage (31.04% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 22,715

I’d like to propose an alternative calculation here (because I believe DS only ticks on whole seconds):

• Test 1: 17.1 seconds -> 17 ticks = 68%; 6607 damage = 32%
• Test 2: 17.24 seconds -> 17 ticks = 68%; 7051 damage = 32%

Now I don’t fully know the details of what you did, but let’s assume you ‘ticked’ out of DS in both cases and assume for the moment that 100% LF = 100% health: 4% of 18372 is 734.88. So if in test 2 you took only 444 damage more (due to randomness of hits/crits) prior to that last tick, then there is actually no difference between test 1 and 2 and soul reaping has 0% effect.

I have 2 final remarks on this: even if LF is internally not rounded to whole percentages (as proposed above), the fact that the value that we see is rounded induces a rather large error that we must be weary off. On top of that, 734.88 dps by just being in DS is huge compared to the damages sources all of our test have used up to now. So a lot of the finer details will probably be obscured by this (allthough having seen a 30% increase from soul reaping anywhere isn’t exactly a fine detail that is easily obscured…).

You could actually make an interesting expansion upon this experiment though: first of all you need to make sure you tick out of DS and aren’t damaged out of it. Then we know that if you take no damage you can stay in DS for 25 sec. Now if you can take a small amount of extra damage (500-1000 range) during this time, you can test whether the damage was higher than 1 tick (24 sec DS) or not. This way you can try to narrow down what 1 tick or 4% is.

Edit: I changed my proposal for an experiment as it was needlessly complicated.
Edit2: 31% should have been 32%

I am doing some more testing but I wanted to share some intermediate finding that had been messing with my results for a few hours: there is apparently no 96% tick? Starting from 100% life force, I can leave DS very quickly and stay at 100% or I can wait 1 tick and I’ll be at 92%. The same is not true if you start from 92% for instance.

That also means max DS is 24 seconds instead of 25…

I managed to narrow it down quiet a bit: I basically did the experiment I described above with the bonfire (I know some of the damage is %based, it doesn’t matter as the damage is printed on your screen anyway) at base health (18372). I recorded all my test and used video editing software to determine my time in DS as accurately as possible. Using appropriate runes and amulet, it was then possible to carefully adjust the damage I received by putting points in curses (since part of the damage you receive from the fire scales with your own condition damage):

• My time in DS went from 21 to 20 sec by going from 19 to 20 curses, at this point I was receiving resp. 2863 and 2866 damage. As such, 4×4% LF (at base health) must be somewhere inbetween these values. Using the average, that gives us 17903 as effective health for 100% LF.
• With the Vital Persistence trait, I got exactly the same results.
• I bet you can guess by now what the effect of 30 soul reaping was…

If anyone has any more questions on what I did/ how I did it, please feel free to inquire (I’m to tired at this point to go into too much detail).

Edit: changed 4% to 4×4%

Test Number 1: 0% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 17 seconds (68% LF)
Took 6,607 Damage (32% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 20,647

Test Number 2: 30% Life Force Boost, 916 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 17 seconds (68% LF)
Took 7,051 Damage (32% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 22,034

Test Number 3: 0% Life Force Boost, 1,839 Vitality

In Death Shroud for 19 seconds (76% LF)
Took 7,850 Damage (23.04% LF)
Death Shroud HP: 32,708

• 1 Soul Reaping Point gives 0.21% Life Force health boost.
• 1 Vitality Point gives +11.53 Life Force health.
• 1 Blood Magic Point gives +115.3 Life Force health (0.56% boost)

Adjusted to account for whole time measurements instead of fractions of time.

Arvid.3829:

I am doing some more testing but I wanted to share some intermediate finding that had been messing with my results for a few hours: there is apparently no 96% tick? Starting from 100% life force, I can leave DS very quickly and stay at 100% or I can wait 1 tick and I’ll be at 92%. The same is not true if you start from 92% for instance.

That also means max DS is 24 seconds instead of 25…

I think the first tick is hidden. If you wait 1s and leave DS you’ll go down to 96% and you won’t have seen an actual tick happen in the life force meter while in death shroud.

No one else did tests while only taking condition damage?

@Ascii

So based on your findings, right now it isn’t even viable to go into Soul Reaping for a death shroud centred build. My build is currently at 20 20 0 0 30 for a pure power/crit DS build, which was SUPPOSED to have a huge increased life force bar.

It seems I’d be better off going 20 20 0 20 10 , the 10 being for vital persistence (SR II) or Unyielding Blast (SR VI). Still not sure which I’d rather have.

Guys, your starting to figure out and master deathshroud. The consequences may be severe.
On a serious note. Great job guys Time to respec again.
20/20/10/10/10 anyone? Don’t forget if you go too far into Blood you heal enemies! >.>

Also Anet
Please listen to these guys. THESE are the kind of posts that you should take into consideration above all. Actual raw numbers and Data.
Also, your DS mechanic is so broken and apparently the Soul Reaping trait line is completely worthless – your supposed OP mechanic doesn’t even work so can we get some fixes and buffs please?

One does not simply address the Developers directly!

But yah people like these guys need to be considered more and responded to by Anet, or even hired by them! It is things like this that will completely change my build. If only I didnt need that stability in DS…

Thanks Arvid and Ascii & others who tested.
The results seem kinda confusing.. ~17k v condition damage and ~22k v power damage. And SR either doing nothing or next to nothing.
I will probably do my own tests.
The other question is toughness -> i have heard it is doign nothing?

edit: ok toughness works fine
got around 24k hp with 200 vit so matches the 22k
now to test condition/SR tree
Ok tested condition: got a bit over 13k hp with 200vit. In line with person who said around 11k.
@ arvid you are using 24 sec as base DS. I think it is actually 25 and if you use that with your numbers you get 14,5k which is more in line. Either case DS takes disproportionate dmge from conditions. The roudning to percent theory sounds plausible :/

You guys should check out XXVI Reds forum page on the 30 point deathshroud tread. It is also another good tread.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/30-points-in-Deathshroud-does-not-give-extra-30-increase/first#post541675

Kisses.1054:

@ arvid you are using 24 sec as base DS. I think it is actually 25 and if you use that with your numbers you get 14,5k which is more in line.

As I said a bit earlier in the topic, the first tick takes you from 100% to 92% for some reason. It could be a hidden tick as Vadren proposes, or maybe this first tick actually takes two seconds (if you count the transition into DS as well, you might get to this), or it could be another bug (I tried it a few times and if you start at 92% for instance, your first tick takes you to 88% as you’d expect; in other words the transition suddenly isn’t counted there?).

Be that as it may, what I did in practise does not depend on this: I measured this using video editing software, starting with the first frame after the first tick (because ticks give a very distinct cue) up to the first frame after the next to last tick. This was to avoid any issues with the transition in and out of DS. Doing this, I measured 22 seconds for normal DS degradation. I then added 1 second before and after to account for what I cut off, which made sense to me at the time; this puts me at 24 seconds. Maybe I should have added 3, but as I said, this doesn’t affect the results as I’m looking at time differences (so this constant factor subtracts itself anyway).

I am very curious how others have dealt with this issue though?

Vadren.9045:

No one else did tests while only taking condition damage?

I will try to reproduce this after the weekend, as it pertains to my results as well

Ascii.9726:

• 1 Soul Reaping Point gives 0.21% Life Force health boost.
• 1 Vitality Point gives +11.53 Life Force health.
• 1 Blood Magic Point gives +115.3 Life Force health (0.56% boost)

Adjusted to account for whole time measurements instead of fractions of time.

I don’t really know how to bring this up a second time, without coming across as rude, so my apologies for that already.

I’m still convinced that there is 0% scaling on soul reaping and there reason you’re aren’t arriving at the same results is because you’re not taking your errors into account. To be more precise: what you say is 100% can actually be anything between 100% en 104% ([100%,104%[ to be more precise). Using this, your results become:

• Test 1: 6607 damage = [32%,36%[ -> eHP = ]18353, 20647]
• Test 2: 7051 damage = [32%,36%[ -> eHP = ]19586, 22034]
  In my opinion, the size of these intervals does not allow you to make the conclusions you did. Specifically, there is some overlap between these intervals, I believe that the real eHP is the same in both cases and is situated somewhere in this overlap zone.

The difference between your value and mine is likely either because the condition part of my damage should be calculated differently (as stated, I’ll try to check this after the weekend) or there is some error in your number of ticks (see above).

Edit: the brackets for the eHP intervals were pointing in the wrong direction.

I did more testing and I’m back to share my conclusions; I consider them to be pretty much final this time.

• First of all, there is indeed a hidden (or at least not very visible) tick at 96%, as Vadren said. It seems that this might be because the bar you see isn’t the full 100% (more like 97% or something). As such you only notice this tick if it is made bigger by additional damage.
• Secondly, I repeated the experiment above with condition damage (Corrupt Boon and Blood is Power) instead of the bonfire. As before, I adjusted my condition damage untill I found a breakpoint in DS duration. In this way, I could relate the damage around the breakpoint to a multiple of 4% and deduce from this the eHP with a very small error. My results were very similar for bleeding and poison damage and showed that there is an extra (DS specific) modifier involved that is significantly higher than for direct damage (and that is the same for both (self) bleeding and poison).
• Applying this knowledge to my earlier results as well, I found that my eHP in Death Shroud was (pretty much exactly) 20% higher than my normal HP in all three cases (bonfire, bleeding and poison damage) as long as I doubled any condition damage taken (as suggested before by Vadren). For me, because these are finally nice round numbers, the puzzle falls in place with this.
• Allthough I had some very minor deviations from this ‘ideal’ result for smaller damages, that can imo only be explained by internal rounding, I found no evidence that this rounding would be as large as previously suggested (1%).

All that would be left now is to test this for different vitalities (this was all at base health), but because of how LF% scales with vitality, I would be very much surprised if this wasn’t a linear relation. And obviously, somebody should probably check if they can replicate this.

Thanks again for confirming. I personally find it distressing if conditions to 2x damage to life force.

I agree. Even if this is intended, it would only be normal then to have the floating numbers (or combat log) reflect this… or at the very least state it in some description somewhere.

It (i.e. extra damage from conditions) just seems so strange I am inclined to think it is unintended bug, with rounding as the most obvious possible cause.

If I later see it in the ability description instead of see it being fixed so DS acts like a normal hp bar I will be extremely annoyed.

This should be a sticky, would have saved me hours of testing DS and DS builds to come to the conclusion.

DS builds are not working and are very weak compared to even a power build that does not spec into DS…. and of course its useless in a condition build. I don’t even think if DS was ‘fixed’ to actually get +30% more it would be viable.

This thread needs to be a sticky, save other necros time.

Anyway yeah I can confirm these findings the most annoying one is we do take more damage from conditions in DS.

This thread should be stickied. Necro has necro’d. Bwwhhaaaha

Nay of the Ether.8913:

This thread should be stickied. Necro has necro’d. Bwwhhaaaha

All these tests need to be redone. Since they were originally done 4 months ago, and a lot of the “bugs” have been fixed — like points in Soul Reaping now “correctly” increase Life Force pool.

Also, I really really think Life Force pool needs to be changed from a percentage to just straight up numbers. That would remove the problem of small hits taking away a whole 1% of the pool and would let us see how much damage we can actually soak up with the kitten thing!

My (wet) dream right now is that when we get the Death Shroud UI improvement, we will also lose the % in favor of solid numbers.

I have 25k health and no pts in soul reaping. It only takes 12k damage to take me out of DS.

I have redone some of the tests above + some other ones and have both good and bad news: all the tests done above are still valid and nothing has changed the results, but the interpretation of the results was wrong. :S I’ll start with the new tests I’ve done first, as they yield the most important results and then I’ll come back to the interpretation of the previous ones.

So I went mano-a-mano (actually more like him pounding my face repeatedly, but that doesn’t sound so cool) with the warrior npc several times and recorded it all. I let him destroy a full DS and then watched the recordings to see the damage and the amount of ticks that happened. Obviously, this will always overestimate the real percentage, but I got lucky once and only received a very small amount of ‘overkill’ (I’ll try to upload that video, once I have figured out how to do some basic editing to it) that resulted in a DS-HP that is (78.5/1.3) = 60.5% of my normal HP (the 1.3 is to account for the 30 points of soul reaping I had at the time). In other words, the real number is likely 60% (which is more in line with what others have found).

In the previous tests, 60% was also the number I arrived at for conditions. Why did I/we assume then that it should be 120% and that conditions just did double damage? Well, part of the tests were done on the bonfire, which deals 2 types of damage: something that you could call ‘environmental damage’ (a percentage of you max health, similar to falling damage) and condition damage (which is based on your own condition damage). This allowed to very neatly control the damage you take by increasing the amount of condition damage you have; but the numbers only made sense if you doubled the condition damage compared to the environmental damage. Back then, Death Shroud still allowed you to see ALL the damage you took (including condition damage, falling damage, etc.), not just the damage that is also in the combat log, as it is now (when did that even change?). And the amount of environmental damage displayed was the same in and out of Death Shroud, so nothing suggested that it might actually not be. Furthermore, there was already a theory that condition damage might be doubled in DS. So since that theory could perfectly explain the results, I didn’t even consider the opposite: that halving the environmental damage explains it just as well… It now turns out that the numbers displayed on the screen back then were probably wrong (go figure) and that that is exactly what happens. (This might explain why they are no longer shown.) I looked into this a bit more and it SEEMS that environmental damage is indeed based on normal HP, but halved, in DS and not on DS-HP or something, because 1) the numbers don’t match up if you take 60% of the environmental damage it needs to be 50% and 2) the environmental damage taken in DS does not seem to depend on points in soul reaping.

TL;DR

• DS-HP is 60% of normal HP (with 0 points in Soul Reaping)
• Conditions are not treated differently
• ‘Environmental damage’ might be reduced by 50% while in DS

This is disappointing (LF 60% of HP) and I think continues to make the Soul Reaping tree less desirable, especially as a conditionmancer.

If I put 10 points in Blood Magic I’ll get 1000 real health and 600 LF health. 1600 EHP. While if I put 10 points in SR, I’ll get just 1200 more LF (at 20K HP) and of course it degens.

Whereas if LF was 120% of health or even 100%, then at 20,000 HP you would get 2000 LF health for 10% into SR.

Also think the other attribute in SR, crit damage isn’t too helpful since most necro abilities have low direct damage that doesn’t scale well with crit, and near useless for condition builds. All that on top of the LF abilities just in general not synching up well with non power builds.

What really galls is a lot of condi necros are going to want 20 into SR for that 50% terror trait, since terror gels with high condition damage. Yet Death Shroud and its trait tree offer little else for you. Thus, our trait trees remain very jumbled and messy.

The DS mechanic needs some work, and by that, I mean improvement.

Considering that the soul reaping trait didn’t work for quite some time (It got fixed in November I think?) I’m more curious if the LifeForce pool is 60% on purpose or if it’s a bug.

At the very least 30 points into Soul Reaping should get you to Life Force equaling 100% of health. Thus 70% should be base if they want to make it lower than 100% off the bat.

Pendragon.8735:

This is disappointing (LF 60% of HP) and I think continues to make the Soul Reaping tree less desirable, especially as a conditionmancer.

If I put 10 points in Blood Magic I’ll get 1000 real health and 600 LF health. 1600 EHP. While if I put 10 points in SR, I’ll get just 1200 more LF (at 20K HP) and of course it degens.

Whereas if LF was 120% of health or even 100%, then at 20,000 HP you would get 2000 LF health for 10% into SR.

Also think the other attribute in SR, crit damage isn’t too helpful since most necro abilities have low direct damage that doesn’t scale well with crit, and near useless for condition builds. All that on top of the LF abilities just in general not synching up well with non power builds.

What really galls is a lot of condi necros are going to want 20 into SR for that 50% terror trait, since terror gels with high condition damage. Yet Death Shroud and its trait tree offer little else for you. Thus, our trait trees remain very jumbled and messy.

The DS mechanic needs some work, and by that, I mean improvement.

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. 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).

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.

@Arvid: thanks for testing. Much appreciated.

Pendragon.8735:

At the very least 30 points into Soul Reaping should get you to Life Force equaling 100% of health. Thus 70% should be base if they want to make it lower than 100% off the bat.

You’d need a base closer to 75% of your health as Death Shroud for that. 75% * 1.3 = 97.5%

I disagree with making it match health naturally. While death shroud does decay, you can also gain it back fairly rapidly through weapon attacks and such. Not to mention spectral abilities. It makes it life force gain an (odd) sort of heal, and in my opinion the hidden “life leech” build that people try to make vampiric into every once in a while.