Guild Wars 2

In this thread I shall explain why I think the Death Shroud mechanic is not working as it should, and why the Necromancer is not balanced properly partly because of this.
The title is “I never asked for this” because, as Adam Jensen said, he was given something powerful that he never asked for, and was then forced to use it or die. With Death Shroud, we were given something powerful, but also something clunky, and not always applicable, and we paid for it in all the other aspects of our class. Death Shroud, the trait lines and the minor and major traits are at fault here.

Let’s begin by analyzing the Death Shroud abilities one by one, starting with Life Blast.

Life Blast deals great power damage. It can pierce, apply vulnerability and give you might. What happens when you’re running something other than a power/precision/critical damage build? The ability does no damage, is slow to cast, and you maybe use it as a source of might for your conditions, or for stacking more vulnerability for your minions. Sadly, the adept major trait that increases your minion damage is not in the same line as the adept major trait that applies vulnerability, and neither of those is in the trait line that is all about enhancing your minions.

Dark Path has good sides and bad sides. It inflict bleeding and chilled, both are great for condition centric builds. It also teleports the caster to the target’s face, which is not always a good thing. As a condition necro, you have no idea why you would like to be in melee range, unless you’re about to activate Plague. You can use it in rare circumstances as an escape, but that’s iffy. This is great only for a dagger build and chasing people down in WvW.

Doom is nice. It’s an instant cast ranged fear. The duration sucks, but the cooldown is low, so you can use it often as an interrupt when you really need to. The ability can be somewhat upgraded, but not by much, and it costs valuable traits. It can fit in any build, really.

Life Transfer is the Death Shroud Panic Mode Button. If you have a good power value, it can deal enough damage and increase your life force by enough so that you can successfully turn the fight in your favor. Without power, you just buy time to run away while doing some minor damage to chasers. It can be traited to heal nearby allies, and that trait is beautiful.

OK, so now we know the basics of the Death Shroud skill bar. It is easy to notice that any build will, at most, benefit from two of the skills, mostly because it’s hard to not be able to take advantage of Doom alone. The abilities are not weak, they’re just… disjoined. Kind of like the trait lines and the minor and major traits; I think we can all agree that most of our minor traits are either weak or don’t quite fit. So here’s my big idea: remove most of the unwanted aspects of Death Shroud, reduce the skills to bare bones, and then give us minor traits in suitable lines that give some useability to the skills. That way we don’t pay for what we don’t want, but don’t have to spend valuable major traits to get more out of what we already paid for.

Here’s a how the bare-bones skills would look like:

Life Blast loses the ability to deal more damage with more Life Force. This is returned with the Grandmaster Soul Reaping minor trait, Strength of Undeath. A Master Curses minor trait, let’s call it Corrupting Blast (and let’s also move Furious Demise, which is good but unfit for Curses, to something like Blood or Spite), grants this ability a 1 second Poison. An Adept trait in Death called Lifeward (let’s pretend Reanimator doesn’t exist) could grant 400 toughness while casting Life Blast. Master Blood trait could be Life Gift, and could give 1s regen to allies it flies through.

Dark Path is kind of tricky. I would like to remove the teleport and make the conditions on-target only, with a bleeding reduced to two stacks instead of three, but the ability is called Dark Path. Not much of a path if you stand still, is it? If I could ignore the name for now, I’d have an Adept Spite trait return the teleport functionality, an Adept Curses trait to make both the chill and bleeding AoE and a Master Death trait that would immobilize the target for 1 second. A Grandmaster Spite minor could inflict 10 stacks of vulnerability on the target for 5 seconds.

Doom cooldown would be increased to 30 seconds, and a Master Soul Reaping minor trait would bring this back down to 20 seconds. A Grandmaster Curses trait, Frozen With Fear, would inflict a two-second chill on the target, while an Adept Soul Reaping trait could make the fear (and only the fear) have a small radius around the target, ~200 or so.

Life Transfer wouldn’t be changed much. 60 second cooldown by default, reduced to 40 by an Adept Blood trait. A Grandmaster Blood minor trait could make this skill heal your actual health bar with each tick for each enemy it hits, but not by much; two targets would be needed to match the healing of Life Siphon. Spite could have a Master minor trait that makes each tick on each enemy apply 1 stack of vulnerability for 6 seconds.

Death Shroud itself would have a single change through the traits; the Death Grandmaster minor trait would cause the caster to grant 1s of regeneration to all of his minions every second while in Death Shroud.

The themes should, I think, be quite clear:
Spite likes to be up in your face with pokey stabby slashy death, teleport and vulnerability help with that.
Curses apply boatloads of conditions to many targets, so area effects, poison and chilled conditions help here.
Death is about minions and tanking. Often combined with Spite for up close and personal stabby slash builds.
Blood revolves around healing, both yourself and your allies. More of both.
Souls seem to have a fear vibe, and as the current Death Shroud upgrade line, it makes sense that it would increase the main DS skill dramatically.

You will notice that I did not touch the underwater Death Shroud at all. That is because of two reasons; it’s easy to extrapolate what the traits I’ve mentioned would do to the underwater DS skills, and I think the underwater DS skills themselves need some tweaking themselves.

So there, that is step one towards making the Necromancer awesome. Step two is tidying up the trait lines, making sure they thematically make sense, and then just fixing the bugs.

I like most of the ideas you present here Boz. The one thing I am not understanding is this part :

“Death Shroud itself would have a single change through the traits; the Death Grandmaster minor trait would cause the caster to grant 1s of regeneration to all of his minions every second while in Death Shroud.”

How come you picked for a passive for deathshroud to be healing minions? Just wondering. =)

In my opinion, you only disliked the current state of DS because you’re coming from a condition build type of view.

As a Dagger + Axe Necromancer who’s focusing stacking Vulnerability and other movement restriction condition, the only complains I have with the DS is that both Life Blast and Dark Path have such long casting time and slow projectile. If they can make them like Lich Form’s #1 skill, which it’s instant cast and has decent speed, then it will be perfect – at least coming from my viewpoint.

I actually like this idea, this would make DS much more useful to individual builds and prove the framework for a more customizable necro experience . .

Though, I’d rather they removed DS all together and give us a class mechanics based upon minions instead.

Blizt.3086:

In my opinion, you only disliked the current state of DS because you’re coming from a condition build type of view.

You are most incorrect, I have outlined the problems that the skills have with most builds.

Blizt.3086:

As a Dagger + Axe Necromancer who’s focusing stacking Vulnerability and other movement restriction condition, the only complains I have with the DS is that both Life Blast and Dark Path have such long casting time and slow projectile. If they can make them like Lich Form’s #1 skill, which it’s instant cast and has decent speed, then it will be perfect – at least coming from my viewpoint.

In a dagger + Axe build, the slow casting of DS1 is actually a net decrease in DPS. It offers range, which is great in a dagger build, but not as great in an axe build.

Shroud also has one more problem that I did not touch upon: incompatible with two out of three Necromancer elite skills. Not yet sure how I’d solve that one.

Venom.6189:

Though, I’d rather they removed DS all together and give us a class mechanics based upon minions instead.

That runs into the same problem: what if I don’t want to run minions at all? Also, minions don’t scale with any of the character’s stats, so a completely nonscaling class mechanic would be a step backward, IMO.

I’d rather DS grant you abilities that were related to your equipped weapons and either complimented them or enhanced them, and didn’t deny your utilities bar.

It would be nice being able to customize DS skills somehow at least. It really isn’t one size fits all currently. Though with some builds you can’t just afford the needed DS traits currently to make it good.

many of those suggestions seem really good. may be even game breaking once necromancers learn to play and use DS effectivly.

well I meant more expendable minions like a mesmers illussions and obviously minions need to scale with necro’s stats in the future for a MM build to be possible

@The Boz
I never said it was an increase in DPS did I? I do admit sometimes Life Blast’s damage can be a bit low, but then again, most of the time when I entered DS, I never intended to use any of the abilities for damaging purpose, but always for defensive/condition stacking/control purpose.

For example, did you know the Vulnerability applied with Unyielding Blast is 2 stacks per hit? If they can just adjust the casting/projectile speed to a bit faster, it’ll be a even more powerful tool for stacking Vulnerability than Axe’s auto attack.

And in your vision you’d make Dark Path an on-target skill, does that include retaining the AoE chilled/bleeding effect? I often take advantage of that by chilling many, then when chilled effect is about to disappear, switch to Axe and cast Unholy Feast to continue restricting their movement.

You know what the biggest problem with Death Shroud really is?

You’ve nailed it on the head – Death Shroud, compared to almost all the other profession-defining mechanics occupying the F1-4 keys, is dull and straightforward but above all it is inflexible. It completely goes against the apparent ethos set out as a standard by other professions. There’s no compelling choice other than when to use Death Shroud, and it lacks the tactical depth other professions benefit from. Observe:

A Guardian is allowed to choose between 3 Virtues: Courage (Block next attack, can only happen every 40 seconds, or active component grants it instantly), Justice (Every 5th attack burns, or active to guarantee next attack burns), and Resolve (Passive healing over time, or active component heals you and nearby allies). This is and interesting and fun mechanic because it lets you pick and choose when and where each Virtue’s active will be most useful, and when you can spare the cooldowns.

Rangers have a plethora of interesting passive skills based on their pets – even different breeds of pets from the same family usually offer different functions or conditions/boons.

Heck, Elementalists gain completely different 1-5 key based on what attunement they currently have active. It’s dizzying simply how many choices they have.

Death Shroud? Death Shroud is an adequate idea wrapped in clumsy mechanics. You can’t see your boons or conditions while in Death Shroud (apparently a bug set to be fixed, har har har) and you’re limited to four attacks. All bar one of these have a pretty lengthy cooldown – if you’re not actively being attacked and haven’t gone down the trait line you might be able to fire off Dark Path and Doom twice before your Life Force runs out and you go back to your regular toolkit. And Life Transfer? Forget about it – if you so much as get sneezed on by CC effects then it goes onto cooldown and that’s it – it’s gone for 40 seconds (unsupported by traits). I actively lament having a full Death Shroud bar when I’m out in the world during PvE because it means that I should probably switch into a mode that restricts me to four buttons, none of them particularly compelling outside of Life Transfer after I’ve applied a buttload of conditions and spread them with Epidemic.

But my biggest gripe is that when looking at the traits that do support Death Shroud, it’s like Death Shroud exists for a specific build of Necromancer that hasn’t been fully realised or simply doesn’t exist. To me it shouldn’t just feel just like a second life-bar. I want going into Death Shroud to mean I’m about to get serious and unload a whole bunch of pain on someone’s face. But with slow cast-times on Life Blast and Life Transfer, coupled with cooldowns just a little too long to make use of them more than once per Death Shroud.

Sorry I didn’t mean to potentially hijack the thread, but I needed to get that off my chest. Something. Anything done to Death Shroud to make it more interesting would be greatly appreciated, and at least this is an idea.

My biggest gripe with death shroud is that it’s the reason necro lacks in versatility compared to other classes.

Necros don’t get: a stun, a stability utility, a temporary invulnerability, mobility

‘More health’ is a poor way to make up for loss of mechanics.

I’m not going to go into a wall of text here, but my issue with Death Shroud is that it feels like the whole class is essentially balanced around 4 buttons. Yay. Death Shroud is like a second lifebar!

Yeah, one that lasts for 5-10 seconds, and takes a few minutes to refill. Whopee. And what do you do? You get 4 buttons. One that’s on autoattack, so technically you get 3 buttons.

So. Friggin. Sweet.

The class doesn’t even feel ‘Necromancery’. There’s no curses. You apply the same debuffs everyone else does (and do a kittenier job too). The pets look pathetically weak. Your animations are recycled everywhere. And to top it all off, you switch into a form that takes away EVERYTHING from you and gives you 3 buttons.

Masters of death amirite?

Give necros a 5. ability in DS which comsumes all available life force for a high damage nuke with the damage depending on the current life force. This solves the problem of low dps in PvP and PvE without making the necro too powerful and it also makes the playstyle more flexible – you can increase your dps by sacrificing survivability.

Uchi.2419:

I’m not going to go into a wall of text here, but my issue with Death Shroud is that it feels like the whole class is essentially balanced around 4 buttons. Yay. Death Shroud is like a second lifebar!

Yeah, one that lasts for 5-10 seconds, and takes a few minutes to refill. Whopee. And what do you do? You get 4 buttons. One that’s on autoattack, so technically you get 3 buttons.

So. Friggin. Sweet.

The class doesn’t even feel ‘Necromancery’. There’s no curses. You apply the same debuffs everyone else does (and do a kittenier job too). The pets look pathetically weak. Your animations are recycled everywhere. And to top it all off, you switch into a form that takes away EVERYTHING from you and gives you 3 buttons.

Masters of death amirite?

You’re looking at it wrong. When I go into Death Shroud it does what it advertises, give me my downed skills. I am death incarnate indeed! Auto attack, fear, a DOT and a heal. It’s a mobile downed state.

To all you bad necros, learn how to mobile down state.

I like my Death Shroud as it is except for Life Blast, that one could be faster. Right now it’s slower than the Staff auto attack and doesn’t attack in a line or combo with fields, making it so much weaker.

And gimme Life Transfer underwater. I don’t want to have a skill that is useless when I’m alone which debuffs me at the same time.

Ok Adam Jenson, but here is my idea for Dark Path:

Upon activation you become spectral and dash forward 15 meters in a straight line, chilling for 4 seconds, and applying 1 stack of bleed to each enemy passed through/near.

I like that idea, seems nice. Both an escape and a gap closer, let’s see if we can make it more detailed…

Dark Path is now a one-second cast 600 range dash in the direction of your choice, 3 seconds of chill and one or two stacks of bleeding to all enemies in the path. Grandmaster Spite minor trait causes the path to also inflict five stacks of vulnerability to all in the path, plus five stacks at the end point in a small AoE. Master Death minor trait causes 3 seconds of weakness in a small AoE at the end point. Adept Curses minor trait doubles the condition duration of chilled and bleeding.

That could work… right?

I saw the subject line and was going to come in here with a snarky one liner like ‘Well I guess anet should have asked you before implementing it’ but this is a pretty well thought out post and now I am rambling and should stop typing.

as a condition mancer, i use DS mostly as an escape and an additional buffer. i also use it to do more direct damage to mobs when the zerg is big in an event, as we all know the issues with condition damage in such situations.

in WvW, DS has saved me many many times. and even in a full condition build, i feel that it still does decent damage. i also love dark path used with fear. you can blink to a target, chill him, then fear him in the direction he doesn’t want to go. it’s incredibly powerful.

…I think I want to bump this. Things haven’t changed, but more people have been playing Necro, and I think we can revitalize this discussion now.

On the subject of deathshroud I really do wish we had some sort of trait that allowed us to gain some sort of passive buff when our shroud-meter is completely full. Like it would put us into a limbo stage, where we are in between normal and deathshroud modes.
Something like:
While deathshroud is 100% full you become ethereal. Your attacks have a 5% chance to give you might.

I know not the greatest bonus, just a quick idea off the top of my head.

It’s a great theory because, as it stands now, DS is very lackluster. As a condition necro, it’s even more so. It’s a stock set of skills that don’t synergize well with any particular build (unlike say…Guardian’s virtues). Minor traits in certain lines would then cater DS to synergize with those builds. Perfect.

Many of these comments are coming from condition build necro’s.. stuff like dark path teleporting you, that part of the skill is there to provide utility to a wide variety of builds.. you need to think about the necro as a whole and not just how it effects your build specifically, I play a power/vit/healing necro and I get a ton of good use out of that teleport.. the conditions are just a bonus for me.. remember you can cast dark path, cancel death shroud before the skill hits and still benefit from the teleport/gap closer.

This kind of thinking goes across all classes, some guardians make little use of virtues.. doesn’t mean they are useless for those builds, other builds with trait support can make them into core abilities for that particular build.

I really do hate to admit this, because I love the amount of damage I can pump out in a power based death shroud build… But the lack of damage doesn’t affect only condition necros. With this bunker build I’ve been playing around with (1700 power), I’ll be lucky to hit for more than 900 on a non-crit.

Maybe if they boosted the base damage, but reduced the power scaling, it would work out better for everyone.

I totally agree it could use a little more.. ‘oomph’ We all know the necro as a whole needs a bit of fixing.. death shroud in it’s current state has many uses though.. just think many condition necros can’t see past there own build to see it.

I can see how some players would have these issues, can’t say that I have. I picked necro because I knew they had the biggest life pool and the idea of a cloth tank/support really appealed to me. So I run dagger/focus and at level 75 am speced blood 30, death shroud 25, and 10 spite. DS does exactly what I want it to.Like others have stated, my only complaint is the speed of life blast.

With that said I have been thinking heavily about playing around with some sort of condition build and this thread is making me not want to respec.

When I ran power builds I didn’t find DS to be really that great either (when I use my condition build I just use no. 3 and and to soak some damage when I am on the run). Simply because to get some decent dps in spvp you cannot put that many points into toughness/vit when you also want a viable DS.

To make it short: melees chewed in seconds through the DS bar.

Add to that the 4 skills which are not really hot either except no. 4 and number 3 is sometimes helpful, too and the whole mechanic feels…“unfinished”.

What also annoys me is also a double requirement for DS: life force AND a timer.

Don’t forget that the life force also trickles out at a steady pace while in shroud form.

You people have made posts outlining the exact problem this thread was made to remedy: Death Shroud is very, very hard to make fit into any build. Customizing it via passive minor traits is, I think, the way to go. I don’t think any of the other options (customize via major traits, outright buffs, full rework) are either as good or as realistic to expect.

The main thing I’d like is if they reverted Dark Path to pre-BWE, when it was a ground targetted teleport.

Some alternate suggestions for consideration:

1) Make the death shroud abilities replace only the weapon skills but allow us to access our utility skills. Being locked out of your build in order to use the class mechanic is kind of bogus.

2) Give us a trait major or minor (maybe in the Soul line) that grants stability while channeling, and Death Shroud will be amazingly more useful across the various builds without an omgwtfbbq level of power increase.

3) Dark Path needs to be far faster or improved in some other way to justify the slow projectile. Tracking maybe?

I’ve rolled a necromancer but have been quite hesitant to play it. Thematically and stylistically, I like the idea of a necromancer, but I just can’t wrap my head around death shroud (DS). I find this mechanic to be clumsy and very intrusive to playing the weapon sets/skill bar that I have chosen, yet it is too integral to the balance of the class to simply ignore using it. It really feels like it has been shoehorned in.

The problems I see with DS, as others have mentioned:
-Change in UI
-Loss of skill slots 6-0
-Skills granted during DS aren’t that compelling to use, and do not play nicely with many builds

With the exception of the elementalist, other profession mechanics add to the power or versatility of the class without compromising the base build. The elementalist attunements affect the weapon slots, but slots 6-0 remain in tact. In addition, elementalists don’t have to fill up any meter or meet any type of condition to switch to or maintain their attunement of choice.

How to make DS more friendly:
- Leave UI intact, use lifeforce health bar, and only switch skills 1-5 while leaving 6-0 alone
-Have DS leave all skills alone. Use lifeforce bar and add boons that are active for the duration. These boons could be determined by traits
-Have a customizable DS bar, with a selection of DS-only skills to choose from. This way, the DS bar could work with the regular bar
-Have F2-F4 skills (or even utility skills) as an alternative use of lifeforce

Shroud would be better served being a set of channeled or castable abilities, which use Life Force as a resource cost.

Plague and Lich are more than enough transformation abilities IMHO.

At the moment I’m utilising Death Shroud to help me and my minions turn the tides, so to say. Since Bloodthirst trait is bugged and the siphoning doesn’t really work correctly (plus Well of Blood actually HEALS ENEMIES) I am using Transfusion trait as an emergency heal for my minions (and allies). So, death Shroud for me is a panic button. Jump in, Trasfer Health, Jump out. Rinse and repeat.

I completely agree with the notion. I actually am for removing DS with something that complements any Necro playstyle.
The basic idea that DS is some kind of blank slate that is upgraded with specific functionalyity via traits is nice, but the ammount of functionality actually added is laughable.

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I use DS it a lot. It’s great to tag everything in DE, gives allyes some health, keep my golem up all the time and mostly saved my kitten a lot of times when I stayed in it long enough for heal to recharge. It’s there, it is avaiable and why not use it?
But I see nothing special in it. It’s just another skill bar, like one for any other weapon. No true corrupted necro ability to play with death and dark magic. Like I said, nothng exclusivly necro special.
For me to have extra value it would have to be more “twisted mind half mad half out of this world necro” oriented. After all, necro plays with death and underworld and who with normal mind would go and play with so dark magic if one is not at least 30% twisted in his head? I would agree to shorten it’s duration if it would have skills that would blast the …… out of mobs. Now we have some 1v1 blast, 1v1 transport, 1v1 fear and only one AoE life siphon. If I call forces from underworld to help me, mobs should know that. They should fear me more than 1 for 1 sec, they should be chilled and their spines should be shattered at least 600 distance AoE, they should see dragons and ghostst and monsters from their worst nightmares….

Wet dreams.

But again, if DS is there and it’s usable, I will use it even if it is not anything special what makes me Necro.

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