Death Shroud suggestions
OTHER TRAITS AND FIXES
A lot of these would help non-reapers be successful, a buff here and there, or just a mechanic change which would help the necromancer in general feel less broken.
DHUUMFIRE Change this ability to inflict 2 burning when using Life Blast, but only 1 burning using the Reaper auto attack. This will allow non-reapers to use Dhuumfire, at least with some success.
TERROR Remove the “if the target is inflicted by a condition” modifier, and keep the full damage amount. Fear lasts , at maximum, 2 seconds, and is easily countered by stability. A Terror nuke should be that; a nuke. It’s essentially useless in its current form. Fear has too long of a cooldown, and too short of a duration, to make its main modifying trait so underpowered.
PARASITIC CONTAGION Currently, the “Curses” tree is not very powerful in PVP. Parasitic Contagion would have to work through Shroud to make it even slightly worth it for pvp, or would need to be buffed to like 15-20% of condition damage.
Death Shroud currently acts very differently from other profession mechanics. Whereas other classes have mechanics that focus around “adding more” to the profession, Necromancer’s Death Shroud disables our utility skills, and is essentially a little more than a weapon swap with a new health pool.
I’d like to point out that its good that Death Shroud functions differently. I do think they should look at giving us our utilities in Shroud, and reworking shroud thereafter if necessary (like lowering its eHP by removing the 50% damage reduction), but the fact that Shroud is such a unique mechanic is great.
Death Shroud, passively, degenerates quickly, and even quicker when struck. This is fine in PvE, as you don’t get struck as often as in PvP… but in PvP, this makes the trait “Vital Persistence” essentially necessary as you are constantly getting focused.
I really need to pick at this, because I see this all the time and its a bad way of thinking. Vital Persistence’s reduced degen does absolutely nothing against burst, and in fact works the exact opposite of what you say: it only matters when you aren’t being bursted. Whether shroud’s degen needs to be looked at is another matter (I think its fine), but decreasing degen only matters when degeneration is actually occurring. This means VP only meaningfully impacts Shroud uptime when you can stay in shroud for a decent amount of time.
Death Shroud also benefits from the use of Vitality, providing a small bonus to Death Shroud when really, it shouldn’t – it makes it harder to balance an already strange mechanic.
It is treated as our HP in many ways, removing that scaling just makes toughness once again the best in every single way. The fact that we scale so well with vitality is unique and good, and helps balance vitality vs toughness.
VITAL PERSISTENCE – Make the 50% slower degeneration a passive. Increase the cooldown reduction to 20%, up from 15%.
This is the opposite of what needs doing. VP is fine as a shroud uptime increaser, it just needs competition in the burst department. Duration vs short term power. If anything VP needs the shroud CD removed/moved to another trait, because it clouds the over-time component (can have some power returned if needed by giving it another over-time component, like some LF on hit).
SPECTRAL MASTERY – Recharge changed to 33%, but no longer increase the duration of abilities. Keep the 5% life force gain. (33s on Armor, 40s on Walk, 30s on Wall)
Again, not the needed change. There are two things to do here, the first is simply fixing it to actually make the 50% increased duration actually work on everything, and then buffing spectrals. The other way is to not just be duration, but increased potency. All the effects given give 50% more LF, grasp pulls and stuns or immobilizes, armor/wall give a buff that gives 50% damage reduction instead of protection, wall’s fear is 50% longer, walk gives 50% speed boost instead of swiftness, etc. Further focuses the the trait as anti-burst (to distinguish it from VP), since their effects are even stronger, but not long duration. There could also be stability granted in some way through this trait or base spectrals, again to focus on anti-burst, since stability helps our ability to handle burst by a lot.
DHUUMFIRE Change this ability to inflict 2 burning when using Life Blast, but only 1 burning using the Reaper auto attack. This will allow non-reapers to use Dhuumfire, at least with some success.
Makes more sense to normalize (to a degree) Life Blast’s attack speed. This makes them fairly consistent on proccing effects, without erasing the differences between ranged projectile vs melee cleave.
TERROR Remove the “if the target is inflicted by a condition” modifier, and keep the full damage amount. Fear lasts , at maximum, 2 seconds, and is easily countered by stability. A Terror nuke should be that; a nuke. It’s essentially useless in its current form. Fear has too long of a cooldown, and too short of a duration, to make its main modifying trait so underpowered.
This does nothing to Terror, except remove what small skilled use it has. If fear is on the target without another condition this trait is being used really poorly. It needs damage increased (revert 17% nerf), and either the Soul Reaping trait merged directly, or put into the Adept at curses (can be made the “falling” trait by changing the on-fall to be the same as on-death).
PARASITIC CONTAGION Currently, the “Curses” tree is not very powerful in PVP. Parasitic Contagion would have to work through Shroud to make it even slightly worth it for pvp, or would need to be buffed to like 15-20% of condition damage.
PC should be reworked and moved to blood magic. Curses doesn’t need sustain in the form of healing, it doesn’t fit and doesn’t help. It needs better damage options, and PC reworked into an opposite altruistic healing works greatly in blood magic in replacement of unholy mediocre.
…This is the opposite of what needs doing. VP is fine as a shroud uptime increaser, it just needs competition in the burst department. Duration vs short term power. If anything VP needs the shroud CD removed/moved to another trait, because it clouds the over-time component (can have some power returned if needed by giving it another over-time component, like some LF on hit)….
Watch out! I suggested this in another thread and got torn a new one. :P
Bhawd said it all.
Well, I do not agree with the fact that terror need any change but that’s my opinion.
No core profession should be balanced around an optional elite specialization.