Guild Wars 2

When you think of winning by atrition poison will quickly come to mind with its ability to reduce healing by 33%.

When playing your condition necromancer you often have poison your enemies without thinking of it. This changes when you when play a power necromancer. The ability to apply poison rapidly disappears. The problem exist because we do not have a good poison trait.

Death magic is one of our underperforming trait lines and already has two poison traits.
Let take a look at what they do.
Death Nova
Putrid Defense

Death Nova is only useful when we have minions. With their sluggish animations and slow cast time few necromancer can make actual use with these utilities.
Putrid Defense Well we need to apply poison first may as well come with (only for scepter)
Making Death Nova better for the general Necromancer I’d suggest adding minions to weapon skills. Unlike the mesmer don’t add them to every single weapon.
For Putrid defense …. really anything. How about apply poison to your target when you remove a boon(or corrupt)

for poisonapplication you can use sigil of doom (dmgloss vs utility), corrupt regen which many builds have, staff 3, rs4 and there are other choices i forgot for sure^^.

after hot hit u dont want to poison ur enemy though and slowly whittle them down (well there are exceptions – e.g. ghosthief ) with the dmg and resistance/condiremoval (bersi with cleansing ire for example) hot brought us. bursting in between is the way to go imo.
sure its still usefull and you can negate cleanses but it lost impact compared to prehot.
plus the attrition type is condi i guess, so poison doesn’t fit that much to power necro; admittedly condi bursts too^^.

about the minions i dunno, they feel unrewarding in general^^.

though i like the idea of more interactions with condis/necro-only special condistuff.
putrid defense is the only minion-gm-trait in the “minion-traitline” so it will probably stay. i mistook putrid defense for death nova …
unholy sanctuary could be replaced, its useless in todays gameplay and was severely lacking even prehot.
i would also gladly give deathly chill for sth else.
-> im not into pve, mainly wvw and a bit of spvp.
in bigger groupfights deathly chill is mostly only applicable via direct chill application (skills), corrupts and frost aura (from eles).
—> too many fields, its rare to combo with your own or other ppls ice field, so no rs5+4 or frost aura via leap for you (at least in public groups and zergs).
therefore from my wvw-perspective i would gladly give deathly chill in its current form for sth else, preferably necroonly like some interaction with corrupts.

edit: quickly thought example: after applying chill to an enemy that enemy cannot gain more than 3 boons within the next 3 seconds. (situational usefull)
10s cd/target to prevent it from being op in wvw (cd “on” target, not per necromancer and target).
(without poison since i dont see it as very useful anymore).

edit2: typos