Many people are talking about the Dhuumfire change that is coming up. And many people seem to be upset while others are saying “It needed to happen.” Well I have a response to that, but I don’t think anyone is going to like it.
From what I can tell, the Dhuumfire change is actually a “Buff”. I put quotations around it because I don’t believe this is the right way to “buff” death shroud. Yes, that is right. This isn’t a buff to Dhuumfire, its a buff to death shroud. But in a rather backwards thinking sort of way. The change is to Force condition necromancers to use death shroud more in their build.
Here is what appears to be the thinking in my opinion. The devs see that the necromancer community wants death shroud to be more involved with their builds. At the moment, only power builds seem to care about death shroud beyond a way to soak up a hit or two. With this change it forces players to use death shroud more often.
Here is the problem. The necromancer community doesn’t want to be forced to use something. No one does. Rather then providing a reasonable reason for Necromancer players to enter death shroud, such as improving ally support, giving the ability to sustain condition damage while in ds, Arena net has taken the rout of changing the function of a necessary trait in a build to force ds use rather then making people want to use it.
Now, I don’t think I speak for myself when I say that I would love to have an alternative grandmaster/master trait so I didn’t have to run dhuumfire. But there isn’t another option. I don’t run Dhuumfire because I think its “The best thing ever!” but rather because my damage output requires it. Without it, my battles become much much slower and drag out much too long. This trait gives me that extra burst of damage that I need. And there isn’t an alternative I can take. Dhuumfire becomes our only choice.
If arena net really wants us to actually want to use death shroud, they would give us a reason to stay in death shroud as a condi build through other traits rather then forcing it down our throats.
I have to politely disagree with the methods used by arena net in order to balance death shroud. For that matter, I disagree with how they balance our profession. But I can’t do anything about this because I have no power to move the developers decision on anything, which has become evident through their responses to my and others posts on other matters.
But to be fair, the developers have yet to sway my opinion of them in their favor. It seems to be they do listen to the community but have a real hard time actually hearing what we are saying. I feel that this might be because they don’t actively communicate with us to get a bigger picture of the concerns and issues we are having. Many of us have spent over a thousand hours on the game, or just on our necromancers alone, and if there is a dev who has spent even half as much time on the necromancer as we have they are not communicating with us and haven’t let themselves be known.
So I ask that arena net open communications with us much more frequently. Even if its just a controlled setting like giving us a feedback quiz every so often to see at least a basic idea of what the community is asking. Some questions like “How often do you use X”, “Why do you use it?” “Rate these X on usability.” “Rate these X on fun.” “On a scale of 1-10 how good is X” so on and so on. The reason for this is because I know you have data on whats being used most. But the data doesn’t tell you how much the individual actually enjoys them or if they might desire something else but are stuck in a single build.
Anyway, I’m done rambling. I hope to hear from all of you.