Guild Wars 2

I’m just curious here, I wanted to throw it out and see what people thought in a general sense. Never hurts to spark up some “what if” conversations every once in a while. I’m not specifically advocating this as a change, but was curious of what people would think about it. So here we go,* what if*:

Death Shroud didn’t prevent damage: Death shroud was a resourced stance that used resources over time and additional resources for spells casted (Expected time being similar to a necromancer under a single person fire, math I don’t quite have on hand). While in death shroud, instead, you reduced damage taken and had reduced condition duration to newly applied conditions on you.

You could now be healed in Death Shroud: Because it wouldn’t act as a secondary health bar, healing effects would still effect you.

Life Blast was also a leech: To give more flavor to leeching build, Life blast would have a leech element to it that scaled with healing power (obviously power) and leeching traits such as Blood thirst.

Other defenses were Added: Non-specifically, the necromancer gained access to blocks, or possibly some evades (tied to shadows, makes perfect sense).

The goal with this would be to make a set up that scaled proportionately to the amount of enemies you are fighting (Like blocks and evades do, where a specific Death shroud soak number doesn’t), and 1v1s and group fights didn’t swing so hard in effectiveness.

Secondly, more of out traits could be useful and not feel like our class mechanics are fighting themselves. Also, starting with low life force (if adequately compensated for other defenses across the class) wouldn’t be quite as detrimental to play.

Again, this is just for the sake of discussion, but I wanted to get some other necromancers thoughts on a Death Shroud style more along these lines than the current style.

(Note: LF would degenerate likely at a set rate, and spells would have costs, Vitality would effectively increase your Life Force available before running out.)

Too much work, doesn’t bring money, would upset casuals with “optimal runs” and PvP meta etc. The day they open a official thread for a rework of DS I will be active on it like my life depends on it, first post :“Why the kitten you chose a reverse mana pool with downsides to simulate a mini-boss fight? Look at war,thief and rev those are good resource mechanics not the green meat bag… (followed by a summary of dozens of multiple threads that already proposed this since forever)” . I will save my tears counting the years waiting for the change.

I wish vitality didn’t affect DS I think it’s a hold back as well , HAHA more HP to take down.

I’d have to agree that it is too late for them to even consider reworking any of the existing class mechanics as they would be too much work and the potential for messing thing up too great.

That and on a PR point of view it would just ask for a “we paid for a game still in beta” style comments.

Sagat.3285:

Too much work, doesn’t bring money, would upset casuals with “optimal runs” and PvP meta etc. The day they open a official thread for a rework of DS I will be active on it like my life depends on it, first post :“Why the kitten you chose a reverse mana pool with downsides to simulate a mini-boss fight? Look at war,thief and rev those are good resource mechanics not the green meat bag… (followed by a summary of dozens of multiple threads that already proposed this since forever)” . I will save my tears counting the years waiting for the change.

I wish vitality didn’t affect DS I think it’s a hold back as well , HAHA more HP to take down.

Well, with the proposed suggestion, Vitality would be nothing more than like “extra mana” as Life force wouldnt’ react with damage taken.

But either way, I guess you could look at this as an un-official “DS rework” sort of thread. I understand things aren’t likely to change, hence the what-if. Play along guys. Lets discuss ideals, not probabilities!

Then let’s propose a defiance system when in DS so players have to think when trying to CC us and we actually get to attack haha beat you to our own game Anet, the hype is strong. I predict a greater decrease in the slow and slower cast times…

I wouldn’t really bother with whether or not ANet would be able to do it as far as a completely theoretical discussion goes.

As far as this, I could see it being a specialization for sure. It is an interesting idea, I don’t think it is intrinsically any better or worse than what we have now, just different with different balancing points.

Bhawb.7408:

I wouldn’t really bother with whether or not ANet would be able to do it as far as a completely theoretical discussion goes.

As far as this, I could see it being a specialization for sure. It is an interesting idea, I don’t think it is intrinsically any better or worse than what we have now, just different with different balancing points.

That’s more or like this. I believe that Death shroud and in an extent Life force are two things that are easy to bend around specialization. When I look at the possibility of evolutions of DS and look at other professions, I pity other professions.

While necromancers and DS most likely won’t change, We still can imagine awesome things for specialization, without getting rid of our mechanic but just evolve them :

Examples :
Get rid of the “transformation” and make DS skills, F skills. That was what I proposed in the specialization’s thread. This way, you “give” the mitigation role to some utility and have more freedom to give leeching a true sustain rôle.

Change DS skills . Right now, DS skills are more or less something that allow necromancer to play a mid range dps/support role. What if you changed skill in a way they became melee skill for example? Life blast could become a cleaving attack, Dark path a charge skill… etc.

DS skills becoming utility skills while some utility skills become DS skills (with some tweeks obviously) . I could see that for corruptions with a change on life blast who will obviously stay as an auto attack but corrupt it’s user each time it’s use. There would be a need to redesign some traits but it could be awesome.

Skills that could feed on LF . This lead to 2 possibility :
Utility skills that feed on LF : they could be upkeep skills or with a simple cost in LF
F skills that feed on LF : This could really become a possibility to introduce “Orders”

I’m sure there are tons of other ways to bend DS, but since right now I’m a bit focused on these one, My sight is a bit narrowed… well whatever, I’m sure each one of us can come up with differents Idea that are all interesting. For me DS may evolve in about everything it’s by far the best mechanism when it come to the evolution’s possiblities.

i dont like the idea. necro needs buffs, not redesigns imo

Sublimatio.6981:

i dont like the idea. necro needs buffs, not redesigns imo

That’s debatable. The reason being, everything with necromancer scales directly against how many people it is fighting. It’s defenses are numerical absorbs. For instance:

Necromancer absorbs 10,000 damage in a fight. Against 1 player, he absorbed 10000 damage.
Against 2 he absorbed 10000 damage as well (assuming he lives long enough to do so).

By contrast an evasive player with blocks/alternative defenses
Evades ~7000 damage against a single player in a given fight.
It evades ~14,000 against 2 players.

The issue escalates from there. Life force also requires build up find which isn’t easy on front loaded fights.

Okay so you want to buff Necromancer to be good in teams so enough to absorb about the equivence of 2 people attacking you. (14,000 damage to equal other classes), then it becomes way too powerful against 1 person.

That’s the issue with necromancer. Necromancer is a number sponge and doesn’t scale correctly with number of enemies, where as blocks/evades/protection does. You really… Can’t balance around that very well. Not to mention, the initial issue of stsrting with essentially 0 defense that needs to be “charged up” before you can do it.

That’s why I feel the way it is now will never work. It’ll either frustrate people 1v1, or not be good enough in rising numbers.

The problem is everybody know what to do against a necro, especially in DS, in fact that’s not the real problem, the real problem is we don’t have plan B like each other professions, because every flaws in DS are known. I’m against F skills for LF because DS bring the only defense we have. You better speculate on defensive F skills or else it won’t work.

My preferred re-envisioning for Death Shroud is to make it similar to Devil Trigger from the original Devil May Cry games. Needs to be built up, but when activated it becomes a powerful form, regenerating health rapidly as the attacks hit harder.

Didn’t kill that Necro fast enough? Now you’re going to pay for it.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

My preferred re-envisioning for Death Shroud is to make it similar to Devil Trigger from the original Devil May Cry games. Needs to be built up, but when activated it becomes a powerful form, regenerating health rapidly as the attacks hit harder.

Didn’t kill that Necro fast enough? Now you’re going to pay for it.

I wouldn’t mind a hyperdrive type mechanism. But tbh I’m not really sure Necromancer jumps at me as the hyperdrive sort of class. (Assuming you mean also that it doesnt act as a sponge, and doesnt give you new skills but empowers your current ones). I do think it’d be fun to have that as a class mechanic in general though…

Unfortunately I doubt gw2 will have any new classes.

Depends, really. Necromancers are the poster child for Aggression magic, after all.

Though overall, it does seem to fit Warriors better :/

ronpierce.2760:

Sublimatio.6981:

i dont like the idea. necro needs buffs, not redesigns imo

That’s debatable. The reason being, everything with necromancer scales directly against how many people it is fighting. It’s defenses are numerical absorbs. For instance:

Necromancer absorbs 10,000 damage in a fight. Against 1 player, he absorbed 10000 damage.
Against 2 he absorbed 10000 damage as well (assuming he lives long enough to do so).

By contrast an evasive player with blocks/alternative defenses
Evades ~7000 damage against a single player in a given fight.
It evades ~14,000 against 2 players.

The issue escalates from there. Life force also requires build up find which isn’t easy on front loaded fights.

Okay so you want to buff Necromancer to be good in teams so enough to absorb about the equivence of 2 people attacking you. (14,000 damage to equal other classes), then it becomes way too powerful against 1 person.

That’s the issue with necromancer. Necromancer is a number sponge and doesn’t scale correctly with number of enemies, where as blocks/evades/protection does. You really… Can’t balance around that very well. Not to mention, the initial issue of stsrting with essentially 0 defense that needs to be “charged up” before you can do it.

That’s why I feel the way it is now will never work. It’ll either frustrate people 1v1, or not be good enough in rising numbers.

DS doesn’t need to scale to the number of enemies. That’s what the spectral skills are suppose to do.

Only Spectral Wall scales with number of enemies, the rest don’t.

Bhawb.7408:

Only Spectral Wall scales with number of enemies, the rest don’t.

Exactly. When people started mastering DS, back when you could survive a focus fire (as long as your cooldowns were up), arenanet nuked it from orbit by cancelling active spectral skills when you entered DS, making necros the easiest class to kill overnight. But they didn’t stop there. After removing the necro’s ability to hold out against focus fire, arenanet killed any future scaling with fire in the form of internal cooldowns. Lately though, even they must have realized how easy it was to blow up necros. They think they fixed it by allowing spectral skills to remain active in DS once again.

Internal CD came along a massive buff to allowing them to work in DS and a pretty large increase in SA LF gain per hit. Not that ICD is the greatest, but it came hand in hand with the strongest buff SA’s ever seen.

Only problem is, it furthered our already dire non-scaling defense situation. They essentially made the spectral skills effective in the same way DS already was which furthered the 1v1 bias and made fighting in small teams problematic if you didn’t have essentially “babysitting” type support. Perhaps that’s why they can be effective in WvW but still struggle to land a SOLID spot in tpvp.

Of course, roaming mobility plays a part in that too. I think stronghold will be a big time for learning to see just how much potential is held (across all classes and builds) within the boundaries of standing on points and being able to effectively rotate timely.

Bhawb.7408:

Internal CD came along a massive buff to allowing them to work in DS and a pretty large increase in SA LF gain per hit. Not that ICD is the greatest, but it came hand in hand with the strongest buff SA’s ever seen.

8% is more than 3%, so it’s a massive buff right? For the people that don’t know any better, yes it would be a buff. But for people like you, me, ronpierce here do know better, because it’s gated behind a icd. Arenanet could have increased the spectral skills cooldowns, they could have shaved a percentage point, or they could have allowed only one active spectral while in DS at a time and reevaluated any of those changes. Any one of those would not have killed scaling.

Especially when you consider multi-hit attacks, the fact that people often attack faster than 1 time per second and multiply it by multiple targets, it tends to add up fast. Having some non-scaling isn’t that bad though. It’s just that necromancer is basically limited to only having non-scaling defenses outside of baseline dodges and The rare bits of protection, which is the weakest form of scaling defense (from blocking, evading, vigor*, etc.)

Weakness would be a good alternative that is more outwardly applied instead. However, condition clears are a bit too common as weakness access is already pretty limited.

The 3% to 8% wasn’t the only thing that happened though, it was also changed to work while in Death Shroud, which IS a massive buff. You’d have to be hit 3 times per second every second for the new SA to not be a net buff to the old version. I agree we need scaling defense, but these changes are what brought SA from almost never used to an extremely common utility skill.

The protection plus innate direct damage reduction means you only take 33% damage while in DS (67% damage reduction), and with 8% generated per hit they need to be doing more than 8% of your LF (960 with no vitality or SR) per second to even cause damage to your LF. There is still a video out there of a Necromancer absorbing an entire Fresh Air burst and barely losing any LF (and Fresh Air causes a lot of hits very quickly). Again, we could use scaling defense, but that doesn’t mean it has to be on every skill. SoL is scaling, SWalk should be changed to scaling considering how low it is, and we should get others as well.

I’m not worried about spectral skills lone, my point there was that it added to the already non-scaling issue. My overall point being it’d be nice to have SOME sort of reasonable scaling defense.

ronpierce.2760:

I’m not worried about spectral skills lone, my point there was that it added to the already non-scaling issue. My overall point being it’d be nice to have SOME sort of reasonable scaling defense.

Sure, it would be nice, but i don’t think it’s necessary. And (note that it’s just to argue) I dare to say that we got a pretty good scaling defense skill which is Locust swarm. Traited and while in DS, it may refill up to 10% LF per second (depend on how many foes around) and this more than half of the time.

The biggest detriment in my experience is our complete lack of mobility. Necros are relatively tanky compared to other zerker classes thanks to DS and some nice Condi cleanse but once a thief or warrior starts sticking to us we get screwed. This is especially bad when more than one person focuses the necro, we can pop our 1-2 stunbreaks and then we die to chain cc.