A recent post here mentioned how Death Shroud is holding us back as a profession, which got me thinking: Why must our Life Force be limited to one ability? Death Shroud is certainly nice, but not all the time. And what if our Life Force mechanic could be used to solve some of our issues?
The Problems with Necros
1. We’re very unappealing in PvE. Necros are an inherently selfish profession. And you know what? If this was a single player game, that’d be totally cool. But it’s not. Even Necros should bring something to parties that would both make people want to invite them and make the Necros themselves feel more useful.
2. We’re a condition-focused profession in a game with strict condition caps shared amongst players. Plus some boss mobs are immune to certain conditions, further limiting our ability to help our group.
3. Death Shroud sometimes contradicts how our profession wants to play. It does not work well with conditions and self heals do not work while in it.
Possible Solutions
1. Necros are selfish. There are plenty of things that could be done about this, most simply allowing us to buff our party members. We’re pretty good at dealing with conditions, but that’s not always useful and frankly when it comes to removing them from party members Guardians are much better.
As for our buffs, well, we have a few for ourselves but no one else. So one suggestion:
Toggle Ability: When one of your abilities grants you a boon, that boon is shared with all party members at the cost of Life Force. Cannot be used in Death Shroud.
Might from Blood is Power, Regeneration, Protection, Swiftness, now everyone can have it all. It may be way too good as is, but that could be fixed by reducing stacks/durations or raising the Life Force cost.
2. Condition restrictions are especially harsh on Necros. Necros are great at not only applying conditons, but manipulating them too. We transfer them to enemies, convert their boons into more conditions, and even convert them to boons on allies. So what if we take this one step further and convert conditions on enemies into boons on allies?
Most conditions have a similar boon. Vulnerability and Might, Cripple and Swiftness, Weakness and Protection. They all do similar things in different ways, but the effects are not always equal – or depending on group composition, you may have too much of a certain condition and not enough of a boon.
So instead of the toggle ability I suggested above, we could instead have a way to use our Life Force to apply Might to allies (in a balanced manner) instead of Vulnerability to enemies and so on.
Bleeds I think deserve a special mention since some builds utilize them as a primary damage source, and converting so much damage into buffs may not work so well. Necro Condition builds generally don’t use Death Shroud for much beyond survivability, so it would be nice to have something that worked better with bleeds and also helped deal with the condition caps.
I think an alternate form would be cool here, one that could apply more conditons and also use them for anything from burst damage to boons to healing. We currently have one ability that scales based on conditions, it’s fitting for Necros so why not another. Only problem is that’s really similar to Death Shroud. So instead it could be a single cast-time or channeled ability with an effect that deals with conditions. Really it could be almost anything, just so Condimancers can make better use of their Life Force.
So how to deal with bleed caps… well I’m just throwing out ideas here: we could remove bleed stacks for bonus effects, we could convert our bleeds into either direct damage or an entirely new condition specific to this new Necro form or boons, or we could just have damage that scales with bleeds… but this is a topic that has already been discussed a billion and a half times so I’ll move on.
3. Necromancer contradictions. We have an entire trait line dedicated to applying bleeds, yet our class mechanic limits our ability to do so when used. We have another trait line dedicated to healing including many siphoning traits, but they’re rendered useless when using our class mechanic. Having any additional way to use Life Force would help with both of these issues.
TL;DR: Having any alternate way to spend Life Force besides Death Shroud (even just a couple abilities) could help Necros be more desirable in PvE, deal with their condition restrictions, and add much more depth to the profession by making builds that don’t work well with Death Shroud (like siphoning) more viable plus adding additional choices to all almost any build.
(edited by Tulzscha.4231)