Guild Wars 2

Its basically this. Mass cd reductions! Heres the breakdown:

1 Life Blast – Halve casting time and damage. Little to no aftercast.
2 Dark Path – The biggest problem core necro has is mobility. Changing this skill can fix that kinda. Instant teleport aoe 8 sec cd 600 range, chill reduced to 2 sec.
3 Doom – 12 sec cd 1/2 sec fear, 1 sec fear under 600 units.
4 Life Transfer – 25 sec cd, apply 2 stacks of stability for 6 sec.
5 Tainted Shackles – 25 sec cd. Precasting this can still land the last hit if you get within range of an enemy before the skill finishes.

So the new life blast would be hitting a 2k armor opponent for just under 1.5k, no might, pvp marauder amulet used.

I think life transfer should pulse poison just like in reaper shroud, this would help a lot

Prince Vingador.8067:

I think life transfer should pulse poison just like in reaper shroud, this would help a lot

DS#4 should not pulse poison. It has to be unique from rs#4 not the same..

Actually base necro is more viable then you think. Personally i just dont want to play it because reapershroud is so much more fun.

Cast time reduction is my preference. For a low mobility profession, fast counterplay seems fair.

Ds 4 should pulse posion or bleed or something. Ds5 should grant stability because that is the skill that you press and then can do things after.

Your ideas in no way make core death shroud good. Everything is so powerful nowadays that changes like yours would never cut it

Lordrosicky.5813:

Ds 4 should pulse posion or bleed or something. Ds5 should grant stability because that is the skill that you press and then can do things after.

Your ideas in no way make core death shroud good. Everything is so powerful nowadays that changes like yours would never cut it

Well its a start.

The most obvious thing that should happen is that 4 and 5 should have their CDs reduced to at least match RS 4 and 5. 30 second 4 means a lot for Transfusion.

Another thing I would think about doing is increasing the raw output of Tainted Shackles, perhaps adding another Torment stack or two on the final explosion. According to the wiki the damage is calculated based on unarmed damage and this is obviously an issue which drastically undercuts the potential damage of the skill, and this should be fixed.

Life Transfer is already a fairly strong ability but I would perhaps consider adding a baseline Vampiric effect to it.

Doom is fine. I would perhaps consider removing the “under 600 units” condition and making the 1.5s fear full range.

I would think about changing Dark Path to a ground-targeted projectile instead of a unit-targeted projectile. With the heavily range oriented Death Shroud we have now, Dark Path makes little sense in its current incarnation.

For Life Blast I would either change it into a beam or an exploding projectile rather than a piercing projectile.

Sarrs.4831:

The most obvious thing that should happen is that 4 and 5 should have their CDs reduced to at least match RS 4 and 5. 30 second 4 means a lot for Transfusion.

Another thing I would think about doing is increasing the raw output of Tainted Shackles, perhaps adding another Torment stack or two on the final explosion. According to the wiki the damage is calculated based on unarmed damage and this is obviously an issue which drastically undercuts the potential damage of the skill, and this should be fixed.

Life Transfer is already a fairly strong ability but I would perhaps consider adding a baseline Vampiric effect to it.

Doom is fine. I would perhaps consider removing the “under 600 units” condition and making the 1.5s fear full range.

I would think about changing Dark Path to a ground-targeted projectile instead of a unit-targeted projectile. With the heavily range oriented Death Shroud we have now, Dark Path makes little sense in its current incarnation.

For Life Blast I would either change it into a beam or an exploding projectile rather than a piercing projectile.

Interesting, especials the life blast bit.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Lordrosicky.5813:

Ds 4 should pulse posion or bleed or something. Ds5 should grant stability because that is the skill that you press and then can do things after.

Your ideas in no way make core death shroud good. Everything is so powerful nowadays that changes like yours would never cut it

Well its a start.

Its not a start. These are barely improvements and are a long way from being the buffs needed to make it comparable to repear shroud.

The way anet balanced, if they did a pass on death shroud then it would be the only change for 3 years. Any changes therefore need to be significant and need to make it on a par with repear shroud, or close at least.

Lordrosicky.5813

Its not a start. These are barely improvements and are a long way from being the buffs needed to make it comparable to repear shroud.

The way anet balanced, if they did a pass on death shroud then it would be the only change for 3 years. Any changes therefore need to be significant and need to make it on a par with repear shroud, or close at least.

Welp.

One thing that needs to be done is a “Shroud 1 modifier” that alters any shroud auto attack traits based on the difference in cast time between it and the “base balance line”.

Assumption Made: Wiki values are used here.
Reaper auto series is the base balance line (.6, .6, .1.2 auto series, wiki states 2.5 for whole chain). After cast delays are included here.

Core Death Shroud Life Blast has a 1.4 second cast time, giving us something like 26.5% power per second (wiki base damage of 372, assumes 1000 power).

Reaper Shroud chain takes 2.5 seconds, and gives us 25.5% power damage per chain.

That’s not bad, although personally I’d like to see life blast get a bit more power damage since it’s a weird, HOMING, piercing ranged attack which makes it difficult to hit more than 1 target (compared to melee cleave where hitting 3-5 is super easy).

The problem shows up when the dhuumfire, reaper’s might (spite minor), and unyielding blast traits show up.

With reaper, in 2.5 seconds you get 3 stacks of burning, 3 stacks of might, and/or 3 stacks of vulnerability. With core shroud you get 1 of each, because you’re still in the middle of casting the next life blast (takes 2.8 to get the second). This is a HUGE drop in performance for any necro build that is purely core.

Thus we need to normalize these traits (and any like it) so performance is stable amongst them. With the reaper chain you get roughly 3 stacks per 2.5 seconds, or 1.2 per second. With the core chain you get 1 per 1.4 seconds, or .71 stacks per second.

This difference needs to be made up with some kind of shroud modifier, whether duration (core necro can stack longer but less burst) or higher stacks per auto (more burst). I think duration is a safer change, and will be less dangerous as new shrouds are added.

For example, we need to make the .71 stacks per second for core necro match the 1.2 stacks per second of the reaper. It’s roughly a 70% increase to get from .71 to 1.2, so while it may look awkward, the core necro dhuumfire could get a built in 70% duration increase (5.1 seconds), the might could last 25 seconds, and the vulnerability 17 seconds.

This kind of change would easily be portable to any future shrouds (speedy or multihit can have negative modifiers from the reaper shroud auto chain). Obviously it should be a flat added modifier but doesn’t count towards boon duration or condi duration, because that would get silly really fast (100% boon duration necro for 50 second might life blasts lol?) or maybe it wouldn’t, but better to be on the safe side when it comes to stacking percentage modifiers.

Also; dark path needs to have a reliability boost and a little more oomph, doom is pretty solid (it’s instant cast, short cooldown), life transfer needs a damaging condition like bleed (to match reaper shroud).

Tainted shackles is fairly interesting, but there’s a problem: You stack at torment to prevent enemies from running, but then you immobolize them, negating the damage the torment wants to do.

There are a 2 ways to solve this that I can see.
1) Make it more punishing to flee: More torment at the start, less later, and all much shorter duration than 10 seconds. Dark Binding ticks 3 times (duration about 3-4 seconds) we COULD make the first tick have 3 stacks for 3 seconds, 5 stacks for 2 seconds, and 10 stacks for 1 second. Get out early or take burst, but technically it should do about the same total damage (compare to 3 stacks for 10 seconds each as it is now).
2) All torment on the target (but only from the necro, not his allies) is converted to poison or some other damaging condition with a minimum of 3, without preserving their duration. This lets you do some damage to people caught by the full binding, as immobolizing targets kills the damage of torment.

~~~~~~~

TLDR: Normalize all shroud autos to some standard (reaper for now) for traits;
Update tainted shackles to actually do its job (either stop people from running away with LOTS of torment, or punish people who fail to run away by converting the torment to a better damaging condition).

NOTE: I didn’t address lack of sustain/stability since that can be a bit more nuanced than just the shroud skills. Someone else may have better ways to change those to make core necro more interesting/viable.

Kiroshima.8497:

snipples

I wish you read some of my post, I addressed many of the things you talked about! All in all I agree with you, and admire your passion!

Sarrs.4831:

The most obvious thing that should happen is that 4 and 5 should have their CDs reduced to at least match RS 4 and 5. 30 second 4 means a lot for Transfusion.

Another thing I would think about doing is increasing the raw output of Tainted Shackles, perhaps adding another Torment stack or two on the final explosion. According to the wiki the damage is calculated based on unarmed damage and this is obviously an issue which drastically undercuts the potential damage of the skill, and this should be fixed.

Life Transfer is already a fairly strong ability but I would perhaps consider adding a baseline Vampiric effect to it.

Doom is fine. I would perhaps consider removing the “under 600 units” condition and making the 1.5s fear full range.

I would think about changing Dark Path to a ground-targeted projectile instead of a unit-targeted projectile. With the heavily range oriented Death Shroud we have now, Dark Path makes little sense in its current incarnation.

For Life Blast I would either change it into a beam or an exploding projectile rather than a piercing projectile.

No please for the Dark Path thing. Increasing the velocity would be perfect. Otherwise, this is the skill that makes a lot of fights possible to work if you use it properly. It’s clunky, yes, but I don’t think changing it to a ground target would be a good solution. My opinion may not be the same as everyone elses, especially considering I’m one of the weird ones who prefers vanilla Necro over Reaper, but I’d really hate to see Dark Path become a ground targetted skill.

Everything else you’ve said sounds good, though. However I think Life Transfer would be great if it siphoned health instead of Life Force. It would be a nice to be able to pull a bunch of health out of someone before dropping Shroud instead of increasing your time in Shroud by 2 extra seconds which is what it pretty much does now, unless you have a ton of targets around you.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

snipples

The ground target aoe for Dark Path is imo the best thing for core nec.

Adding a vampiric effect to DS 4 is interesting, but how would you balance it against more enemies? We cant have necs getting a 10k heal lol. Preposterous.

Well a nerf to Reaper would definitely be an indirect buff to base Necro! But really, some aspects of Reaper do need a nerf, while some of base Necro’s need a buff. With any buffs not related to Death Shroud, it will be a buff to Reaper. With that in mind, one buff I’d like to see is a buff to Consume Conditions. There are a few ways to buff this, and either one or all should be used.

- Increase all healing, initial and condition consumption ones.
- Decrease cast time (quarter second off is my suggestion).
- Decrease CD (25 seconds is my suggestion)

With such a long cast time and CD, it’s a kitten poor heal. I would rather see a decreased cast time and CD, or increased healing and reduced CD. Implementing all three changes would probably make this skill too mandatory, especially with how weak our other heals are, and even more mandatory because conditions hit too hard and are applied so quickly and easily that we have to use this heal.

Zintrothen.1056:

snipples

Well that’s a turn in a different direction! I haven’t heard any propositions regarding heals. It would be really nice if Consume Conditions casted a bit faster, I must admit.

LMAO necro could use a bit of a dmg boost but other than that its fine. If you find yourself continuously dieing or just dont think it adds up to the other classes or whatever then learn to play it.

For those of you that dont know. Dark path actually used to be ground targeted (with 900 range) but it was changed in the beta so it is unlikely that Anet will ever undo it. It doesnt fit with Anets idea that necros are slow.

Muchacho.2390:

For those of you that dont know. Dark path actually used to be ground targeted (with 900 range) but it was changed in the beta so it is unlikely that Anet will ever undo it. It doesnt fit with Anets idea that necros are slow.

guardians are supposed to be slow and strong when their long CDs are up. But cz necros were once strong on condi side, their defensive CDs are now sub 40 range, cant wait till they become single digit.

warriors are heavyweight kenyans.

necros in old days used movement runes, wurm, walk….and they were still considered slow and catchable

I know its a dream, but i mainly dream of necros getting functional skill, such that are always usable, not playing tyria3D avoiding pebbles and searching for non-steal spots. but anet has to reinvent and give each class a different wheel