Guild Wars 2

Hi people,

I have a suggestion that you may find interesting and wich could improve Necromancers for higher lvl of content.

Right now Necromancers are in a very bad situation, while they are true beasts at dealing damage with conditions and have plenty of vitality and life recovery in some case, they do lack the tools to mitigate bigger spikes of damage in both PvE and PvP (especialy PvE). They also have other problems with power builds and combo support, but I won’t speak about these issues.

Necromancers used to be capable to mitigate spikes of damage with Deathshroud, but this got removed and they now take everything that bypass Deathshroud right into their healthpool. With limited (and situational) acces to Vigor and Aegis, their ways to prevent damage are now limited to 2 dodge rolls, deathshroud, protection and life recovery the 3 last of those beeing useless against high level Boss content with OS mechanics.

My idea is simple, keep the Necromancer the way it is right now but add him a new inate perk called Soulbound Recovery, wich would allow him to dodge at the expense of 32,5% of his base life force when the Necromancer is out of stamina. The Necromancer would of course keep his ability to enter Deathshroud but would get extra options to expense his ressources.

Why 32,5% base lifeforce? Well I think first it is a pretty considerable ammount of lifeforce and that same quantity would allow people wich invest 30 point into soulharvest to get 130% total life force and dodge 4 extra time in a row instead of 3.

Edit : Or instead, sinds Andele explained me how Life Force Pool worked decrease the effective Life Force cost for a dodge.

While 4 extra dodge rolls sounds very unbalanced, do not forget Necromancers would actualy need to fight to generate enough lifeforce to dodge an extra time.

What do you people think about this idea?

This is actually a really promising idea. Not sure if the LF cost is right, would probably need a lot of testing, but I like it!

I think it’s really interesting, so kudos for thinking it up.

I honestly like the idea especially since you can use life force without using death shroud (which isn’t that good), but don’t let those dodges activate traits that involve dodges ottherwise it would be OP. (ex: mark of blood on dodge)

It’s not bad, sort of a half measure to ultimate mitigation like invulnerable, blocks and aegis.

Other classes get more out of dodge because of better mobility and stability. Without those things you are still liable to be ping ponged or locked out of your dodge by stuns.

But certainly be better than what we have now, which is nothing.

I feel like its a bandaid, and kind of a bland one. I don’t think there are any core base issues with the Necromancer. The problem is we have 0 defensive traiting, and (besides Spectral Armor) few great defensive CDs on either weapons or utility skills.

Fix those issues and Necromancer is in a much better place, and they’ve essentially already said they are looking at the defensive traiting issue when we get new DM minor traits.

@Pendragon, that’s exactly what I like about it: since the devs seem determined to keep DS as our only source of survivability rather than give us the kind of real mitigation mechanics that other classes have, letting us use life force as a bonus endurance pool is basically doing exactly that! :p

Plus it’s the kind of mechanic that forces a tactical decision on the player: do I go into DS to absorb incoming damage, or do I use LF to dodge it? It forces you to think about how big the incoming attack will be, and whether you’ll waste less life force by dodging it or by facetaking it in DS.

I’d love to see SOMETHING!
Something that kept up with ‘vigor’ that wasn’t the vigor buff.

I’d really love to see more Life Force manipulation. (Things like this, or heals in DS, or give buffs to allies after draining life from others.)

I think the most fun ideas I’ve heard, is… Leeching/siphoning endurance from others. Tho as it’s a pvp balanced game, I can see it not being enough to effect another player more than 1 dodge per 5mins, and only give us a extra dodge per 3mins. :-/

Bhawb.7408:

I don’t think there are any core base issues with the Necromancer.

I don’t agree with that part. One of the things I have a problem is that we cannot heal during deathshroud. It means that going deathshroud is not always a good option especially in siphon builds (which includes MM). The dodge in exchange for life force will allow us to avoid damage while still using our healing abilities.

BTW life force increases numerically with Soul Reaping not in a percentage, making the new value of LF its new base.

Love your idea, also want something like sacrifice hp for lf and lf for hp

Andele.1306:

BTW life force increases numerically with Soul Reaping not in a percentage, making the new value of LF its new base.

Oh I didn’t know that, well we could always increase the base value of the lifeforce consumption and make the Soul Reaping decrease that value a bit?