Guild Wars 2

What do you guys think of it? I am personally really interested, but a few things really makes me dislike it. The biggest turn-off is the secondary attribute we get from it is +% critical damage. Just why? ANYTHING would be better for this trait tree, and it should be swapped around with boon duration from the power tree. Another thing that would really make this trait extremely efficient would be getting the Reaper’s Might trait from the power tree down to the DS tree. I’m also unsure about the grandmaster trait we get, 5% seems a bit low and would be better if it was at 10%. It might sound too strong but in reality we will spend our force pool a lot anyways.

What do you guys think of these pin-points and of the tree overall? Anything that is underestimated or that should be different?

Heartlust.6140:

The biggest turn-off is the secondary attribute we get from it is +% critical damage. Just why?

So people like me can get to 111% crit damage, why else?

I feel our tree attribute parings are just terrible for this class. It was like they purposefully paired things you would not want together.

Wait are you saying we shouldn’t have Crit damage at all? Or that Crit damage should be in the power tree spite? I’m fine with Crit damage being in the soul reaping tree as it makes the tree worth even more, and its kind of a universal tree that works with many builds, I would hate for Crit damage to be in a tree that I wouldn’t want to spend points in.
I love the thought of the blood traits, but there is no way I could justify IMO spending more points on vitality with our health being naturally so high.

Other than that I think there are a lot of kitten good traits in the soul reaping tree, what is the last one you are talking about.

Crit Dmg should be with Crit Chance.

I would prefer Vitality, or even Toughness to go with DS

Zabatakis.3571:

I feel our tree attribute parings are just terrible for this class. It was like they purposefully paired things you would not want together.

I don’t know about you but I love the Blood Magic tree for this reason. Healing and Vit together? Yes, please.

I think the trait attributes for necro should be:

Spite – power/crit damage
Curses – Condi damage/precision
Death Magic – Vitaility/boon duration
Blood magic – Tougness/healing
Soul Reaping – LF/condi duration

Ofc this is just my opinion and would suit my builds/game play perfectly.

But back on topic. I’ve been running with 30 in SR for a while now, in tornaments for the stability stomping which is very important. Running with 0/20/10/10/30, and it’s probably my favored setup atm. Also the soul marks is very handy at the start of matches, start off with your staff place a few marks down (not putrid mark or fear, you need to save these for more important moments) and you get an acceptable amount of LF back.

trait secondary stats are pretty much the same for all classes… BUT, the traits option are very bad… almost every tree shouts hybrid spec or you just have useless things in them that makes your choice very small…

Spite – Power/Cond Damage
Curses – Precision/Crit Damage
Death Magic – Tougness/Boon duration
Blood magic – Vitality/Healing power
Soul Reaping – LF/Cond Duration
- much better, also the grandmaster minior trait is actually 20 power pre 20% life force, the beta one and it should stay that way, 5% damage increase if life force is over a arbitrary cap is stupid since necro DS “is supposed to be” all about manipluation of HP and LF (one sinks low, other is high).

@BlueprintLFE, I just feel like people speccing into a DS build would go for pure power and defenses insted of crit chance to really get use out of the crit damage. I might be wrong though.

Condition Duration is probably in Spite because the Conditions on Axe, Focus and Wells don’t get anything from Condition Damage.

Condition Duration affects all conditions whereas Condition Damage only affects Bleed, Poison, Confusion and Burning.
See: Signet of Spite.

Most Necros don’t use Confusion much and Burning is almost never used because none of our skills inflict it.
Poison is probably more useful for the healing reduction, although the damage certainly helps.

That leaves Condition damage mostly for Bleeding. That’s why most of us stack it.
Curses tree combines Crit Chance with Condition Damage for the Conditions that are inflicted on a crit from Traits and Sigils.

Since Dagger is so fast you can actually use it for quite a bit of bleeding despite it not inflicting any with it’s skills. (In Mainhand anyway)
Helps on a Scepter, too, for sure.

Death Magic probably has Toughness because if you are hiding behind Minions and being a glass cannon that makes you really powerful in PvE and very easily killed in PvP.
The Boon Duration is there to assist you in applying boons on your Minions.

To make Minions+Healing work well together Blood Magic has Vitality and Healing.
They also go well with the tanky Dagger builds.
Or are meant to.
Too bad healing doesn’t seem to do anything to Life Stealing right now.

Aaand I’m guessing that they just slapped Crit Damage in Soul Reaping because it was the last slot for it.
Dagger does build a nice amount of Life Force and going Curses/Soul Reaping gives you high Crit chance, high Crit damage and high Bleed damage on crits.
You’ll be missing Power then and… yeah I dunno.

…I’ve gotta say I’ve never before really thought about how well the stat split goes with the Dagger.
On paper anyway…

Here’s what I think.

Spite – Precision/Critical Damage
Curses – Condition Damage/Condition Duration
Death Magic Toughness/Boon Duration
Blood Magic Vitality/Healing Power
Soul Reaping – Power/Life Force

As death shroud kind of necessitates power in order to be effective it makes sense to pair the two, no?

Precision dagger builds take great advantage of the life force/crit damage, as it essentially heals more, and of course does more damage. The issue I have here however is with curses and its precision/condition damage.
Scepter/trident are the only weapons that inflict damaging conditions with their auto attack, while axe does no damage condition, dagger only does a bleed with its 5th skill, and neither focus or war horn inflict damaging conditions.
As said earlier, the dagger can do a fair bit of bleed damage due to the minor trait and its high attack speed, so I don’t think the condition damage is wasted so to speak, but I can say that any other attribute would be more useful to me then condition damage.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Here’s what I think.

Spite – Precision/Critical Damage
Curses – Condition Damage/Condition Duration
Death Magic Toughness/Boon Duration
Blood Magic Vitality/Healing Power
Soul Reaping – Power/Life Force

As death shroud kind of necessitates power in order to be effective it makes sense to pair the two, no?

This. Then we would be in line with other classes that have pairings benefit each other directly.

While I think having crit damage with precision would be nice, it would shoehorn crit/precision combo for all the classes, as crit damage only directly works with precision, a little ironic considering my last post but whatever.

Why do you say that death shroud necessitates power? Life force if anything would be more linked to toughness, as that’s the only one that is useful regardless of how you use your life force.

War Mourner.5168:

Why do you say that death shroud necessitates power? Life force if anything would be more linked to toughness, as that’s the only one that is useful regardless of how you use your life force.

Because offensively speaking death shroud does peanuts unless you’ve got some power behind it. Of course, all our damage is peanuts comparatively speaking but still. What little we have counts all the more.

AFAIK dagger builds rely heavily on toughness and vit since you have to be insanely close to your target and would not be efficient going into crit tree with a build like that IMO.

BTW, DS life force pool isnt affected by toughness, just vitality~
Also Curses, despite the non indicative name is actually the crit tree, not spite, since all of the bonus conditions are applied on crit. Also if Soul Reaping had 2 major attributes and Curses 2 minior, it kinda doesnt fit the setup anymore.

I run an SPVP dual dagger build with 0 points in toughness or vitality, 30 in power 20 in Crit rating tree, and 20 in Crit damage tree and it wrecks faces, and I’m definitely not a glass cannon with all my survivability tools.

That’s not saying I wouldn’t love to put points in the toughness tree, but jagged horror minor trait puts us at such a disadvantage and it is terrible the jagged horror lasts maybe 5-8 seconds and enemies rally of it. Lol

^ honestly, how viable would that be in tpvp? It depends a whole lot on your gear if you go into those traitlines

I usually stack knights gear so I get some toughness, I am a big fan of toughness, I have done some pretty decent SPVP games against good players and obviously against bad players, I honestly can’t say I have had a problem really with any progression yet. Not to say I won’t, but I haven’t yet. Only if I get caught with moa but that just sucks in general

BlueprintLFE.2358:

I usually stack knights gear so I get some toughness, I am a big fan of toughness, I have done some pretty decent SPVP games against good players and obviously against bad players, I honestly can’t say I have had a problem really with any progression yet. Not to say I won’t, but I haven’t yet. Only if I get caught with moa but that just sucks in general

You first post implied you didn’t put points into toughness (people would take this as gear as well). Now your saying you stack toughness. Try some tpvp before coming on here and saying it works great. Spvp means nothing.

I wouldn’t want the trait stats to be changed at all honestly.

Crit dmg % is a niche stat and I don’t want to be pidgeonholed into it. If you pair it with prec then it is useless for condition builds. If you pair it with power you’re requiring someone to run a power build that also has plenty of precision (no power/vit/toughness setups).

Also condition duration is very useful for power necros and I wouldn’t want to lose that. I like dagger/focus and condition duration means longer dagger #3 immobilize, focus #5 chill, staff #3 chill, Shroud #2 chill. Such tools are very important to a necro since we lack in mobility, keeping the enemy mobility low is vital.

Minion of Vey.4398:

I wouldn’t want the trait stats to be changed at all honestly.

Crit dmg % is a niche stat and I don’t want to be pidgeonholed into it. If you pair it with prec then it is useless for condition builds. If you pair it with power you’re requiring someone to run a power build that also has plenty of precision (no power/vit/toughness setups).

Also condition duration is very useful for power necros and I wouldn’t want to lose that. I like dagger/focus and condition duration means longer dagger #3 immobilize, focus #5 chill, staff #3 chill, Shroud #2 chill. Such tools are very important to a necro since we lack in mobility, keeping the enemy mobility low is vital.

Only stats that i would like see switched are Vitality with Toughness. If your going to try and heal your self over and over again, heals scale way way better with Toughness than Vitality which they don’t scale with at all. Also since the death tree seems to be only for MM anyway, we already get toughness with the 15 point minor.

@Angry Flying Squirrel

I would like to see power paired with a more useful stat or our power weapons/ability paired with more CC.
As it is, I see duration only benefiting the damage conditions (of which a power build is in short supply), and cripple/chill (benefits axe but not really dagger (depending on off-hand) except for immobilize on a long cooldown).

Vulnerability and weakness already have a high duration.
Fear and daze have such a low duration the percent bonus won’t benefit it much.
Blind disappears on the first attack, so duration is fairly negligible with smart use.

As it is, I feel conditionmancers either spec into a bad for them line to get the duration, or power is left with a stat that is only marginally useful.

If axe were the power weapon, I think the stats on the +power would be fine as chill would be in great supply. I would actually love to see dagger changed to be more of a tanky/vampire weapon (it already has a high base damage so doesn’t need to be pumped up too significantly with stats). That said, Axe would need a buff.

I am fine with death being the primary MM tree, but I would like to see it reshaped so that any build can spec into it and receive a beneficial trait (which is currently not the case). I think the thief’s toughness tree is the best example of this. The traits emphasize stealth which is something almost no build goes without, so the thief can always pick up toughness (or vitality for that matter) at no real detriment to the rest of their build (I actually run a +30 toughness, backstab thief).

Lastly, I think every trait needs to be reevaluated (not just in effect but in its position in the tree as well). Our traits are underwhelming and a tad schizophrenic. For example, MM seems to be our tanky spec, but in order to make our minion’s do reasonable damage, we have to go fairly deep into the power tree.