Guild Wars 2

when you are thinking of what the necromancer is designed for in terms of sustain and how effective it can be without losing pressure on a target you can go with a few builds but in the long term measure of a fight what are you looking to do ? draw out the fight as long as possible or to end it quickly . other classes in gw2 i believe have a better rotation of skills that not only helps them in the manner of keeping pressure on a target but being able to roll through their skills without having to be cc’ed or slowed down all the mean while having better options in re-setting a fight that would help them with survive ability .

conditions can be that moniker if conditions were not cleansed , or transferred or start out so weak to begin with or be completely nullified in some cases.

power specs might have an option of laying down heavy amounts damage if it were not cc’ed , frozen or out of range to attack .

so how does one go about fixing these issues that persist on the necromancer when literally every class in the game has built in mechanics that either strongly counter what a necromancer is trying to do or can out perform in every category ?

i believe that if necromancers were able to not only sustain themselves with minions and that minion ai pathing was not an issue and that the health siphoning was stronger for sustained pressure that could help the necromancer out . but then again you also have the fear builds that are meant to help a necro in regards to dishing out heavy cc themselves if there were no cleanses or break frees that other classes could use in counter to a necro that would be an option .

what is your take on how to better a necros sustain of pressure ?

what is this blasphemy? speaking of sustain on the necro forums my god..

all a necro needs is stability or healing in death shroud and it would be ok .. or reverse all the nerfs made to it because of dhuumfire before they turned it into a space filler

ozzy.8059:

what is this blasphemy?

i know right ? lol

Power builds, I feel, have pretty decent sustain. Condition builds, on the other hand, really need help.

A few things that will help all builds:

• Shorter cast times. Given our lack of practical stability, shorter cast times are another way to reduce how often we get interrupted.
• Self-traited healing functioning in Death Shroud. This is important because it lets our sustain mechanic actually let us recover as well as fixing us fighting our own mechanics. It also immediately improves the value of traits like Parasitic Contagion
• More AoE scaling sustain. Locust Swarm is our best sustain skill right now because it scales very well with numbers of foes. Signet of the Locust likewise scales very nicely now (assuming you have the healing power).
• Party UI change to allow allies to see when you’re in death shroud to prevent wasted panic-heals. This doesn’t directly help Necro sustain, but it helps out in group play.

Personally, with my time playing an Unholy Sanctuary build has shown me what Necro sustain can be. It’s also shown me that receiving all heals in Death Shroud would be horribly OP.

Condition builds, however, need better life force generation. My biggest suggestion is making Feast of Corruption (Scepter 3) generate some life force regardless of if the target has any conditions, in addition to the current amount.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Personally, with my time playing an Unholy Sanctuary build has shown me what Necro sustain can be. It’s also shown me that receiving all heals in Death Shroud would be horribly OP.

Maybe, but atleast our siphon/healing traits should work in DS. It would make bloodmagic less bad.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

It’s also shown me that receiving all heals in Death Shroud would be horribly OP.

Your candidacy for necro forum specialist is hereby revoked! :P

Seriously though, you’re wrong about this. When focused in teamfights necros have worse sustain than any other class, even if they sit in DS with active Spec Armor/Walk, Locust Swarm and Well of Corruption combined. And other classes are not only better equipped to survive those kind of situations on their own, but they are able to receive ally healing at all times in addition to that.
In other word: there is no rational argument that could support the claim that any form of healing in DS would be overpowered. I know you are thinking of a very specific outlier scenario right now in which the planets align and a necro would get healed for an obscene amount of hp while sitting in Shroud… but the counter argument to whatever you can come up with is and always will be: other classes would do even better.

flow.6043:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

It’s also shown me that receiving all heals in Death Shroud would be horribly OP.

Your candidacy for necro forum specialist is hereby revoked! :P

Too late! Galie already confirmed it with me :p

Seriously, I have the e-mail. Some professions didn’t have a volunteer for specialist, though, so those eight are going to be delayed in announcement.

Seriously though, you’re wrong about this. When focused in teamfights necros have worse sustain than any other class, even if they sit in DS with active Spec Armor/Walk, Locust Swarm and Well of Corruption combined. And other classes are not only better equipped to survive those kind of situations on their own, but they are able to receive ally healing at all times in addition to that.
In other word: there is no rational argument that could support the claim that any form of healing in DS would be overpowered. I know you are thinking of a very specific outlier scenario right now in which the planets align and a necro would get healed for an obscene amount of hp while sitting in Shroud… but the counter argument to whatever you can come up with is and always will be: other classes would do even better.

The thing is, healing while your health cannot go down is much stronger than being healed normally. Unholy Sanctuary’s healing can’t be mitigated with DPS.

Yes, in teamfights, the Necro tends to go down quickly when focused, hence my suggestion that better AoE scaling sustain was needed. This isn’t a case of our sustain being bad, it’s a case of our defense being bad. Those are related, but not identical things. The problem with Necros is that the profession basically tries to substitute sustain for defense. In smaller encounters, this works, but being focused by multiple enemies breaks it down primarily because most of our sustain doesn’t scale. Other professions, where they don’t substitute sustain for defense, have defenses that scale instead.

Consider how OP Warriors would be if they had Defy Pain on a 10 second cooldown, even if they had no other defensive skills save a stunbreak (like Shake it Off). That is more similar to a Necro getting full healing in death shroud in a spectral build than anything else I can really think of. Yes, Death Shroud only absorbs a limited amount, but it also absorbs condition damage.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The thing is, healing while your health cannot go down is much stronger than being healed normally.

This isn’t any different from blocks, invulnerability or escaping a fight entirely with mobility… you use it and your hp doesn’t go down anymore because you avoid damage rather than mitigating it with a different source.
If anything this is an argument why necros need healing in DS more than other classes while they use their defensive mechanisms.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Unholy Sanctuary’s healing can’t be mitigated with DPS.

Well, you just need to remove all the life force. It’s not like you have a guaranteed 8 seconds of Berserker Stance, 3 sec Mist Form or Gear Shield. If you focus a necro hard enough you’ll emty their lf pool faster than that while they can still be stunned/immobilized/chilled which all carries over directly into their regular hp. You’re put into an unrecoverable situation, and for what? 4 ticks of healing from Unholy Sanctuary? Pls…

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Consider how OP Warriors would be if they had Defy Pain on a 10 second cooldown …
That is more similar to a Necro getting full healing

No it’s not at all like a necro, not even if necros could use the warrior Healing Signet.

I won’t even go into detail on how a warrior’s traits and weapon skills combined with a soldier or celestial amulet inherently makes them a lot tankier than necros. But just the fact that they have a permanently working, uninterruptable 360+ hp/s main healing skill puts their sustain in an entirely different league.
Now add stances, vigor, stability and access to ally healing at all times and really ask yourself: would necros come even close to that if they had healing in DS?
(spoiler alert: nope!)

Death Shroud is the only mechanic in the game that is total prevention of your health being reduced. Even invulnerabilities don’t account for already applied conditions. If you notice, I never once brought up Healing Signet. Sure, some extra source of healing was implied, but I never made any distinction.

Necromancers, like it or not, do have the highest uptime of being unable to take damage to health. Healing during this period is much, much stronger than the same amount of healing normally. There isn’t a perfect analogue, so I chose Defy Pain as being overall the closest in effect (still susceptible to CC, duration is similar to easily obtainable death shroud use).

Time spent healing with Unholy Sanctuary can be reduced with DPS, sure, but the healing itself cannot be mitigated that way. When you have Unholy Sanctuary traited, you always leave Death Shroud with more health than you went in. Any other immunity/invulnerability in the game, that is not the case and you can, in fact, die during those.

I’m not saying we don’t need more healing than we currently have, but allowing all healing would definitely make us OP.

I honestly don’t think Death Shroud full healing is as strong as you suggest, Drarnor. I’m looking at the list of things which can heal another player in the game, and they include Regeneration, Water field blasting, some stuff like Elementalist Staff Water autoattack and some other skills, and Healing Breeze on a Guardian. A lot of these aren’t going to be very large heals, although being able to always snag the heals from them while in Death Shroud would be a huge boon to sustain.

The thing is, though, that it requires a Healing Breeze Guardian and a Necro together, or a Staff Ele and a Necro together, and they have to coordinate to be hitting the Necro while in DS. To me that’s really good coordination and it should work. It not working is actually hurting the efficacy of Healing Breeze and such skills. That sort of thing working is the kind of thing that legitimizes Necromancers in more team comps in PvP or when a Necromancer is zerging in WvW and the water field blasts go down but he happens to be in Death Shroud.

I think if they made it work and then gave it a try, we’d find it not as OP as you suggest. But you know, if it is I’ll happily accept it being reduced. I really think there are a lot of factors and it’ll be hard to know if we never try.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Power builds, I feel, have pretty decent sustain. Condition builds, on the other hand, really need help.

A few things that will help all builds:

• Shorter cast times. Given our lack of practical stability, shorter cast times are another way to reduce how often we get interrupted.
• Self-traited healing functioning in Death Shroud. This is important because it lets our sustain mechanic actually let us recover as well as fixing us fighting our own mechanics. It also immediately improves the value of traits like Parasitic Contagion
• More AoE scaling sustain. Locust Swarm is our best sustain skill right now because it scales very well with numbers of foes. Signet of the Locust likewise scales very nicely now (assuming you have the healing power).
• Party UI change to allow allies to see when you’re in death shroud to prevent wasted panic-heals. This doesn’t directly help Necro sustain, but it helps out in group play.

Personally, with my time playing an Unholy Sanctuary build has shown me what Necro sustain can be. It’s also shown me that receiving all heals in Death Shroud would be horribly OP.

Condition builds, however, need better life force generation. My biggest suggestion is making Feast of Corruption (Scepter 3) generate some life force regardless of if the target has any conditions, in addition to the current amount.

1+ to those points that would help all builds

I’m with flow on the healing in DS debate. There may be a need to have different values for PVE/WvW and pvp, but there’s not way healing in death shroud would be op. It would solve a lot of sustain issues, for sure.

Sustain isn’t a Necromancer issue, it is an issue of specific Necromancer builds. Reality is that many of them sustain relatively well, and some have really bad sustain, it all depends on the build.

In some cases this is because Death Shroud actively counters some of our own sustain, artificially lowering what we would have otherwise. It is why we absolutely need Death Shroud to be changed to allow all sources of self-healing to pass through, and if need be be re-balanced. Some builds could also use better mitigation, LF generation, defensive conditions, or things like that. More soft CC, better LF generation, better blinds, some actual ways to nullify abilities, things like that would all go a long way to fixing sustain issues.

I think a good thing to help necromancer sustain out would be to change a healing skill to be the only non-traited healing skill in the game to heal us in death shroud. Well of Blood
Initial self heal and pulse heal remain the same, HOWEVER the pulse can heal the player through death shroud.

Edit: another thing that would help sustain in pvp at least is a 1200 range power weapon, literally every other class in the game has a 1200 range power weapon, or the capability to sustain a fight with a shorter range power weapon in a team fight. Necro has neither.

Question, since I don’t think it has been explicitly stated:

What quantitatively constitutes “enough” sustain for a Necro, in your opinions? Given the “typical” Power and Condition builds and what they bring offensively to the table, what do you feel you should survive that you do not currently live through, and why do you feel like you should survive it?

Or is it that healing power/tanking builds should survive longer? If so, what is killing these builds that the proposed changes would fix?

Everyone always has an opinion on what Necros need for sustain, but I’m never certain what hump they think that will get them over. I’m too used to seeing things like an Engi complaining about always dying to Necromancers, then I ask him what else he has trouble with and he says “Nothing, really”, like he deserves to be able to beat everything in the game easily. Hard counters are no fun, but a little perspective is always nice.

My problem with necro sustain (coming from a power build) is that we start the match off with no life force because sacrificing minions before matches can’t happen anymore which is apparently supposed to be our defense according to anet, and we have no get out of jail free cards save for flesh wurm.

When you look at other insanely high DPS classes the have more than one way to deal with incoming pressure

• Fresh Air eles: S/f has good projectile reflect/absorb+invuln and s/d has great mobility plus both have a ton of blinds.

• Pew pew rangers have the longest range in the game because read the wind not only increases arrow speed it also artificially increases range.

• Thieves depending on the build can stealth and get away (not always) or dodge for an entire fight being impossible to lock down.

• Meditation Guards have some of the best self healing in the game along with tons of instant burst damage all while throwing out more blinds than you can shake a stick at.

• Mesmers in some respects have better in combat mobility than thieves, as well as the ability to constantly evade, and interrupt (something we can usually do nothing about)

But the biggest thing all of these classes have in common is an insanely high up time on vigor and build in dodges. Now I know at one point Anet said that necros were “supposed to be the class you can just not get away from” well at this point that is not true. To help our sustain I think we need better in combat mobility (a ground targeted blink that isn’t flesh wurm) and access to vigor (without having to convert).

Oh and if we really are supposed to be the class you can’t get away from why can medi guards stick to any class like white on a rice ball on a paper plate with a glass of milk in a snow storm?

Cogbyrn.7283:

What quantitatively constitutes “enough” sustain for a Necro, in your opinions? Given the “typical” Power and Condition builds and what they bring offensively to the table, what do you feel you should survive that you do not currently live through, and why do you feel like you should survive it?

Not really into condi, as it stands for power: the standard build is pretty much where power ranger was before the changes to signets, gs skills, longbow skills and some traits were made. It has no real value (some boon remove? pick thief or mes; downed pressure? engi, thief and don’t even talk about generell utility like healing, boons, mobility. generell fields and finisher, stomping and rezzing -lol) and the survivability is ultra low because gimpshroud is not a good pressure tool and, also thanks to no healing, not a recovery tool.
For beeing a pressure tool cast times are too high and thanks to that cc-vulnerability is also really high.
So as a result you play power necro like a gs warri back in the pre- cleansing ire+HS-days: circle the edges of fights, trying to not get anyones attention and waiting for an opportunity to strike, but without the mobility of said warrior.

Also it is not about how much more survivability should an existing build get but about: how much should we get out of skilling more defensive and trading dmg/burst and the chance to 3-shot an opponent with zerker shroud for more survivability. And while there are those funky spectral builds, that actually have decent, not great, survivability they simply don’t do anything significant, except not dying fast (most of the time).

Allowing self healing in DS is probably all it needs to give necros some really great sustain if traiting for blood magic but that probably won’t happen, so i am hoping for necro specialization removing gimpshroud so necro can finally be balanced like a gw2 class and not some kind of old school mmo class…

So it sounds like there are two separate issues from the two responses so far:

• Other classes can spec for insanely high DPS and still have mechanics to allow them to mitigate pressure through dodges/invulns/reflects/etc. When a Necro specs for insanely high DPS, they have basically none of that.

• When trading damage for tankiness via spec, Necros are not afforded as much as other classes, so they still can’t really mitigate as much pressure as other classes scale to while losing the damage they once had.

My question is: what sort of self-healing in DS do you think Necros will be able to do that will bring them up to snuff? Do you think the vampiric traits will truly be enough to provide the sustain that is necessary? Does that mean that Necros would turn into bunkers, since going into Blood Magic would most probably sacrifice damage potential?

I’m asking pointed questions because I hear comments touted all the time seemingly without justification.

Would healing while in DS help the high DPS Necro builds sustain any better? Should they get any better sustain?

Would the vampiric traits cement a tankier role for Necros in the arenas where they are lacking representation (assuming high-level PvP)?

Cogbyrn.7283:

So it sounds like there are two separate issues from the two responses so far:

• Other classes can spec for insanely high DPS and still have mechanics to allow them to mitigate pressure through dodges/invulns/reflects/etc. When a Necro specs for insanely high DPS, they have basically none of that.

• When trading damage for tankiness via spec, Necros are not afforded as much as other classes, so they still can’t really mitigate as much pressure as other classes scale to while losing the damage they once had.

My question is: what sort of self-healing in DS do you think Necros will be able to do that will bring them up to snuff? Do you think the vampiric traits will truly be enough to provide the sustain that is necessary? Does that mean that Necros would turn into bunkers, since going into Blood Magic would most probably sacrifice damage potential?

I’m asking pointed questions because I hear comments touted all the time seemingly without justification.

Would healing while in DS help the high DPS Necro builds sustain any better? Should they get any better sustain?

Would the vampiric traits cement a tankier role for Necros in the arenas where they are lacking representation (assuming high-level PvP)?

It shouldn’t happen through traits. It should just naturally happen. The problem it self is death shroud, anet is convinced that is our defensive mechanic, and they are convinced it is enough of a defensive mechanic when it’s clearly not. Heals need to be received in death shroud with out traits, from either party members/teammates or from heal skills like WoB.

jportell.2197:

But the biggest thing all of these classes have in common is an insanely high up time on vigor and build in dodges. Now I know at one point Anet said that necros were “supposed to be the class you can just not get away from” well at this point that is not true. To help our sustain I think we need better in combat mobility (a ground targeted blink that isn’t flesh wurm) and access to vigor (without having to convert).

Oh and if we really are supposed to be the class you can’t get away from why can medi guards stick to any class like an overly drawn out simile?

It’s odd, because you’d think Dark Path + any movement debilitating skill (Grasping Dead, Dark Pact, maybe even Chilblains) would be enough. After all, DS2 teleports you to your target and chills them on a 15s cooldown, regardless of weapon set or utilities.

Softspoken.2410:

jportell.2197:

But the biggest thing all of these classes have in common is an insanely high up time on vigor and build in dodges. Now I know at one point Anet said that necros were “supposed to be the class you can just not get away from” well at this point that is not true. To help our sustain I think we need better in combat mobility (a ground targeted blink that isn’t flesh wurm) and access to vigor (without having to convert).

Oh and if we really are supposed to be the class you can’t get away from why can medi guards stick to any class like an overly drawn out simile?

It’s odd, because you’d think Dark Path + any movement debilitating skill (Grasping Dead, Dark Pact, maybe even Chilblains) would be enough. After all, DS2 teleports you to your target and chills them on a 15s cooldown, regardless of weapon set or utilities.

Except any class we pull that on has some way to get out of it. Just one teleport on us isn’t enough. Not to mention we are the class that has to try and perfectly time almost everything we do. We get punished most for missing our damaging combos.

jportell.2197:

Softspoken.2410:

It’s odd, because you’d think Dark Path + any movement debilitating skill (Grasping Dead, Dark Pact, maybe even Chilblains) would be enough. After all, DS2 teleports you to your target and chills them on a 15s cooldown, regardless of weapon set or utilities.

Except any class we pull that on has some way to get out of it. Just one teleport on us isn’t enough. Not to mention we are the class that has to try and perfectly time almost everything we do. We get punished most for missing our damaging combos.

Not really sold on this. I can get why Dark Path isn’t (and shouldn’t) be enough on its own to prevent others from escaping, but a couple weapon skills (Locust Swarm, Dark Pact, maaaaybe Unholy Feast?) seem quite good at keeping you close. So why is this combination of mobility reducing skills and abilities insufficient for the typical enemy?

If Dark Path was an instant teleport that applied the same conditions, it would be more on par with the sort of thing other classes besides Warriors get. Even so, Necro has enough chill/cripple to slow an army considering all of their weaps/utilities that can apply those conditions. It just seems like they designed Necro with cast times in mind as a direction for class design, then scrapped that idea in lieu of instant mobility for the “squishy” classes.

Unfortunately in a game designed like GW2, sustain isn’t just “ability to receive damage”, as “ability to avoid damage actively” is most likely going to scale much better. Necros own in the “ability to receive large amounts of damage” department, so giving them options to avoid more damage as well just seems dicey to me. For many parts of the game, Spectral builds have quite a bit of DS sustain baked in while pumping out high damage. I’m coming around to the idea of giving a tankier sustain option through Blood interactions with DS. That’s a tightrope that I don’t envy ANet walking, though.

Cogbyrn.7283:

My question is: what sort of self-healing in DS do you think Necros will be able to do that will bring them up to snuff? Do you think the vampiric traits will truly be enough to provide the sustain that is necessary? Does that mean that Necros would turn into bunkers, since going into Blood Magic would most probably sacrifice damage potential?

Vamp traits would certainly not turn necros into bunkers, but healing in DS would at least give the pure-dps type builds (that we’re currently forced to take) alternative trait options that are actually worth considering.
Let’s say you want to take 3 points in Blood Magic for Vampiric and Vampiric Precision in a power build. Usually you’d go 62006, so what do you sacrifice? Deathly Perception would actually have nice synnergy with Vampiric Precision, so do you give up 3 points in spite instead? Or the 2 points in Curses and 2 in Spite for a 40046 build? Maybe you’re willing to give up 3 points in Soul Reaping afterall, so you’d get to keep Close to Death and Chill of Death.
Either way, you’d lose a significant amount of damage, but this time you’d actually get something decent in return. Not just for something like a higher (and actually working) regeneration uptime, but for example: the best case scenario with both Vamp traits and Deathly Perception would probably be an uninterrupted Life Transfer on 5 targets. This would heal you for a little over 3k hp. Sounds outrageously high by current necro standards, but is it really? After all you have at least 20k hp in total and you’re healing at best up to 15% of that on a 40 second cooldown, and only if you are surrounded by 5 opponents. So in that context 3k hp is almost nothing.

So what I’m saying is, we don’t really want DS healing for the sake of buffing our current builds with Blood Magic traits because you can’t have both anyway. But it would be a really nice gateway to open up build diversity. You’d see more condi necros take Parasitic Contagion, you’d see people max out defensive traits while still trying to do just enough damage with a zerker amulet. Maybe we’d even see some builds with both Parasitic and Vamp traits.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Would the vampiric traits cement a tankier role for Necros in the arenas where they are lacking representation (assuming high-level PvP)?

So the bottom line for this question: No, Vamp traits wouldn’t, at least not on their own. But ally healing would help a little. Not because that would turn necros into sustain monsters, but because certain skill and position rotations in team fights would be made possible.
Also, it would simply be fair to no longer be the only class that can’t be supported by allies in that way while they’re actually using their main defensive mechanism to survive pressure.

Softspoken.2410:

Not really sold on this. I can get why Dark Path isn’t (and shouldn’t) be enough on its own to prevent others from escaping, but a couple weapon skills (Locust Swarm, Dark Pact, maaaaybe Unholy Feast?) seem quite good at keeping you close. So why is this combination of mobility reducing skills and abilities insufficient for the typical enemy?[/quote]

Because all the skills you mentioned (except Dark Pact, which is weak because it has a low range and high cast time) apply soft CC, which is almost useless in this game. It’s too easy to cleanse and its uptime (duration/recharge) is extremely low, so hard to reapply once cleansed. Moreover, teleport/shadowstep skills completely ignore its effects, because, unlike charge skills, their range is unaffected by movement speed reduction. So thieves, mesmers, and sword guardians are basically immune to chill and cripple. The only classes whose mobility is seriously hurt by it are elementalists and warriors, and both of htem have decent cleanses.

Also, don’t you dare call Dark Path a teleport. If you have swiftness you can LITERALLY outrun your own Dark Path projectile! It’s a good in-combat skill with all the bleeds and chill, but useless as a gap closer. If you cast it at over 600 range, your target is quite likely to outrun it and you’ll get an “out of range” message! All they need is a single movement skill and they’ll get past the maximum 1200 range!

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The thing is, healing while your health cannot go down is much stronger than being healed normally. Unholy Sanctuary’s healing can’t be mitigated with DPS.

I still dont really see what exactly would be so much stronger about having 2 health bars and being able to refresh one while the other one is active.

Other classes heal while receiving damage to their only healthpool.
Necros could heal while receiving the same amount of damage to one of their healthpools.

In the end, Necros still receive damage like everyone else.

Consider how OP Warriors would be if they had Defy Pain on a 10 second cooldown, even if they had no other defensive skills save a stunbreak (like Shake it Off). That is more similar to a Necro getting full healing in death shroud in a spectral build than anything else I can really think of. Yes, Death Shroud only absorbs a limited amount, but it also absorbs condition damage.

Well, but defy pain on a 10 second cooldown doesnt have to be charged like DS. Saying that Death shroud acts similar to that every 10 seconds is very theoretical and only under the best circumstances. It’s more likely that youre getting kicked out of death shroud almost immediately, when you activate it again 10 seconds after leaving it. And 3-4 seconds of damage block every 13-14 seconds is much closer to all the invades, blocks, damage mitigation via mobility and permanent vigour other classes have (worse, actually).

@manuveruppd: In addition to Dark path’s tracking, speed and range being vastly buffed, i think mobility on most classes across the board needs to be cut dow or come with more severe drawbacks.
As it is right now, it seems to me that Anet underestimated the value of mobility-skills compared to other skills.

Spectral builds can easily build up almost a full bar of life force during that 10 second cooldown. I do it all the time. Takes me an average of about 15 seconds to fill my life force from 0, longer if I have to heal.

Here is how my fights usually go: we fight for a bit, then I pop Locust Swarm and enter death shroud. I continue fighting in melee range both to maximize life blast damage and let Locust Swarm keep feeding me life force. After15 seconds, I’ve healed 2k health while they’ve barely made a dent in my life force (if I was at 100% to start, I’m usually now at about 80%). Keep in mind, I run Assassin’s amulet, so my defensive stats aren’t high, but I do run a high Protection uptime. The missing life force takes about 4 seconds to replenish while I am simultaneously hitting for very significant damage.

Healing while your actual health can’t be touched is much stronger than normal healing. Especially if you know the tricks to drastically extend Death Shroud.

Again, I am fully in support of getting our self-healing traits to function through Death Shroud to help our sustain, but I firmly believe that getting unrestricted healing would indeed put us well over the edge.

Death Shroud is the most difficult mechanic in the game to balance. It has to not be overbearing for a single foe while also being enough to protect the Necro from multiple opponents. I don’t envy ANet in the slightest for having to balance it.

I also don’t feel any sympathy, because they did bring it on themselves :p

Spectral builds can certainly deal decent damage and have good refill but i think they lack something to make them wanted/ usefull.
Also and this is a big minus: Spectral armor relies on you actually getting hit. If your opponent does not attack you while the effect is on you won’t get your refill and you won’t get your sustain going, while every other class relies on either passive get x health per second or healing skills(heal and weapon) cooldowns. So they are only time gated in their sustain while necro is enemy gated.
So not only vampiric sustain gets kitten if we don’t hit a target (or get hit if choosing vamp sig, yay) but also spectral sustain gets kitten if we don’t get hit. Good opponents can abuse this in some scenarios.

@soft-cc: Necro has really good access to chill and cripple but like others have said these conditions are not really that strong(in terms of limiting mobility). They still have benefits and can hinder some classes more than others and if you play on a class with limited access to these conditions (eg guard) you realise how beneficial they can be, but they also have their limits.
Teleports ignore them completely. Some skills remove them passively without even using dedicated condi clears (eg withdraw, overcharged shot- rifle4 engi) and also they don’t affect the ground you cover via dodging. Though a change in cripple/chill interaction with dodge would be interesting to see. Hurhur.

@Dark path: Great skill, don’t get me wrong. Baseline 5 sec chill with bleeds makes it good and PoC makes this one of the most interesting and rewarding necro skills.
It is just not a chasing tool, since you can outrun it and also using one movement skill will bring you out of the skill range. But atleast the tracking is great and does some crazy 90 degree direction changes.

But all this stuff is not really directed at necro sustain.
Tbh apart from allowing siphons in DS i would like to see Transfusion working on the necro. Yes with hpow this heals for 5k (or even 6k?) but it also sits on a 40 sec recharge, can only be traited for -15%cd and requires a trait to do so and it can be interrupted since it is a pretty long and obvious animation.
I think with these changes there would certainly be some value in bloodmagic and some different builds could surface that might require some tuning but could allow the “sustain caster” to actually sustain.

Edit nr 300: Also thanks cogbyrn for providing some direction for the discussion. I appreciate it.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Again, I am fully in support of getting our self-healing traits to function through Death Shroud to help our sustain, but I firmly believe that getting unrestricted healing would indeed put us well over the edge.

So basically you’re against being able to get heals from allies? That’s pretty much the only thing that is very easy to balance and clear as night and day: should be allowed in full.
I really don’t understand what could possibly be anywhere near op about something that all other classes have access to. And quite honestly, I think the fact that the we haven’t been able to receive any healing in DS for the past 2.5 year is borderline offensive and a discrimination against the necro class.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Takes me an average of about 15 seconds to fill my life force from 0, longer if I have to heal.
…
Here is how my fights usually go:
…
After15 seconds, I’ve healed 2k health while they’ve barely made a dent in my life force (if I was at 100% to start, I’m usually now at about 80%)

Clearly you are describing a PvE fight here.
I’ve watched your stream and even with your build this is not how fights work at all unless you happen to run into an upleveled guy who started playing gw2 on that very same day.
I mean, come on… just 20% life force lost in 15 seconds? That means you have to net +10% over natural degeneration if you have Vital Persistance (which you do iirc). Now let’s be generous and assume that your opponent is actually lame enough to get hit by all Locust Swarm ticks. So 30% from that skill while in DS. Which means that your opponent needs to do damage worth 20% life force in 15 seconds to reduce your lf pool from 100 to 80%. Now, I don’t know how much vitality you get from the rest of your build if you have an Assassin’s amulet, but assuming your health pool is bout 20k big and factoring in the 50% damage reduction in DS: Are you really telling us that the people you “usually” fight can’t do ~5k damage in 15 seconds??
Suffice to say, this can hardly be the basis of a balance discussion, and against real opponents you’d have a much harder time.

Bellamy.9860:

Tbh apart from allowing siphons in DS i would like to see Transfusion working on the necro. Yes with hpow this heals for 5k (or even 6k?) but it also sits on a 40 sec recharge, can only be traited for -15%cd and requires a trait to do so and it can be interrupted since it is a pretty long and obvious animation.
I think with these changes there would certainly be some value in bloodmagic and some different builds could surface that might require some tuning but could allow the “sustain caster” to actually sustain.

I agree, but if healing in DS was possible I’d promote Transfusion to a higher trait tier, possibly even grandmaster.

I’d be happy if siphons worked through death shroud.

So what would happen if entering DS had no/1 sec cd, but all “On enter DS” abilities were given a ICD. Would that help a bit?

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

So what would happen if entering DS had no/1 sec cd, but all “On enter DS” abilities were given a ICD. Would that help a bit?

Some of them already (or still) have ICD’s.
I don’t think this change would actually do some significant improvements to our sustain since this would be more of an offensive buff. If there would be no cd on DS we would be able to aquire on demand fury, weakening shroud and stability and while on demand stability would enable some combos like stabi-channels it would be only a small buff to our sustain and a medium-large buff to burst potential with less retaliation potential.

Another possible approach could be giving each on enter trait a 7 or 10 sec internal CD and letting them proc on DS entry AND exit. Since most of these traits get already balanced by our ability to “shrouddance” i think we should not get punished by staying in DS for an extended amount of time. Every second we stay in Shroud after activating the effect the real cooldown of these procs gets increased by 1 since DS cd begins when leaving shroud.

But this is mostly directed to get some more juice out of Foot in the grave and Deathly Invigoration. Both traits seem good on paper but crap in actual use.

*About “balanced by shroud dance”: Since the reasoning for those traits and weakening shroud beeing strong was the possible 50%+ uptime of stabi/weakness i assumed they factor that into numerical balance.

Bellamy.9860:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

So what would happen if entering DS had no/1 sec cd, but all “On enter DS” abilities were given a ICD. Would that help a bit?

Some of them already (or still) have ICD’s.
I don’t think this change would actually do some significant improvements to our sustain since this would be more of an offensive buff. If there would be no cd on DS we would be able to aquire on demand fury, weakening shroud and stability and while on demand stability would enable some combos like stabi-channels it would be only a small buff to our sustain and a medium-large buff to burst potential with less retaliation potential.

Another possible approach could be giving each on enter trait a 7 or 10 sec internal CD and letting them proc on DS entry AND exit. Since most of these traits get already balanced by our ability to “shrouddance” i think we should not get punished by staying in DS for an extended amount of time. Every second we stay in Shroud after activating the effect the real cooldown of these procs gets increased by 1 since DS cd begins when leaving shroud.

But this is mostly directed to get some more juice out of Foot in the grave and Deathly Invigoration. Both traits seem good on paper but crap in actual use.

*About “balanced by shroud dance”: Since the reasoning for those traits and weakening shroud beeing strong was the possible 50%+ uptime of stabi/weakness i assumed they factor that into numerical balance.

Its kinda funny but when I was writing that post I did think the 2 traits you mentioned would need a buff/rework of some kind. It just seems when I play on my necro, about half of my deaths is because I have 3k hp, my ds is full, but its on a 5 sec cd still

flow.6043:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Again, I am fully in support of getting our self-healing traits to function through Death Shroud to help our sustain, but I firmly believe that getting unrestricted healing would indeed put us well over the edge.

So basically you’re against being able to get heals from allies? That’s pretty much the only thing that is very easy to balance and clear as night and day: should be allowed in full.
I really don’t understand what could possibly be anywhere near op about something that all other classes have access to. And quite honestly, I think the fact that the we haven’t been able to receive any healing in DS for the past 2.5 year is borderline offensive and a discrimination against the necro class.

Because no other profession can protect their actual health with the uptime Necros can. If allowing self-traited healing doesn’t prove to be enough, great! Expand what can heal us some, but only some. Evaluate that, and if it still isn’t enough, expand again. Full healing in Death Shroud is a decent goal, but it should not be the first step.

flow.6043:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Takes me an average of about 15 seconds to fill my life force from 0, longer if I have to heal.
…
Here is how my fights usually go:
…
After15 seconds, I’ve healed 2k health while they’ve barely made a dent in my life force (if I was at 100% to start, I’m usually now at about 80%)

Clearly you are describing a PvE fight here.
I’ve watched your stream and even with your build this is not how fights work at all unless you happen to run into an upleveled guy who started playing gw2 on that very same day.
I mean, come on… just 20% life force lost in 15 seconds? That means you have to net +10% over natural degeneration if you have Vital Persistance (which you do iirc). Now let’s be generous and assume that your opponent is actually lame enough to get hit by all Locust Swarm ticks. So 30% from that skill while in DS. Which means that your opponent needs to do damage worth 20% life force in 15 seconds to reduce your lf pool from 100 to 80%. Now, I don’t know how much vitality you get from the rest of your build if you have an Assassin’s amulet, but assuming your health pool is bout 20k big and factoring in the 50% damage reduction in DS: Are you really telling us that the people you “usually” fight can’t do ~5k damage in 15 seconds??
Suffice to say, this can hardly be the basis of a balance discussion, and against real opponents you’d have a much harder time.

You watched my WvW roaming, which uses a different gear setup (Zealot’s/Captians/Zerker mix) and trait setup (Weakening Shroud instead of Reaper’s Precision) and where my opponents have stat inflation (notice I never had guard leech stacks or a sharpening stone active). I was referring to my PvP experience where I use Assassin’s amulet and Reaper’s Precision. Those differences make more of a difference than you would think. That also means gear and level discrepencies are thrown out entirely.

And yes, a net 5k damage over 15 seconds when they are dealing 66% less damage due to Protection and Death Shroud’s natural halving and I am gaining life force from crits (58% crit chance, 78% for the first 6.5 seconds of death shroud) as well as each tick of Locust Swarm that lands cancelling out more than a second of natural decay. Quite possible.

They may deal more damage than that. I regain a lot of it back. This is especially true against Mesmers, where Locust Swarm feeds me life force for their illusions as well (which can’t avoid the ticks).

@Warlord of Chaos: None of the “on DS entry/exit” traits have a cooldown anymore. Only the cooldown of Death Shroud itself.

I see at least some people are starting to realize what I’ve been saying for months.

I have always thought that our problems with sustain and our entire up time was not due to our lack of healing in death shroud or our lack of damage in condition or power builds but comes down to our limited capability to mitigate damage from multiple sources when focused and our utter lack of stability. The problem that bothers me the most is that we have little acces to stability and thus are stub magnets or cc magnets which completlely shuts down our ability to finish our burst rotations or reapply conditions that are all to easily cleansed. Another thing that bothers me is that some classes get access to stability and immunity to conditions and or damage while still being able to apply damage. If a necro even tries to accomplish this our sustain or ability to spike is nonexistent. Heck, our damage just goes down. Other classes can defend and attack. We can only do one, well, which is apply damage if we are not cc’d. Defense on a necro depends on being a damage sponge, which in my opinion caps the ability of a good necro to compensate. As in that no matter the skill, the necro will always be at a slight disadvantage even at a high skill level because we simple have limited options to mitigate damage that really centers on ds management which is not overly dependable.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

You watched my WvW roaming, which uses a different …trait setup (Weakening Shroud instead of Reaper’s Precision)
…58% crit chance, 78% for the first 6.5 seconds of death shroud

Okay, so with that you’ll generate an extra 1% lf every 5th hit, every 4th for the first 6.5 seconds. This does in no way deminish the point I was trying to make. The calculated 5k damage were a best case scenario in your favour anyway, and even if you have 100% Protection uptime, there’s absolutely no way that players who are that incompetent are your “usual” encounter.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

…and where my opponents have stat inflation (notice I never had guard leech stacks or a sharpening stone active)

That’s actually an argument I could’ve made to further demonstrate how you must be fighting the worst players when you allegedly take so little damage.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Because no other profession can protect their actual health with the uptime Necros can.

That’s simply not true.
You are confusing face-tanking with other defensive mechanisms, such as mobility, blinds, blocks, evades, several forms of damage immunities… all of which actually scaling better against increasing numbers of attackers.
So again: you are wrong, necros need ally healing the most of all classes.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

If allowing self-traited healing doesn’t prove to be enough, great! Expand what can heal us some, but only some. Evaluate that, and if it still isn’t enough, expand again. Full healing in Death Shroud is a decent goal, but it should not be the first step.

No thanks. Considering how long it takes Anet to implement even the smallest of changes, I’d rather skip the formalities and get straight to full healing.

Fine, fine. I can guarantee that would be the next Dhuumfire fiasco. You sure you want that?

Again, because “health” is a Necro’s only real defense, they have to be extremely careful with how much Necros get. It is extremely easy to make a Necro nigh impossible to kill with anything but team focus fire. Increasing the amount of “health” we have is a very delicate process for balancing. Would I like full healing in death shroud? Well, yeah, sure. Do I think it would be healthy? Not right now I don’t. I’m more interested in keeping the profession balanced and healthy for the game than “being on par with other classes.”

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Fine, fine. I can guarantee that would be the next Dhuumfire fiasco. You sure you want that?

Again, because “health” is a Necro’s only real defense, they have to be extremely careful with how much Necros get. It is extremely easy to make a Necro nigh impossible to kill with anything but team focus fire. Increasing the amount of “health” we have is a very delicate process for balancing. Would I like full healing in death shroud? Well, yeah, sure. Do I think it would be healthy? Not right now I don’t. I’m more interested in keeping the profession balanced and healthy for the game than “being on par with other classes.”

But how can you say that when the necro’s defense will be comming from only himself , especially since high defense necro builds are based on high death shroud uptime and have access to protection, regen and weakness? It means that their defensive performance will be about the same in a 5v1 as in 5v5 especially if the team has pets of some sort. The necro will be able to protect a point all by himself no matter the amount of opponents. I am exagerating a bit, but the issue will still stands, too much personal defense and the necro will be too much survivable in a 1vX.

Sorry, I was implying “by making changes”, not with the current implementation.

Right now? Yeah, even the most defensive Necro doesn’t last long against team focus fire. But make the wrong change, and that will be the only way to bring one down. Personally, I’m not interested in having that happen.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

next Dhuumfire fiasco …
impossible to kill with anything but team focus fire.

You must be experiencing different fights than I do. I don’t know what else to think at this point.
From my experience, the amount of healing a necro would have to receive and the team coordination nescessary to turn someone into the immortal necro you suspect them to become simply doesn’t exist in PvP.

flow.6043:

You must be experiencing different fights than I do. I don’t know what else to think at this point.
From my experience, the amount of healing a necro would have to receive and the team coordination nescessary to turn someone into the immortal necro you suspect them to become simply doesn’t exist in PvP.

I tend to agree with you, really. It would require some decently impressive coordination between a high healing class like a Cleric’s Staff Ele in Water autoattacking the ground or a Guardian that sacrificed Shelter for Healing Breeze to truly make a Necromancer indestructible. Couple that with the highest DS-sustaining build (which sacrifices a lot of other useful qualities that could be better served in a team comp by a CeleEle or CeleEngi or something), and I really don’t think it’d be broken.

I want to be able to sustain myself mostly through a skillful use of my own skills and partially through a good coordination with the team.

I don’t think healing needs to work in Death Shroud. Necro with Life Force is a very survivable profession. Still susceptible to CC, but survivable nonetheless. What it lacks in sustainability or the ability to replenish health, it gains in LF generation and being able to burn through the life pool for much longer than other professions.

What I want is some reliable sustainability outside of builds that rely heavily on DS and LF generation. I feel these builds lack sustain.
How to make it so that you can’t combine both LF builds with sustainable build making an ultimate sponge necro with a health pool that can’t go below, say, 10k? I have no idea.

Said many posts before, there should not be argue if healing in ds is op or not. The class mechanic should not negate our own spells and traits, thats counterproductive. The design that is now is failed, thats the only problem. Noeone amongst us can know 100% if it would be op or not (Drarnor how can you guaranty dhuum fiasco? Are you developer who actualy tried it amongst good pvp players?), but we all, i assume, want it balanced if the need arises, but not by limiting it. Thats why the game has balance team, not just for correcting tooltips.

Oh an just to make things clear. I had hard time figuring what you ppl actualy want. What i was refearing to is all healing from allies, regen, siphons and sigils, runes and signets passive. Utility, elite, healing slots would still unable to be used while in ds. I had a feeling in few posts that some ppl think like i do and some ppl asume “all” healing meaning also from utility/healing slots, coming to some unneeded confortations. Please clarify more.

I guarantee it because I seem to be one of the only people that actually uses the healing in death shroud we already have instead of just insisting it’s terrible.

Here are things I think we can all agree on:

1. self-traited healing needs to work through death shroud. This is to prevent conflicting mechanics, one of which is core to the profession.

2. Party UI needs to indicate that a Necro is in Death Shroud to prevent wasted panic heals. Even if a Necro could be healed while in death shroud, if the UI shows a Necro (who is actually in death shroud) is low on health, people will try to heal him, even if he’s actually full health.

3. Some cast times are too long for their effect, making the Necro more susceptible to CC than they really should be.

Can we all agree on those three points?

I can agree to those 3 points, but I still say US is dog poop. Making vamp traits and other self heals go through ds would go a long way.

@eumanandidpddpdsus I can 100% Garuntee if we allowed all healing in ds it would be OP as hell.

What sane argument can anyone make to support self speced healing not to work in DS? Self speced healing in DS and team sustain are two different issues, 1 being a fault in the system the other a fault in the supposed team focused balance. I have seen venom share thieves with better sustain.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

1. self-traited healing needs to work through death shroud. This is to prevent conflicting mechanics, one of which is core to the profession.

depends on what you mean with that. healing that comes from the necromancer itself, via traits, regen, well of blood? or really just traits (which also inclue regen in one case)? yeah, we can agree on that. the choice of words, ‘self-traited healing’, sounds really odd to me.

I was only referring to the traits there. In the case of Regeneration as a boon, it would be best (for consistency’s sake) if it either worked or did not work in death shroud. No “well, the Regeneration from this trait works, but not other Regeneration.”