Hello all! I wanted to try and come up with ideas about a new elite spec so I decided to make a post in hopes of creating inspiration. I’m not very good at making post so i’ll just be putting a rough idea. I came up with the Lich Knight because one of the trademark abilities of a necromancer is the ability to raise undead, however in gw2 the ability to use undead isn’t really that prevalent outside of a few utilities.
The Lich Knight is a class that is centered around using and maintaining undead minions.
Weapon proficiency: Sword and Shield
These two weapons center around consistently gaining life force to spend on skeletal minions and keeping them alive. (ex. a shield skill that allows the user to block incoming attacks and for each attack that is blocked you gain a certain amount of life force or create a bone wall that can be attacked and grant life force based on how much damage it received. While one sword skill creates a reverse leeching effect allowing you to heal your minions when you use it to deal damage, but not yourself)
profession mechanic change:
This change will be very similar to the scourge in that life force is used as a secondary resource and lose its effectiveness as a secondary life bar. For the lich knight this resource is used to summon skeletal minion. Each minion will perform a different role and have two abilities. One is their auto attack while the other is a long cd ability it will use automatically once it goes of cd. There may be a trait that adds a 3rd skill as well.
The skeletons:
There are 3 basic skeletons you can spend life force on. Each skeleton has its own set of stats separate from your own based on what kind of skeleton they are. There is a fourth that I like to call amalgamation that combines the skeletons you have and the end result is based on what skeletons were used and the stats are based on how many were used. Skeletons however are in a constant state of health degeneration that increases the longer you have them out, and you can only have a maximum of 8 at a time or 10 traited. Design wise, each skeleton is random in appearance based on the playable races available with the exception of the bone dragon.
Knight Skeleton: it is a minion that has high toughness and vitality, but low offense. It has an ability to charge into the fight and is used to draw the attention of the enemy preventing it from focusing on other minion or yourself.
Magic Skeleton: A skeleton that uses dark magic to attack your enemies. power focused
Melee Skeleton: A Skeleton that focuses on melee attacks, they attack faster than magic skeletons do. condition focused
Amalgamations
Skeleton Guard: Majority Knight Skeletons. an advanced version of the knights with better skills available for it to use. Even having a taunting skill.
Lesser Lich: Majority Magic Skeletons. A Skeleton that summons bone minions that quickly run toward the target and explode. It has better aoe potential. The bone minions it brings out doesn’t count as minions under your control so it doesn’t effect your counter.
Skeleton Swordsman: Majority Melee Skeletons. Has better condition stacking potential and more conditions it can apply.
Bone Dragon: have 10 on your summons counter, it has strong ability to perform all 3 roles. Its stats are based on what was used to bring it out so it can’t perform well at all 3 roles at the same time. It has a basic claw attack, and for the CDs a biting attack ( power based), a breath attack (condition based), and a defensive skill. It won’t use the defensive skill until its health lowers to a certain point.
Note: sacrificing skeletons for amalgamations doesn’t decrease the counter. If you use it to bring out a Bone Dragon, the counter will still be at 10 and be unable to summon lesser undead until it dies. The advanced skeletons are not used during amalgamation so you could have multiple of the advanced undead as long as your counter doesn’t go over 10. You must think carefully ahead what you will want to use.
Healing and Utilities:
A healing skill that heals you based on how high your minion counter is, and heals your minions for a small amount and grants them regeneration.
Enhancements: These utilities are centered around improving your minions through buffs or allowing them to improve their role better. Like a Flame enhancement cloaks them in fire causing fire damage to enemies close to them if they are a guard or adds burning to the melee attackers attacks for a duration, Bone Armor that improves their survival, etc.
Elite: Sacrifice – You sacrifice all of your summons in order to absorb them granting a large buff to yourself depending on what was sacrificed.
The idea of this spec is to constantly build up your resource to keep summoning minions and advancing them into stronger forms and empowering them. The biggest weakness though is that without their minions they are relatively weak. If you were to face one then focus their non-knight/guard minions down and then target the lich knight. They are also weak to CC.
