Guild Wars 2

A thought occurred to me the other day. I was thinking about orders in the idea they could have extremely low cool downs and require death shroud to use. Now this isn’t a new idea. Some have suggested that orders would be shouts. Now combining these two elements would actually be incredibly harmful to the necromancer. This wouldn’t help us at all even if they were really good seeing as we both need our life force as defense and this would mean we’d have a whole thing of utility we just couldn’t use at the start of the fight. It would actually limit our options rather then increase them. Even if we didn’t take into consideration the whole UI issue.

But I got to thinking about some other things. Such as corruptions which are currently underwhelming. I’ll stand by the idea I’ve presented for minions as a fix for their usability. And that is the idea of both using life force and life. Giving corruptions the ability to use life force or life rather then self inflicted conditions as well as increasing there effectiveness could be quite interesting. The issue I see with something like shouts in this regard, especially if they’re supposed to be orders, is you’d quickly burn through any life force and life you might have. And if they are just shouts then they lose any flavor they might have.

I think the idea of expanding some existing skills to use Life force and life is a great idea. Such as minions and corruptions doing just that. But not for spectral skills, wells or signets. And the next set of skills we get could very well use life force to activate. But I highly doubt it. This is something that would be awkward for our profession when its not on the base.

New ways to use life force on our profession mechanic, like having orders along side death shroud or locked beyond entering death shroud as our replacement utility. The second option actually sounds really likely to me which worries me. This would mean regardless of how little they cost they’ll still be locked behind the death shroud wall. Which although it would open up our game play a little bit we would still end up with the exact same issue as before. We’d still be incredibly predictable when entering death shroud. Something none of us wants.

There is defiantly allot of room for the necromancer to expand in a large number of directions with very unique game play. Which is why I think most of us are still here. But the question then becomes will arena net actually take us in the right direction? Or will there counter productive philosophy with the necromancer get in the way and continue to make us a sub-par profession? Only time will tell.

It would be interesting to see the profession use the concept of life as a resource like it used to back in GW1. This is something that I think all GW1 veteran necromancer players are really itching for.

Arenanet spent a lot of time balancing LF generation and DS. My gut reaction to the idea of using LF for something other than DS is that it would mess up their balance too much and so would be unattractive.

The simplest way to give Necromancer utility without affecting our “sustain” is to copy-paste utilities from another class that run in a direction completely different from the typical Necromancer builds.

I like the idea of using life force for something besides DS but still think it would interfere with their previous balance work. The specialization coming up will probably be boring shouts that give mediocre AoE buffs but would not rule out some other class’ utilities.

Anchoku.8142:

Arenanet spent a lot of time balancing LF generation and DS. My gut reaction to the idea of using LF for something other than DS is that it would mess up their balance too much and so would be unattractive.

The simplest way to give Necromancer utility without affecting our “sustain” is to copy-paste utilities from another class that run in a direction completely different from the typical Necromancer builds.

I like the idea of using life force for something besides DS but still think it would interfere with their previous balance work. The specialization coming up will probably be boring shouts that give mediocre AoE buffs but would not rule out some other class’ utilities.

The problem with that statement is DS isn’t balanced. Life force, I could argue is but Death shroud isn’t.

“Necromancer is in a good state.”

We may not agree with that statement but I expect only the tiniest of impacts to PvP balance. The new specialization will probably focus on Necromancer’s PvE weaknesses; but even that will be cautious.

Expect some glitz and glitter with a bit of group support utility, and that GS will have cleave but work a lot like an axe-dagger with a new off hand utility.