Guild Wars 2

Main hand Dagger

Skill #1
On third chain strike: It will reduce your #3 cooldown by 1sec and Siphon Life = to the targets current life by 2%

Skill #2
Siphon Life effectiveness is increased by 2% for every 10% life your currently missing.
Removed Scaling with healing power

Skill #3
Remove damage, make cast time instant.

Thoughts?

I believe that life siphon does scale with healing power.

Life Siphon heals for 202 per tick at Lvl 80, and increases by 1 per 25 Healing Power (approx.)

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_stealing (notes section bottom of the page)

Thanks! Fixed the suggestion

Siphon Life channal time decreased from 3½ to 1¾.

Daecollo.9578:

Siphon Life channal time decreased from 3½ to 1¾.

Imo adding free power is considered unbalanced so If you add something like that you will have to take away something in return. (example: Increase cooldown from 12s to 16s)

So we have to be careful what we edit, but I think the dagger kit is really underpar with other kits we have ><. We want to stay in melee range and be awarded for it, but at the same time the longer we stay we become more susceptible to other attacks (it’s like a trade off kind of thing).

Nirvash.3018:

Daecollo.9578:

Siphon Life channal time decreased from 3½ to 1¾.

Imo adding free power is considered unbalanced so If you add something like that you will have to take away something in return. (example: Increase cooldown from 12s to 16s)

So we have to be careful what we edit, but I think the dagger kit is really underpar with other kits we have ><. We want to stay in melee range and be awarded for it, but at the same time the longer we stay we become more susceptible to other attacks (it’s like a trade off kind of thing).

Not really, its dumb for having such a long channel time, it should have less to be compared to other classes abilities.

In my opinion, making #3 instant (as in cast-while-casting-something-else-instant) might be too powerful for a 3-4 sec immobilize. I would be in favor of reducing the cast time to half a second or so, though.

Daecollo.9578:

Nirvash.3018:

Daecollo.9578:

Siphon Life channal time decreased from 3½ to 1¾.

Imo adding free power is considered unbalanced so If you add something like that you will have to take away something in return. (example: Increase cooldown from 12s to 16s)

So we have to be careful what we edit, but I think the dagger kit is really underpar with other kits we have ><. We want to stay in melee range and be awarded for it, but at the same time the longer we stay we become more susceptible to other attacks (it’s like a trade off kind of thing).

Not really, its dumb for having such a long channel time, it should have less to be compared to other classes abilities.

Compared in what way? Straight up damage? That’s not what the skill is for. Your suggestion would allow an opponent to avoid all damage (and negate any potential healing) of this skill with just 1 dodge or block. As it is now, they still get hit by about half the ticks. And if it DID hit, well…along with other siphons, I’ve had a full channel of this skill heal me for 5k before, while doing about 4k damage to another level 80 in WvW. Your suggestion either makes the skill OP or worthless depending on whether or not the opponent avoids it. That is too much risk/reward.

As for the main post, I’ve been using dagger mainhand for several months now and I don’t feel it needs any buffs. Your changes might work but there’s no need to spend time fixing and playtesting what isn’t broken IMO.

I pretty much agree dagger is decent. Life siphon however needs a 400% increase on healing….. Cause right now it’s frikin ridiculous…

DeathenShada.6397:

I pretty much agree dagger is decent. Life siphon however needs a 400% increase on healing….. Cause right now it’s frikin ridiculous…

Yeah man, a skill with a 12s cooldown should totally heal for 7200…

lettucemode.3789:

DeathenShada.6397:

I pretty much agree dagger is decent. Life siphon however needs a 400% increase on healing….. Cause right now it’s frikin ridiculous…

Yeah man, a skill with a 12s cooldown should totally heal for 7200…

how are you getting those kinds of heal numbers on syphons?

The cast time on Life Siphon needs lowered to 1 second.

I don’t really understand why everyone wants life siphon channel reduced, the longer it goes the stronger it hits and the more healing you get (overall, not meaning it increases heal with each hit, as it does not), not to mention if you use dark armor it’s that much longer you get to utilize that trait. If you’re standing in one spot using life siphon then yeah, I can see why you would want it to work quicker, learn to move around, strafe, make the target move after you. If any change needs to be made, it’s that the heal scales with the damage/siphon so that it gives you incentive to continue the channel to get more out of it. In it’s current state I have never felt it to be too underpowered nor needing a major rework, even with the current healing it isn’t too bad with vampiric traits.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I don’t really understand why everyone wants life siphon channel reduced, the longer it goes the stronger it hits and the more healing you get (overall, not meaning it increases heal with each hit, as it does not), not to mention if you use dark armor it’s that much longer you get to utilize that trait. If you’re standing in one spot using life siphon then yeah, I can see why you would want it to work quicker, learn to move around, strafe, make the target move after you. If any change needs to be made, it’s that the heal scales with the damage/siphon so that it gives you incentive to continue the channel to get more out of it. In it’s current state I have never felt it to be too underpowered nor needing a major rework, even with the current healing it isn’t too bad with vampiric traits.

um, it would still heal and do the same damage it does if its reduced, the reason is, is because of the damage it does, and the fact you can’t dodge during it.

Daecollo.9578:

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I don’t really understand why everyone wants life siphon channel reduced, the longer it goes the stronger it hits and the more healing you get (overall, not meaning it increases heal with each hit, as it does not), not to mention if you use dark armor it’s that much longer you get to utilize that trait. If you’re standing in one spot using life siphon then yeah, I can see why you would want it to work quicker, learn to move around, strafe, make the target move after you. If any change needs to be made, it’s that the heal scales with the damage/siphon so that it gives you incentive to continue the channel to get more out of it. In it’s current state I have never felt it to be too underpowered nor needing a major rework, even with the current healing it isn’t too bad with vampiric traits.

um, it would still heal and do the same damage it does if its reduced, the reason is, is because of the damage it does, and the fact you can’t dodge during it.

wrong. the entirety of it would be avoided in a single dodge.

hackks.3687:

lettucemode.3789:

DeathenShada.6397:

I pretty much agree dagger is decent. Life siphon however needs a 400% increase on healing….. Cause right now it’s frikin ridiculous…

Yeah man, a skill with a 12s cooldown should totally heal for 7200…

how are you getting those kinds of heal numbers on syphons?

It heals for a bit over 200 per tick, and he suggested increasing it by 400 percent…200 * 4 * 9 = 7200

More powerful life siphon would be nice.

I feel like they need to completely redesign skill #3. I get it’s use in pvp, but on the pve side of things it’s a completely counterintuitive thing for the mainhand dagger to have. In pve, a root’s for keeping the enemy away, and yet the dagger’s a close combat weapon, so what’s the point of it?

Replacing the root with some sort of closing move makes sense to me.

Randin.5701:

More powerful life siphon would be nice.

I feel like they need to completely redesign skill #3. I get it’s use in pvp, but on the pve side of things it’s a completely counterintuitive thing for the mainhand dagger to have. In pve, a root’s for keeping the enemy away, and yet the dagger’s a close combat weapon, so what’s the point of it?

Replacing the root with some sort of closing move makes sense to me.

Closing is nice, but necromancer can’t really do anything but mash one once he does (which is easier with current three imo). Only thing I see arena net possibly changing would be the siphoning amounts and that’s if we’re extremely lucky.

If there’s going to be any changes to MDagger, I’d really like to see a leap added to help us move into melee range., ideally replacing or in addition to to dagger 3.

Perhaps similar to Elementalist’s new Magnetic Grasp/Leap ability they just added.

I realize we have “Dark Path” but I’ve never been a fan of jumping into DS for half a second to cast the power just to move into melee range. If I’m going to put on DS I might as well just shoot the target with Life Blast and be done with it.

I’ve been playing a melee necro basically since release and I don’t think we need a gap-closer. We have a slow on every single weapon, besides offhand dagger. In my experience those have been sufficient to let me get close when I need to. If they dodge one just try the next, or Fear right before Dark Path hits them so they can’t avoid it. Spectral Grasp helps tremendously in this area too, it’s a lot better than it used to be, and gives you 10% life force to boot.

I like the immobilize on dagger 3 a lot. Spectral Grasp (knocks them down long enough that they can’t avoid whatever you do next) + dagger 3 + well of suffering + pain train is great fun in those zerg vs. zerg standoffs. If dagger 3 was nothing but a gap closer I’d have to abandon that style of play because there’d no longer be any good way to keep people in a well.

hackks.3687:

lettucemode.3789:

DeathenShada.6397:

I pretty much agree dagger is decent. Life siphon however needs a 400% increase on healing….. Cause right now it’s frikin ridiculous…

Yeah man, a skill with a 12s cooldown should totally heal for 7200…

how are you getting those kinds of heal numbers on syphons?

Were you asking about the 5k heal I mentioned?

Short answer: Bloodthirst + Vampiric Precision + 50% crit chance + sigil of blood + omnomberry pie.

Long answer: With my build (power/crit) each tick of dagger 2 heals for 325, plus 41 per hit (with WvW bonus), plus 55 on half those hits. 325 * 9 + 41 * 9 + 55 * 4.5 = 3542, rounded up. Sigil of Blood heals for 450ish according to wiki, plus 20 from points in Blood Magic, so the total is 4012. Omnomberry pie heals 325 on one-third of my hits since I have 50% crit chance, so 325 * 3 = 975, bringing the total for one average channel of dagger 2 to 4987. That number will vary depending on your luck.

That’s an impressive number, but I don’t stick with the siphoning traits too much because they only account for 617 of that number. So if you didn’t use Vampiric or Vampiric Precision, you’d get an average of 4360 healing on a full dagger 2 channel, less some because of 10 less points in Blood Magic and thus less healing power.

With no points in Blood Magic at all, it goes down to 3258.

I think the best change for siphon would be to front load most of the healing and backload most of the damage.

The healing and damage numbers are roughly ok with maybe a slight damage boost right for the end of the channel.

It would also allow us to get a bit more healing off against builds with alot of interupts and make the healing more reliable while also making it dangerous to let the channel finish without dodging or interupting.

And I would agree lettuce that SOUNDS really impressive, but the tradeoff is you can’t use any skills, utilites, elites, and you have given up your all powerful food slot and have built specifically to get the crit heals (using knights gear).

Part of the “cool” factor with other classes when they run their channeled skills is they can use their instant skills during that time, (think shattering clones while channeling sword 2, or using staff 2 while casting staff 3 on a mesmer, or really anything channeled and blink).

You are by definition helpless while channeling dagger 2, and thats not only boring, but lacks any depth at all. How do you use dagger 2 any better than the next guy using dagger 2? What options do you have for improving how dagger 2 works? How do you combo into or off of dagger 2?

Really you get them to burn their dodge, and hopefully their stun, and then you channel it… that is very lackluster. Also the range on it is very easy to break if you have any leap skills.

In my opinion it should have worked more like troll urgent, and done a longer heal over time/siphon, but not required the channel. Obviously not that strong, but the same concept. You could have called it blood link, and made a cool graphic for it…. and it could have been instant cast, followed by the siphon over the next 5 seconds if they stay in range.

My redesign would be:

Dagger (1) I would add a slight poison effect to Necrotic bite even if I had to reduce the Life force regen to +3 instead of +4

Dagger (2) actually with all the traits it isn’t to bad, but I would increase the siphon to 250 per pulse and reduce the damage to 600 per pulse as a compromise

Dagger (3) give us the pull from the old risen in Orr, I personally only use this for when things are running away and this would be sweet justice for all the times i got pulled in Orr … heh

Offhand:

Dagger (4) Keep it as is but for the love of all that is unholy speed it up

Dagger (5) I’m not a big fan of targeted skills so I never use this, Hoverer I love using the DS ability (Weakening Shroud) that self targets this on activate.

Tommyknocker.6089:

My redesign would be:

Dagger (5) I’m not a big fan of targeted skills so I never use this, Hoverer I love using the DS ability (Weakening Shroud) that self targets this on activate.

People would love dagger 5 much more if it was instant cast and had no delay after casting before coming down from Thor’s cloud. The traited version provides only one bleed, but is significantly better because it is instant.

Rennoko.5731:

And I would agree lettuce that SOUNDS really impressive, but the tradeoff is you can’t use any skills, utilites, elites, and you have given up your all powerful food slot and have built specifically to get the crit heals (using knights gear).

Part of the “cool” factor with other classes when they run their channeled skills is they can use their instant skills during that time, (think shattering clones while channeling sword 2, or using staff 2 while casting staff 3 on a mesmer, or really anything channeled and blink).

You are by definition helpless while channeling dagger 2, and thats not only boring, but lacks any depth at all. How do you use dagger 2 any better than the next guy using dagger 2? What options do you have for improving how dagger 2 works? How do you combo into or off of dagger 2?

Really you get them to burn their dodge, and hopefully their stun, and then you channel it… that is very lackluster. Also the range on it is very easy to break if you have any leap skills.

In my opinion it should have worked more like troll urgent, and done a longer heal over time/siphon, but not required the channel. Obviously not that strong, but the same concept. You could have called it blood link, and made a cool graphic for it…. and it could have been instant cast, followed by the siphon over the next 5 seconds if they stay in range.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to give the impression that I designed my build around dagger 2. Someone asked how I got such a high number on it and I answered that question. Like I said I rarely put 20 points into Blood Magic anymore. I use the knight’s gear and siphon food anyway, I just noticed that I had some good synergy with dagger 2. I’ll answer your questions anyway since I like this discussion.

How do I use it better than the next guy? Maxing out its healing potential (which I proved in the post above, pretty sure no one’s done that before), making sure the enemy has used dodges or immobilizing them before channeling it (instead of complaining that it’s easily dodgeable), remembering to switch to it as often as possible to use it on every CD.

What options do I have for improving it? I don’t think it needs to be improved, it fits the necromancer theme of attrition and sustained damage.

How do I combo into it or off of it? Toggle DS for fury before using it, or use it when I know the opponent has dodges left because I actually want to use dagger 3 + well of suffering. Maybe that’s not the kind of answer you want to hear, but the necro power weapon channels are great for baiting opponents into dodging them so you can actually land other things, or vice versa. I like that.

lettucemode.3789:

How do I use it better than the next guy? Maxing out its healing potential (which I proved in the post above, pretty sure no one’s done that before), making sure the enemy has used dodges or immobilizing them before channeling it (instead of complaining that it’s easily dodgeable), remembering to switch to it as often as possible to use it on every CD.

What options do I have for improving it? I don’t think it needs to be improved, it fits the necromancer theme of attrition and sustained damage.

How do I combo into it or off of it? Toggle DS for fury before using it, or use it when I know the opponent has dodges left because I actually want to use dagger 3 + well of suffering. Maybe that’s not the kind of answer you want to hear, but the necro power weapon channels are great for baiting opponents into dodging them so you can actually land other things, or vice versa. I like that.

Toggling DS to proc the fury before the channel is an interesting idea I had not considered. My main beef with any power melee build (which I am sure is apparent from the dozens of posts on the subject I have made), is that if you really want to do anything in melee as a necro, its just safer/easier to do with the other classes. Again I am not saying it SHOULD be better or equal with the necro, but just that is the case.

The class design of attrition is all well and good for Spvp, where when people run, you keep the point, but it feels so weak in the WvW scene. Certainly you can come up with a practical dueling spec for WvW, if you want to roam and hunt down 1v1 fights, but more often than not if you really want to run a coordinated group, someone able to spike out a good 12k damage is going to be better to have along.

I am sure we will continue to disagree on this subject, because you have managed to find a niche you like and it works for you (I am happy for you!). I have come to really love my condition build in WvW in recent weeks and have embraced it and seen much better results as a consequence. I will have a hard time finding equal value to a group than I add right now in any other build, especially one that focuses on attrition based mostly single target skills.

My guardian friends do a better job of staying alive (attrition), have a much easier time keeping up protection/regen/retaliation (withough sacrificing runes) than a power build (they give all those aoe buffs too). My thief friends stomp, burst, evade damage, res, much better than I could do in a power build. My ele friends long range stun, party heal, disrupt, better than a power build.

But do any of them have the ability to AOE a 10 second poison, weakness, 10 second chill, 10 stacks of bleeding, 2 second fear? Sure don’t. So thats what I do. Any good player can make any class/build work with practice, but that doesn’t make the build optimal or practical.

I think MH Dagger is in a good place. It’s already a nicely designed MH for a power/wells necro.

The only think I’d like to see changed hasn’t much to do particularly with MH dagger skills but life siphoning in general. IMO life siphons should scale with healing power. This may open up some bunker dagger necro possibilities. Dagger 1 is a fast LF generating auto-attack which is good for a bunker, and Dagger 3 could be used as a defensive tool to get off your full Dagger 2 cast.

So far I think ANet has Condi and Power Necros in a good place. If they can flesh out minion masters and life siphon mechanic (e.g. the death and blood lines) in general it would round out the Necro very nicely in terms of viable builds.