Guild Wars 2

One thing I don’t quite understand is why Anet wants DS to be our defense mechanic, yet make its skills mostly offensive and not defensive, and making use of it entirely around offense.

I may not always agree with TheMightyAltroll, but he brought up an interesting point on the sPvP forums recently:

There are two types of damage mitigation in this game:

• Offensive Mitigation
  Weakness, Blind, Stun, Daze, Fear, Vampirism/Leeching, Condition Transfers, Boon Conversion

• Defensive Mitigation
  Invulnerability, Dodge/Vigor, Teleportation/mobility, Invisibility, Protection, Stability, Strong Healing, Block, Evade, Reflect, Stunbreakers, Passive/Active Condition removal, Self Resurrection, Condition Conversion

Now, Necromancer has limited to zero access to most defensive mitigation capabilities, however it has a significant amount of access to Offensive Mitigation. The reason why Necromancers lack survivability, is because we rely on cutting damage at the source, our opponent. Every other class in the game has high access to defensive mitigation, the problem is, the Defensive mitigation, when used properly, will ignore a Necromancer’s offensive mitigation, thus making him very easy to kill.*

In order to even generate LF to use our “defensive” mechanic, we rely on hitting our opponent or having mobs/npcs around us die, often blowing cooldowns we could use in the next part of the fight with someone disengaging just to gain LF from a mob. If any profession that can quickly leave and come back (thief, ele, mes, maybe guard/engi) after forcing us to blow our LF on a burst, they have a huge advantage. They are out of the fight, and in order to defend ourselves with DS we have to wait for them to reengage and begin building LF, whereas the person reengaging for example:

*an ele can swap to a different attunement to deal damage/heal or wait for cooldown
*a guardian has his virtues and assuming he isn’t about to use RF or die he won’t just roll over his keyboard and use them all at once
*Mes can come back and use two damage skills, daze, or become nearly invincible
*Thief has steal to easily reengage without blowing initiative and gain access to a fear

The necromancer is forced into the long haul, yet other classes that disengage have the advantage in the attrition fight because with no one around we can’t prepare for it, and our “offensive mitigation” that isn’t DS is also countered by their “defensive mitigation”.

I’m unsure of what their vision of the DS is supposed to be. They want it to be our damage sponge of sorts, yet give it decent offense (DS #1, #3 w/ terror, #4, #5), while the offense required in obtaining DS and while in it is countered by defensive mitigation. They don’t want us to be very mobile, so why not rework DS and give us the tools to defend while in DS?

My idea for DS as a defensive mechanic

Remove requiring LF to access it
This helps necros surviving the long fight (you want us to be built for attrition, right?). Bare with me here.
Increase DS recharge to 20-30 seconds
Start at 100% health once entering DS
The big part: LF becomes like Adrenaline to a warrior, used to power a defensive skill in DS

DS with no life force is still accessible as a damage sponge that still degens over time and with enough damage can be forced out of it, making it like a much weaker mist form, however becomes more useful with life force. For example, a new bar:

DS1 Sacrifice 10% of normal health, gain 25% LF. Cooldown: 5 seconds
DS2 Requirement = 10% life foce. Effect: 4 second AoE (180 range) weakness + blind. Cooldown: 10 seconds
DS3 Requirement = 25% life force. Effect: Chill foes in melee range, then teleport (900 range, gound targeted). Cooldown: 25 seconds
DS4 Requirement = 25% life force. Effect: Gain Vigor and Protection for 5 seconds. Cooldown: 35 seconds
DS5 Requirement= 50-75% Life force. Effect: Become invulnerable for 3-5 seconds (50% giving 3 seconds, 75% giving 5), ends DS after use. Cooldown: 60 seconds

Some of these changes would make necros take longer to kill, but it solves a number of complaints.
*Access to teleport, which makes us more mobile but not even close to thief/mes level, which is how it should be
*Vigor and protection, forms of defensive mitigation
*Invulnerability on a typical cooldown

The bug fix to LF amount/damage taken (how DID they not notice/fix this for so long, considering we had so many threads about it?) generally buffed our survivabiliy a fair amount, firstly because of we can now have a larger buffer, but mainly because it means that all our LF generating abilities effectively generate a lot more LF.

The change to spectral armor combined with the above fix makes it rather good 1v1, but has ended up much worse then the pre patch version against multiple foes because of the new ICD. Spectral walk is now worse off in either case, don’t know why they nerfed it so.

The change to the spectral buffs however have only served to further highlight a serious issue with our ‘attrition’ claim – we cannot deal with focus fire.

While we can tank in a 1v1 situation well enough now, as troll pointed out, we have a lot of offensive mitigation, which for the most part is single target. It is also much easier for for an enemy to block/cleanse offensive mit off of themselves then it is to pull defensive mit off the necro.
The second point is of course that we have rather poor defensive mit (outside of dealing with conditions, where our condi builds can throw them off/eat them rather well).

We need far more defensive mitigation to genuinely claim attrition, as it work against all incoming damage where as offensive mit only reduces certain sources of damage. The old spectral buffs would (roughly) scale with the amount of things attacking you – i.e: the more people attack you, the more LF you get. The new spectral buffs have a ceiling, making them poor for multiple targets. If (for example) the ICD of spectral buffs was on the attacking side (i.e: 3 people attacking you, spectral armor can proc once per second for each of them), it would have a more balanced scaling benefit without worrying about people that attack 20 times per second getting jipped. Of course you might have to change the LF gain or what ever but yeah.

Then there are other obvious points that strike me.
Focus 4 gives regen when it hits friendlies, which doesn’t even work in DS and has a flat benefit, regardless of how much damage you’re taking. Why not a couple of seconds of protection? It actually works in DS and works just as well against multiple enemies as a single one.
Aegis on entering DS as a trait somewhere would create a non ‘exploit’ way of sponging key attacks with good timing.
Let healing effect us in DS – if I’m sitting in DS because two people are trying to kll me, it seems pretty poor design that my friendly neighborhood ele can’t heal me like he would to any other class in the game, and leads to a more dull, independent playstlye – which makes no sense in a team game.

Anet needs to get over their aversion to letting us use boons – you can’t have every other class play around using boons, and then make the necromancer designed around not having them, not when it clearly doesn’t work. We would either end up as we are now (vulnerable to focused fire, decently defensive 1v1), or we would be great defensively 1v1, good under focused fire, and then teams would build around pooping out a million boons for us to make us OP as hell in both situation.

I just don’t understand why it couldn’t stay the way it was before. Pre-patch I was perfectly satisfied with this kind of escape mechanic, talking about WvW (as I’m mainly focused on that).
Sure, jumping off cliffs and thus escaping from enemy zergs may seem a radical solution, but all it did that made us possible to jump out from cheesy situations.
Every other class has not just one, but several valid way when it comes to escaping.
- Thieves have stealth, several gap closers that can be used as openers as well (dagger, sword, shortbow, shadow step) and general high mobility. I might even say it’s ok, it comes with the nature of the class.
- Mesmers have blink as gap opener, portal, invis-mass invis and invuln. via Distortion. I might say ok for that too, for a squishy class like mesmer, it’s needed to have such escape abilities.
- Eles have mist form and generally are one of the most mobile characters. Perma swiftness + dagger offhand = perfect roamer.
- Warriors have several sources of stability, condition cleanse, perma swiftness and greatsword. Needless to explain further.
- Engies have perma swiftness, massive amount of protection, mini
- Rangers have stability, swiftness, leap, generally considered a quite mobile class
- Guardians have stability, block/aegis, leaps. But yeah, Guardians are maybe the least mobile classes amongst the ones I named. They balance it with extreme tank abilities.

Necros had only one way and now it’s taken away from them. Simply because people refused to think and kept repeating the “mantra” that if a character falls from a certain height it should always take damage, no matter what. Just because other classes couldn’t do it, necros shouldn’t either.
Based on the same logic, the whole necro community could start heavily arguing about stealth, blocks, etc. I could keep going on.
Just because something was unique for a class, the rest of the community and thus ANet considered it to be not legit.

Heck, if something, this escape mechanic, we used to have gave even less choice for us. It was only about jumping and that’s it, end of story. No chance to re-engage, to reposition or to shadow enemy zergs, you took the jump and that put an end to the situation.
Compared to this, stealth itself has the opportunity of re-engaging just like the basic high mobility of certain classes and these mechanics have several other advantages compared to that “Kamikaze jump”.

The jump is one nerf, one can get over it.
But then comes the Spectral Armor/Walk + DS combination nerf, which cuts the rope in my case.
Pre-patch it was possible for a necro to mimic some kind of invulnerability with this combination, thus giving us a semi-real damage mitigating method. It was still not perfect – for example against high damage one-hit skills (i.e backstab) it was still not that good (you lost severe amount of LF >> effective HP and you had to rebuild it), but under focused fire from multiple opponents, it did the job.
I don’t even know why thieves in the first place was mad and considered this mechanic to be OP. Just because one-shot stabbers couldn’t shine anymore?
If I may, I’d point out that it required extreme knowledge and situational awareness to use DS for the aforementioned purpose. You had to be perfectly aware of your environment and what your opponent was about to do to catch that second where the Thief couldn’t anymore modify his attack thus resulting in a failed stab. This was not an easy move to pull off.
If this one-hit engagement was “unsuccessful” for the thief, he could still re-engage whenever he felt it safe. LF is burnt, steal the fear from the necro, use it while revealed ends, start from the beginning with now having a serious advantage (no LF on the necro).

But to answer the OP; the fix about the increased damage taken in DS is good when it comes to high damage one-hit skills. Give us back our “homemade” invuln. (i.e. remove the icd from Spectral Walk/Armor) so Death Shroud could once again function as a real defensive mechanic.

(just a short note to “offensive mitigations”: it’s one thing that they could be completely neglected by defensive mitigation skills, but hell, they could even convert them to their advantage, while there is no such thing possible backwards – you can convert a condition to a boon, but you can’t do anything with block/invuln./reflect/aegis/etc.)

Edit: Ah, War pretty much said the same

DS doesnt need to become more defensive, its just they need to balance defensive stats/build with offensive weapons/utilites vs offensive build/stats with defensive weapons/utilites. Like a Zerker guardian with stuff like shelter, renewed, hold the line, etc should be way less tanky than a cleric/soldier/whatever other 2+ defensive stat combo with meditations or spirit weapons (but ofc the soldier/cleric/other should deal only around 1/3 of his damage).
Right now thats not the case, the only effect that is about as viable as permaprotnregen, block, evades, etc is chilling the enemy and vs warriors (and mesmers/engie in some builds) blinding them.