Guild Wars 2

Last Night, just before recording the lastest GW2 Podcast, Bhawb and I decided to go out and test the Might Stacking Build suggested by Akame.1073. We both went to into the mists and started working with different versions of the build to find the best way to stack as quickly as possible and maximize your damage.

We tried several variations of the build, but the essential thought was to use Life Blast to stack might with BiP and/or Signets give might as offsetting abilities. We discovered some pretty interesting things along the way that really made the testing fun.

Interesting tidbit 1: Signet stacking might is not worth taking the cast time plus low up time causes it to be nothing more than a headache as it prevents you from stacking might effectively.

Interesting tidbit 2: Might can only hit 20 seconds, and since BiP is a short CD. You should use it after coming out of DS to boost your totals and not before going it.

Interesting tidbit 3: Life Blast Might is applied on cast so you have 1 second between each stacks. Since it’s a 15 might stack, you can stack up to 15 stacks with just Life Blast before 1 falls off without any boon duration traits.

We tested several times without boon duration traits and no sigils, if you used 50 percent of your Life Force with no trait for 25 percent you could get to 7 stacks of might every time with 25 percent increase I could get to 9-10 stacks before jumping out. 10 stacks if you went all the way through for both held true with no boon traits.

Bhawb took 30 points in death magic and picked up 2 superior runes of strength and 2 superior runes of fire giving him approximately 70 percent increase in boon duration if it’s additive which we figured it was. He was able to max out at around 15 with a build of 10/0/30/0/30 or any variation of that build with 30 in death magic 15 stacks before jumping out of ds.

We found that if the best option because of how the Might off LF worked is to save BiP until you dropped out of LF to maximize your stacks for a second before they start falling off. I felt you could get more if you really began to gimmick the build.

I picked up 2 runes of Hoelbrak, 2 runes of strength, 2 runes of fire, sigil of superior strength and sigil of superior Accuracy. I then went to 10/15/20/0/25 to max out the amount of buffs and debuffs I could get. Without BiP and these stats I was able to get to 22 stacks if I ran the full duration of LP. I would then wait until it dropped to 15 stacks PoP BiP and be back at 25 before going back into DS and hammering LP.

With the following build:
10/15/20/0/25
I was able to hover between 20-25 stacks of might without ever dropping below that number. Once I got to 25 I could do run to 50 percent pop out dagger hit the guy until I was back up again and keep going.

Myth: You can’t reach 25 stacks of might without doing signets or using BiP on a build

Verdict: Necro’d – it’s completely possible to hit 25 stacks of might with just LP if traited and specced to build might

Viability: In PvE, sure it would even be fun to see how hard I can hit with it. You can also do 25 stacks of vuln with this build as well without breaking a sweat. It’s gimmicky so it’s really only a pve build. In pvp, you can’t really stay on target as long as needed Remember you need the entire chain to get started first.
I wonder how hard it would hit in a dungeon where you got everything rolling, and use BiP to maintain those stacks.

If you have any other tests you would like us to try we would be glad to take a look at some other builds. We will probably be testing minion aggro theories next

You should consider using superior sigil of battle. With it you can maintain 20+ might with BiP without even touching LB. That way you can go hybrid and do extreme bleeds+good base damage (Though bleed duration suffers as you need might duration).

Bas.7406:

Interesting tidbit 2: Might can only hit 20 seconds,

Not sure what you tested for this, but I use a Signet of Battle on my staff and with 10 Points in Death Magic, it lasts 22 seconds.

There is also a Might trigger on the Pirate Runes which I use for farming and that one lasts 30 seconds.

Pendragon.8735:

Bas.7406:

Interesting tidbit 2: Might can only hit 20 seconds,

Not sure what you tested for this, but I use a Signet of Battle on my staff and with 10 Points in Death Magic, it lasts 22 seconds.

There is also a Might trigger on the Pirate Runes which I use for farming and that one lasts 30 seconds.

I think he meant the might from Blood Is Power can only last 20 seconds. I was under the impression that bonus boon duration maxed out at 100% for any given boon, so with BiP’s base duration of 10 seconds, you can’t stretch it past 20 seconds.

There’s definitely sources of Might that last longer.

I’m not entirely certain boon duration is capped though, so don’t quote me on that.

Bas.7406:

Bhawb took 30 points in death magic and picked up 2 superior runes of strength and 2 superior runes of fire giving him approximately 70 percent increase in boon duration if it’s additive which we figured it was.

Add 2 superior runes of Hoelbrak for another 20%, bringing it to total 90% (It makes BiP last around 23½ seconds while having 24 cooldown if traited)

Softspoken.2410:

Pendragon.8735:

Bas.7406:

Interesting tidbit 2: Might can only hit 20 seconds,

Not sure what you tested for this, but I use a Signet of Battle on my staff and with 10 Points in Death Magic, it lasts 22 seconds.

There is also a Might trigger on the Pirate Runes which I use for farming and that one lasts 30 seconds.

I think he meant the might from Blood Is Power can only last 20 seconds. I was under the impression that bonus boon duration maxed out at 100% for any given boon, so with BiP’s base duration of 10 seconds, you can’t stretch it past 20 seconds.

There’s definitely sources of Might that last longer.

I’m not entirely certain boon duration is capped though, so don’t quote me on that.

BiP has base duration of 12 seconds, not 10.

So Necrobusted guys, fancy testing this for us all?

1) Is the amount of HP available at 100% DS equal to our normal HP?

2) What impact does toughness/armour have on direct damage taken?

3) What impact does condition damage (bleeds, burn, poison in particular) have on DS? Does it do double damage, or are ticks rounded to the nearest full %?

That’s what I really want to know.

Targuil.3741:

Softspoken.2410:

I think he meant the might from Blood Is Power can only last 20 seconds. I was under the impression that bonus boon duration maxed out at 100% for any given boon, so with BiP’s base duration of 10 seconds, you can’t stretch it past 20 seconds.

There’s definitely sources of Might that last longer.

I’m not entirely certain boon duration is capped though, so don’t quote me on that.

BiP has base duration of 12 seconds, not 10.

WELP.

(Reasons to look up everything all the time.)

Bas.7406:

Interesting tidbit 3: Life Blast Might is applied on cast so you have 1 second between each stacks. Since it’s a 15 might stack, you can stack up to 15 stacks with just Life Blast before 1 falls off without any boon duration traits.

I don’t know how relevant this is to the rest of your post, but the displayed casting time in the tooltip is just the time of the cast bar. But attacks have an animation following the cast bar before a new cast bar appears. You can test it with a stopwatch, for some moves, it makes the delay much more than the tooltip cast time.

So in this case, there would be more than 1 second between each cast as the next cast doesn’t start immediately after the previous one ends.

SupahSpankeh.8452:

So Necrobusted guys, fancy testing this for us all?

1) Is the amount of HP available at 100% DS equal to our normal HP?

2) What impact does toughness/armour have on direct damage taken?

3) What impact does condition damage (bleeds, burn, poison in particular) have on DS? Does it do double damage, or are ticks rounded to the nearest full %?

That’s what I really want to know.

1) LF is 50-60% of your HP (I’d have to do much more detailed testing to get a more accurate estimate).

2) I’m assuming you mean while in DS. As far as I can see it works exactly the same as when you’re out of deathshroud.

3) People thought conditions did double damage while in DS because they assumed LF = HP, so it makes sense that it appears like that we you know that we have roughly half the LF compared to HP. So yeah, conditions don’t do more in DS.

War Mourner.5168:

SupahSpankeh.8452:

So Necrobusted guys, fancy testing this for us all?

1) Is the amount of HP available at 100% DS equal to our normal HP?

2) What impact does toughness/armour have on direct damage taken?

3) What impact does condition damage (bleeds, burn, poison in particular) have on DS? Does it do double damage, or are ticks rounded to the nearest full %?

That’s what I really want to know.

1) LF is 50-60% of your HP (I’d have to do much more detailed testing to get a more accurate estimate).

2) I’m assuming you mean while in DS. As far as I can see it works exactly the same as when you’re out of deathshroud.

3) People thought conditions did double damage while in DS because they assumed LF = HP, so it makes sense that it appears like that we you know that we have roughly half the LF compared to HP. So yeah, conditions don’t do more in DS.

I’m not doubting you, but I’d like to see some hard tested numbers on this. Many of us have been questioning just what’s going on behind the scenes in DS lately, and it’s just too sketchy to theorycraft on without some hard numbers.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I’m not doubting you, but I’d like to see some hard tested numbers on this. Many of us have been questioning just what’s going on behind the scenes in DS lately, and it’s just too sketchy to theorycraft on without some hard numbers.

Actually, all of this stuff was hard tested months ago (back in october); unfortunately no one cared.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Death-Shroud-HP-Pool

Assuming that the results from then are still valid (there is nothing in the patch notes to suggest it wouldn’t, but you never know):
1) Full DS-HP is 120% of your normal HP
2) The same as out of death shroud, not including the 4% (3%) loss per second which is affected by neither vitality, toughness or +life force %
3) It deals double damage while in DS (this includes agony afaik tell)

I’ll try to repeat this experiment somewhere next week to confirm that nothing has changed since then.

if you want 95% acurate DH health pool :
get some friends : a 100 blade / dubble axe warr (zerker)
a mesmer
a gardian
& last but not least a necro
get into the mist with team comp warr, masmer, guardian on one team; necro in the other. Get a stopwatch & a recording software.Necro should build up LF & then get bashed by the warr (war 100 blades + axe ww under the effect of sig of rage + quicknes + guardian boons + masmer speed bost should make minced meat out of necros LF in no time )

Now all this burst should mitigate LF % decay, still with the watch you can get the exsact timing to include the decay in your calculation. While the warr record his bursting on the necro LF to 0 you just calculate the dmg recived in the recording.
Repeating the proces as much as posible will grant you a decent average sum of your life force. That should be it.

the average LF decay in % = cross calculation : 1sec = 4% (3%) (average time to burst Lf to 0 ) = x %

(average warr dmg) miltiplied by( the average LF decay in %) = actual dacay number in LF unit

& the amount of LF in total is (average warr dmg)+(actual decay number in LF unit)

that should be it.

You can also try diferent specs & geat sets to see how those actually effect the LF & dng recived.

Have someone use a single attack on you in pvp, make it something with a visible cast. Go into DS, take the hit, leave DS. It’s quite easy to do that fast enough to get no degen. Look in the combat log to see how much it did, and compare that to the percentage lost.

A single hit from some random npc in wvw did 1466 damage, and did 11% of my life force – that’s with 30 in soul reaping. You do the rest.

Pendragon.8735:

Bas.7406:

Interesting tidbit 2: Might can only hit 20 seconds,

Not sure what you tested for this, but I use a Signet of Battle on my staff and with 10 Points in Death Magic, it lasts 22 seconds.

There is also a Might trigger on the Pirate Runes which I use for farming and that one lasts 30 seconds.

Totally my fault, on this one. The max duration, I could see is 20 seconds. It does last longer in certain instances. BiP was the only one I could see, and with 80 percent boon duration it was at 20 seconds.

@targuil, The problem with sigil of battle is it requires weapon swapping every ten seconds to be effective since I am in Death shroud that’s not possible. Plus over a period of time sigil of superior strength can surpass sigil of battle.

I ran with 80 percent duration using sigil of hotel talk, strength, and fire. And only 20 in death magic. The difference between 80 and 90 percent on Reaping is still only one second there is no need to do the extra 10 percent because of casting time.

@haley For sake of argument the Life blast has a ver short CD. When casting and immediately dropping out of Death shroud, with no boon duration benefits I had 14 seconds left by the time I could see the boon so if there is a delay its minimal at best.
However when I went the full time in ds I can stack 14 without the sigil or boon duration. I would need to test how many I Life blast I casted in order to figure out the difference.

My point was to figure out how to stack 25 as efficiently as possible. So if you waited to use BiP until you dropped to 15 seconds, you would have be able to maintain 20 to 25 stacks as long as the fight continued.

Given the varied responses, I think it merits a refresher in analytics.

Bas?

Bas.7406:

@targuil, The problem with sigil of battle is it requires weapon swapping every ten seconds to be effective since I am in Death shroud that’s not possible. Plus over a period of time sigil of superior strength can surpass sigil of battle.

Since last patch there have been reports of leaving Death Shroud proccing “On Swap” sigils. I’ve not personally tested, but if true could make Sigil of Battle more usable (Depending on how long you’re in DS for)

Bas.7406:

@haley For sake of argument the Life blast has a ver short CD.

The delay between Life Blasts is enough to make a Life Blast cast once every 1.15 seconds. Not quite every one second, but the delay adds up when trying to stack Might and/or Vulnerability.

Might stacking in general is very overrated by the community. The basic math just doesn’t work out. It’s better to stack traditional stats.

Bas.7406:

@targuil, The problem with sigil of battle is it requires weapon swapping every ten seconds to be effective since I am in Death shroud that’s not possible. Plus over a period of time sigil of superior strength can surpass sigil of battle.

I ran with 80 percent duration using sigil of hotel talk, strength, and fire. And only 20 in death magic. The difference between 80 and 90 percent on Reaping is still only one second there is no need to do the extra 10 percent because of casting time.

Fair enough, might not be useful enough for power based might stacking. For condition/hybrid might stacker it might be better as they swap more often anyway.

Over a period of time, lets say we have 0 boon duration as it doesnt really matter over a period of time. Superior sigil of battle, when swapped every 10 seconds, maintains 6 mights permanently(3 might for 20 seconds per swap) . Superior sigil of strength has 2 seconds proc cooldown, but lets assume it procs as soon as possible, providing 5 permanent might stacks (1 might for 10 seconds per proc). If you add boon duration however, sigil of strength will get to its maximum stacks in shorter time than battle (20seconds vs 30 seconds with 100% boon duration)

Akame.1073:

if you want 95% acurate DH health pool : …

The method that I used to calculate it, and that is explained in the link that I posted, was already more accurate than this. And more controlled and only requires you (1 necro). Feel free to falsify it…

War Mourner.5168:

Have someone use a single attack on you in pvp, make it something with a visible cast. Go into DS, take the hit, leave DS. It’s quite easy to do that fast enough to get no degen. Look in the combat log to see how much it did, and compare that to the percentage lost.

A single hit from some random npc in wvw did 1466 damage, and did 11% of my life force – that’s with 30 in soul reaping. You do the rest.

Several problems with that:

• In all the tests I’ve done, I have never seen a case where damage in DS is not applied on the tick, so no it’s actually impossible to do it fast enough to get no degen.
• For that matter, the first tick largely coincides with the transition-animation to DS, which makes it feel a lot shorter than other ticks. So it’s actually entirely possible that you even had 2 ticks in that case.
• You haven’t told us if you were using Vital Persistence, kind of crucial.
• You haven’t told us what your hp is, kind of crucial as well.
• With these small numbers, the impact of the rounding in the figure that the game displays will huge, so you’ll end up a very large error in the DS-HP you calculate.

For this test, 19541 HP, 30 soul reaping, and the number I gave was after accounting for degen. Because we do know for a fact that soul reaping bonus is a flat % bonus, without soulreaping that would mean I would have 10262.51313 LF, which is 52.5%, give or take a little due to rounding on the LF percentage.

Edit2: Additionally, the seigerazor buff increases my health by 21%, that is to say, my regular health is 79% of the buffed health, but this increased the LF pool, turning 100% LF to 79% full, so it’s safe to say that there is a direct/linear relationship between LF and hp.

Edit 3: It was supposed to be 10%, not 11%, so I’ll be generous and say 1500 was 10% to keep it simple, and making it a slightly more generous 59%, although anet will probably have it set at a neater point, like 55% or 60% or something.

Since the “How much health does your life force equate to question” is still here (yay!) I wanted to point out that the thread Arvid gave, while great, predates the fix to Soul Reaping that made it actually yield bonus life force. I highly suspect the way calculations work have changed since then, since the numbers I’ve gotten with personal testing aren’t getting my life force damage mitigation anywhere close to 120% of my regular HP.

What if instead of it being 120% of your regular hp and conditions doing double damage, conditions always took the correct amount of life force, but direct damage was taking too little…?

Edit: With some minor testing, I’d guess the base pool is equivalent to 60% of your health, with direct and condition damage behaving normally. 30 points in soul reaping increases it to 1.3 * 60% = 78% of your health.

Here’s one of my last tests:
I have 30 points in soul reaping, and a health pool of 22,372. (Heart of the Mists, a few runes and 30 points in Blood Magic)

Cast spinal shivers on Thief sparring NPC, then immediately go into Death Shroud from 100%. This time I took 8421 in direct damage before using doom and dropping out of death shroud (doom is just so I know where to stop counting in the combat log) and run away. As I drop death shroud, I also check the recharge on spinal shivers. In this case, it was still showing 10 seconds to recharge. I chose to interpret this as anywhere from 9 – 11 ticks of degeneration, to allow for error in timing / observing. I also had 13% life force remaining.

So I lost 36-44% life force to time degen (Vital Persistence not equipped) which means I lost 43-51% of my life force to 8,421 direct damage. So my life force pool is anywhere from 16,512-19,584 hp (against direct damage).

So my life force pool is equivalent to anywhere from 73-88% of my base health. Removing the bonus from Soul Reaping, I got a base pool equivalent to somewhere within the range of 56-67% of my regular health.

For all of these, I believe the true answer to be close to the middle of the range (assuming 10 degeneration ticks) which is why I believe the basic pool provided by death shroud to be equivalent to around 60% of your health.

War Mourner.5168:

Go into DS, take the hit, leave DS. It’s quite easy to do that fast enough to get no degen.

War Mourner.5168:

… and the number I gave was after accounting for degen.

So you accounted for the degen that was supposedly not there? 0.o

War Mourner.5168:

A single hit from some random npc in wvw did 1466 damage, and did 11% of my life force

War Mourner.5168:

Edit 3: It was supposed to be 10%, not 11%, so I’ll be generous and say 1500 was 10% to keep it simple…

Recap: I spend a full day screencapturing myself and subsequently analysing every file. Finetuning the damage I take to multiples of the natural degeneration. Doing this finetuning to damage differences caused by single(!) stat points. Doing this for 3 different ‘damage sources’ (bonfire which is direct damage+condition damage, bleeding from blood is power and poison from corrupt boon). I come to the conclusion that doubling the condition part (not my finding at all btw, just confirming what others had found before) of all 3 cases yields the same effective DS-HP for all 3 (very very close to 120% of my real HP).

And then months later, this is supposed to be the counter to that? Not, hey I repeated what you did but I get something different? Not, hey I think your method is wrong because…? Not, hey I think the last patch changed something? But THIS? Are you kitten serious?

Softspoken.2410:

Since the “How much health does your life force equate to question” is still here (yay!) I wanted to point out that the thread Arvid gave, while great, predates the fix to Soul Reaping that made it actually yield bonus life force. I highly suspect the way calculations work have changed since then, since the numbers I’ve gotten with personal testing aren’t getting my life force damage mitigation anywhere close to 120% of my regular HP.

What if instead of it being 120% of your regular hp and conditions doing double damage, conditions always took the correct amount of life force, but direct damage was taking too little…?

Glad you actually looked at it.
As I’ve mentioned then also: I encourage everyone to try and repeat this to see if they get similar results. I’m perfectly willing to accept that the patch that fixed Soul Reaping and/or Gluttony have somehow altered this (given that someone actually ‘proves’ it in a solid way). It’s why I will also try to repeat it next week.

I had assumed for a long time that DS was somewhere around 100% HP as well, I don’t know if it was changed or if it’s always been like this, but someone pointed it outto me recently when I quoted your thread, I then tested it myself and found that it agreed with his point that LF is close to half your HP.

I went into DS long enough that I took a single tick of degen because he said that the first tick happened so fast. I did this repeatedly to make sure it I was getting a single tick of degen and only a single hit.

Believe me, I’d be happy to find that LF was 120% of HP, I just think that it no longer is, or never was.

I’ve found vulnerability stacking to have better results than might stacking for WvW, given that you cant share your might.

SupahSpankeh.8452:

So Necrobusted guys, fancy testing this for us all?

1) Is the amount of HP available at 100% DS equal to our normal HP?

2) What impact does toughness/armour have on direct damage taken?

3) What impact does condition damage (bleeds, burn, poison in particular) have on DS? Does it do double damage, or are ticks rounded to the nearest full %?

1) There was a huge thread awhile back on the mathematics behind Deathshroud because people had figured out Soul Reaping was doing nothing for DS. After the eventual patch fix we worked out DS-HP is 120% of your max health + soul reaping or;

(Max Health x 1.2) x 1.SR
SR referring to your Soul Reaping points

A ungeared Necromancer with 30 points in soul reaping for example;

(18,372 × 1.2) x 1.3 = 28,660 DS-HP

2) I’m not sure on the specifics of Toughness to Damage Reduction, however this site seems to have the formula down. You can play around with your Toughness levels to get the right %

3) All conditions deal double damage whilst your in Deathshroud, on top of the natural -4% / -3% /sec deduction.

I went into SPvP to test this. I got to full Life force off my thief friend, I then went into DS, where he backstabbed me (also did an autoattack chain by accident). You can see exactly how much damage he did, 8352 damage exactly. This took him about one second, so a tick or two of degen, yet it brought me down to 43% life force.

I had 25k HP here – if I had 1.2 LF for every HP, then I should have 30k LF, give or take a little, yet 8352 damage does not strike me to be 50% of 30k.

I don’t know if they changed it, but it’s certainly not x1.2 HP now.

Nice Testing Warhorn, you will have to start a thread called Necrobusting: DF and it’s 1.2 Myth

This is why I wanted it re-testing.

I’ve been a necro since BWE 1 and recently I’ve felt a bit squishier in DS. Hard to put my finger on it.

Thank you War Mourner, now can we test my questions in-depth? Specifically impact of condition damage and impact of vit/toughness on DS HP and mitigation?

Also, kitten ANet and their pointless kittening kitteny QA process. Kitten them all, the useless kittens.

The toughness thing is very easy to prove (I’m almost certain it uses your toughness normally though), just go into pvp, and get a friend with a steady weapon, and to poke you with it while you’re in DS, and without. If the hits do a different amount of damage in DS or out (keeping in minds crits, so best to have a low crit chance) then we know there is some sort of armor scaling.
Conditions should be just as easy, get a friend to put a single bleed/poison/burn on you, then go into DS. If the damage tick they see increases, then we know it does more in DS. Also probably best to check with the same condition applied while you’re in DS, just to make certain there isn’t some odd thing like it only doing more if it was applied in DS.

Indeed, easy enough to test, but I was hoping the chaps who said “If you have any other tests you would like us to try we would be glad to take a look at some other builds. We will probably be testing minion aggro theories next” might pick up the testing and do a cast or something on it.

I’m not even sure DS HP scales at this point. I’ve gto 28khp, but I lost approx 45% of my DS HP to 6k damage

I know when you add HP your DS meter goes down, which hints it does work, but in my hasty tests I’ve found it to be the same amount of HP.

SupahSpankeh.8452:

Indeed, easy enough to test, but I was hoping the chaps who said “If you have any other tests you would like us to try we would be glad to take a look at some other builds. We will probably be testing minion aggro theories next” might pick up the testing and do a cast or something on it.

I’m not even sure DS HP scales at this point. I’ve gto 28khp, but I lost approx 45% of my DS HP to 6k damage

I know when you add HP your DS meter goes down, which hints it does work, but in my hasty tests I’ve found it to be the same amount of HP.

Haha, I will see what I can do. Recording is new to me so I will do what I can

All we can ask is that you try

OK so toughness works normally (steady weapon doing 44 damage to me in and out of DS), conditions are a little trickier because even they guy casting conditions can’t see the ticks while you’re in DS, but I see no reason why they would do double damage, but I’m sure people can properly test it if they wish.

So can someone explain to me where this 120% HP in DS figure is coming from? My testing didn’t come anywhere near this, and was more in line with the 60% figure. The only indication 120% HP is given when going into DS, is based on the fall damage you take in DS.

So the idea is you get 120% HP, but then take double damage from every attack/condition while in DS?

Also here is a stupid question, but why doesn’t the DS tree just increase the DS bar up to 130%? And degenerate from there at 3/4% per second? The UI already shows a pecentage.

I am okay with the idea that DS is only 60% of my normal HP pool if that is the case, but that is a far cry from a full extra life bar.

To be fair they never said it was a ‘full extra life bar’ (that I know of, wouldn’t be surprised if they did actually), but you’ll looking at the whole ’130% LF thing the wrong way.

130% would mean you could withstand more degen sure, but by having it the way it is now means that since all LF gain is percentage based, you gain more LF then someone without investment in soul reaping in terms of exact numbers, and frankly I never stay in DS long enough to be terribly worried about degen anyway.

Also I’m not terribly upset about it being 60% – if damage bleed through DS into HP, then I would be upset.

How would having the bar display 130% be a bad thing? If I do an attack that generates 3% life force, it would still go from 50-53% or 103-106%…. And wouldn’t the point of investing into the DS tree for your DS tree to be better than someone who didn’t? I would much prefer 130% DS, to 100% DS, that is 30% bigger.

It would take longer to fill your bar up, and each point of life force generated would represent less total health in DS, but counteractiving 8-10 seconds longer of degeneration would be better in my opinion. I guess that is up for debate, and would not be “better”, if you were a power based build that survived off LF generation.

And the full extra life bar comment was directed at everyone who says that in general, not anet specifically… You are correct in that they have never officially stated anything on DS as far as I know.

I also very rarely stay in DS long enough to even care about more than 1-2 ticks of degen, but in PVE, using it to build might and DPS structures is not bad.

I’ve done some more tests and reported my findings in the other thread

Oh? How kind of you.