Guild Wars 2

ArenaNet recently stated they will be introducing new skills and traits. Here are some suggestions for skills and traits to complement the Blood Magic line. Keep in mind these are made with an eye towards maintaining balance with the current state of Blood Magic; I’m not going to suggest something so over-the-top OP like 500 Life Siphon per hit that there’s no chance of it ever being implemented:

Boiling Blood or Blood to Life

Type: Blood Magic > Trait > Grandmaster > Major

Effect: All Life Siphoning improved by X% for every Y% below 100% health (I suggest 3% more Life Siphoning for each 1% health loss).

Notes: This may sound OP on paper, but isn’t. Given how low our current Life Siphoning values are, a 3% : 1% ratio is no more OP than the regen that some of the other professions have access to; and that’s without the restriction imposed by this suggestion that the extra sustain comes at the expense of lost health.

Consider a scenario where a necro is reduced to 10% of their health. That’s another way of saying they’ve lost 90% of their health. Using the ratio above, this translates into a 270% improvement in Life Siphoning (90 units of 1% of health have been lost x 3% improved Life Siphoning per 1% of health loss = 270%). A number like 270% looks impressive. When converted to a decimal number, it’s only 2.70.

A necro with Vampiric Precision and Bloodthirst will siphon ~90 health per hit (Vampiric now scales with Healing Power; but not by much). With the scaling factor from above, our necro clinging to life at 10% health will siphon 243 health per hit (90 life siphoned per hit x 2.70 scaling factor = 243 life siphoning per hit). Respectable, but certainly not OP. One good spike would still be enough to overwhelm the necro and send them to defeat as they are hovering around 2,000 to 2,500 health at this point.

Furthermore, as the necro gains health, the amount of life siphoned per hit will start to decrease due to the inverse scaling. That first hit at 10% health remaining would siphon 243 health. In the absence of taking any additional damage, that’s probably enough to boost the necro’s health by ~1%. They would now have a life siphoning multiplier of 2.67 instead of 2.70 (89 units of 1% of health x 3% improved Life Siphoning per 1% of health loss = 267%). The scaling would only decrease from there as they continued to siphon health until they had returned to baseline at 100% health.

If even after taking the inverse scaling limiter into account it’s felt this is still OP, impose an additional limiter of making the multiplier only apply on critical hits. This would balance out all of the other life siphoning traits nicely:

If a necromancer traits Vampiric Precision, Vampiric Master, and Boiling Blood, they gain the advantage of extra life siphoning with each critical but without the benefit of Bloodthirst’s addtional 50% improvement to life siphoning. They compensate by having more sources of life siphoning due to their minions.

If, on the other hand, the minion master traits Bloodthirst to gain the extra 50% boost to life siphoning, they sacrifice Vampiric Precision, reduce their chance to crit, and thus reduce their chance to benefit from Boiling Blood (assuming an additional limiter of Boiling Blood only processing on critical hits). Since Vampiric Master siphons more per hit than Vampiric Precision, I don’t foresee minion masters ever traiting Bloodthirst, Vampiric Precision, and Boiling Blood.

The blood necro purest , by contrast, can trait Bloodthirst, Vampiric Precision, and Boiling Blood. They don’t benefit from having as many sources of life siphoning as the minion master using Vampiric Master, but their siphons will either be 50% more effective or they will benefit from crit life siphons when compared to the minion master. The minion master must forego one of these two options in order to trait Vampiric Master. This maintains balance, build diversity, and the viability of both siphoning minions masters and vampires.

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Blood Feast

Type: Utility Skill.

Cast Time: Instant

Duration: 10 seconds

Recharge: 60 seconds

Radius: 600

Effect: The necromancer is enveloped in a Desecration aura. This aura converts X% (I suggest 10%) of all direct damage on up to 5 enemies within range into healing for the necromancer. Unaffected by life siphon boosting skills or traits (e.g Bloodthirst).

Notes: Straightforward sustain that scales with the number of opponents and the amount of damage the necro and his allies can put out. A best case scenario would be to assume 20,000 points of damage applied to each of 5 enemies within range and within the time limit of 10 seconds. This would translate into 10,000 healing for the necro (20,000 x 5 x 0.10 = 10,000).

Powerful healing, to be sure, under ideal circumstances. Limited by the long recharge, the variability of the number of opponents, and the DPS of the necro and his party,
it’s not really OP. It would more likely heal for ~3,000 every 60 seconds; a reasonable amount that contributes to the necro’s long-term sustain without being over-the-top.

Blood Fury

Type: Blood Magic > Trait > Grandmaster > Minor OR Blood Magic > Trait > Master > Major

Effect: On critical hit, gain X seconds of Fury (I suggest 3 seconds). Internal cool down of Y seconds (I suggest 10 seconds).

Notes: Replaces Blood is Power if it becomes a Blood Magic > Trait > Grandmaster > Minor. Synergizes with high critical hit chance and Vampiric Precision to improve the odds of landing even more criticals. This rewards aggressive play with higher DPS and more life siphoning.

Quickening Thirst or change the name to Blood Frenzy

Type: Blood Magic > Trait > Master > Major

Effect: On critical hit, gain X seconds of Quickness (I suggest 5 seconds). Internal cool down of Y seconds (I suggest 30 seconds).

Notes: As has been suggested elsewhere, merge the current Quickening Thirst with Dagger Mastery. Change Quickening Thirst to the above.

Since the improvement to Signet of the Locust in conjunction with the Swiftness from Spectral Walk to which we’ve always had access, I would hazard a guess that Quickening Thirst sees almost no use. With this suggested change, it makes this trait more attractive; especially in light of dagger being the primary weapon of Blood Mages and faster attacks synergizing well with Life Siphoning.

Despite its lack of an overt penalty, it’s balanced in comparison to the other professions’ Quickness-granting skills by the fact that it has a slightly shorter duration, is not a stun breaker, requires a critical hit to process, and can not be precisely controlled as to when it will activate (unlike the other professions which can cast their Quickness skill at will and at the most opportune moment).

This supports the image of a blood necro slashing away in a mindless frenzy, striking faster and faster as they are overcome with uncontrollable blood lust in an attempt to consume all life around them versus another profession who uses their Quickness skill in a calm, calculated, and reasoned manner.

Ummm… just to give you a heads up, those changes came and went. We got things like dhuumfire and tainted shackles.

Mani, don’t forget they changed Blood Magic, Vamp now works with heals power, to a total +6 if fully geared in it. Oh and dagger CD from 15 to 20% (Like other class’s).

ManiumX.4735:

Ummm… just to give you a heads up, those changes came and went. We got things like dhuumfire and tainted shackles.

From the link I posted above:

New Skill and Traits

We’ll begin regularly adding new skills and traits to the game for each profession to expand your characters and builds! You will be able to earn these new traits and skills by unlocking them. To go along with this, we’ll expand the content and options to earn skill points to help encourage players to experience different challenges and content throughout the world. These skills and traits will be designed to be balanced with the existing skills/traits we currently have in the game, and will simply compliment and expand the range of abilities and tactics available to each profession. Both WvW and PvE players can acquire skills and traits, and additional means of earning skill points will be addressed for both core content areas.

The regular addition of skills and traits that you can earn as you play provides us an extremely stable, easily expandable reward system that fits neatly into the pillars of progression and advancement that Guild Wars 2 are all about. Your character will be able to grow and change for years to come without invalidating everything you’ve earned so far.

Its not like they did that one patch and said “that’s it, game’s perfectly balanced now, we’re done”. They are still going to fix up traits and such, that just happened to be a big patch where they did it for everyone.

Bloodlust

Type: Utility Skill.

Cast Time: Instant

Duration: 60 seconds

Recharge: 120 seconds

Radius: 900 or 1200

Effect: The necromancer is enveloped in an aura. For each foe that dies within the aura’s stated radius, the necromancer gains one stack of bloodlust. Each stack improves life siphoning by X amount (I suggest either 5 points or 10 points). When the duration ends, all stacks of bloodlust are lost.

Notes: First, the name. I realize there is already a sigil named Bloodlust. This skill’s name is just a working title; it would likely need to be changed to something else to avoid confusing it with the sigil. Soul Siphon, perhaps.

The goal here is to improve the necromancer’s sustain though life siphoning by making that siphoning scale up as things die around the necromancer. It rewards playing as an aggressive vampire by increasing a necromancer’s life siphoning the more they invest themselves in the fight.

Stacks of bloodlust can only be gained from an opponent’s death; stacks will not be gained from allies’ deaths nor from ambient critters.

Additional limiters – if it’s felt this skill as written is OP and more are needed on top of the ones already listed – might include:

1) Reducing the amount of life siphoning per stack (from 5 or 10, to 3, perhaps).

2) Giving each stack its own duration. Maybe each stack lasts 15 or 20 seconds.

3) Change the duration and/or recharge rates.

4) Limit the stacks of bloodlust to 25.

Of course, I don’t personally feel more limiters are needed as life siphoning is already lack-luster (with the exception of #4 above). But I mention them in the spirit of trying to remain objective and balanced. If used in a PvE area, I could certainly see a necromancer easily wracking up 50+ stacks against mindless trash mobs; in which case an extra 150 to 500 life siphoning per hit (depending on which scalar is settled on) would certainly be OP. So a stack limiter makes sense.

It’s a skill that is near worthless in 1-vs-1 or small scale sPvP/tPvP fights. However, it would have good utility in PvE and WvWvW.

I’d argue that the Blood Magic tree could be vastly improved in four simple steps.

1) Make Bloodthirst baseline for vampiric traits, and remove it from tier 1.
2) Move Ritual Mastery down from tier 2 to tier 1.
3) Move Vampiric Rituals down from tier 3 to tier 2.
4) Introduce a new 30 point BM trait allowing vampiric siphoning effects to heal health through death shroud.

I think all those changes at once would be too strong, that’d add a lot of potential healing with little investment. But I like the ideas there, regardless.

So I guess the premise is that BM needs to be more attractive, ergo buffs. Generally, I don’t think new complicated skills is the way to go for such things. I think I’d argue the following:

1) Bloodthirst is more or less required for vampiric builds (vampiric precision is an option if you’ve over 40% crit and only going to take one of the two is my understanding). Without it, siphoning is reasonable but not great. Making it baseline might slightly improve siphoning for standard well-based 20 point investments in BM, and make a 15 point investment more attractive.

2) Ritual mastery from tier 1 to tier 2 would promote diversity in non-siphoning wells builds. Likewise, vampiric rituals from tier 3 to tier 2 would provide some diversity in wells builds… my sense is that vampiric rituals as a tier 3 trait is definitely not worth the investment, but it might be attractive in tier 2.

3) So currently, I think I’d argue that the best option for necro bunkering might be MM with a 30 point investment in BM for condition clearing. Giving a 30 point BM siphoning through death shroud would again promote some diversity in necro bunkering possibilities (or bunkering more generally) and power based DS builds. I don’t think it’d be strictly better (30 points in BM is a big investment, if you wanted a DS bunker you’d need 30 points in BM + 30 in SR I’m guessing), but might work well for some applications.

I definitely like the core ideas, I just think that it might turn out to be a bit too much healing if it were implemented straight as is. But they can always tune numbers.

After sleeping on it, I think I might agree. Here you go.

1) Make Bloodthirst baseline for vampiric traits, and remove it from tier 1.
2) Move Ritual Mastery down from tier 2 to tier 1, and move Vampiric Rituals down from tier 3 to tier 2.
3) Move Vampiric Precision up from tier 1 to tier 2. Move Deathly Invigoration down from tier 2 to tier 1.
4) Introduce a new 30 point BM trait allowing vampiric siphoning effects to heal health through death shroud.

So now, the tree is more attractive for wells play that doesn’t involve siphoning; gives a slight utility buff to heavy siphoning users that don’t take the 30 point DS trait (in the form of a adept slot that is now freed up); and has fairly heavily nerfed healing for users that take the 30 points DS trait (they have to choose between siphoning on crits and on wells).

The alternative is to simply give the 30 point DS trait a toggle that reduces siphoning while in DS, but that seems like a kluge.