Guild Wars 2

In today’s livestream, it was revealed that all drain abilities have been buffed, and to compensate, Bloodthirst has been reduced to 20%. It’s more or less been 3/5s baked into the class, which is a good thing. However, I don’t know whether the trait will really be strong enough to justify itself now; 20% extra healing from a specific avenue of healing seems a bit weak for a Major trait.

Dagger traits are already pretty unpopular, and as it stands, they’re very expensive- 3 major traits to grab everything (Quickening Thirst, Bloodthirst, Dagger Mastery) seems like quite a bit. Anyone else think that the traits could use a bit of squeezing together? Stickytaping new Bloodthirst together with either of the other traits could make D/D quite a bit more appealing.

Thoughts?

I probably won’t take it anymore if the base values have been upped to compensate, I feel like the new Transfusion trait is so amazing I’m going to be hard-pressed to not want it instead.

That said, I still think it’ll be a valid option for full-siphon builds, ones that want to be a bit more selfish. I agree it might warrant some kind of buffing/consolidation with other traits though.

New Transfusion does look solid for MM, and between it and Bloodthirst you do get something of a choice; either keep the minions up for longer or get more healing while they’re alive.

I personally am strongly considering taking Mark of Evasion in my MM build; I think consistent personal regeneration while not using staff will offer more overall survivability than Bloodthirst while still giving minions a helping hand on health. I’m struggling to think of a build that will strongly benefit from Bloodthirst other than the most hardcore tanky build, and even then, there are stronger options in Blood Magic.

I am hoping the change has been done with long term goals in mind and that the long term goal is to provide a weapon with melee cleave that is geared towards a tanky life siphon build and can take advantage of vampiric adding up multiple small heals from cleaved targets

Full-siphon builds. Ones that push out high precision, along with wells-siphon and vampiric precision. Selfish builds that don’t care about team healing, but more about self-healing.

And I’ve been using Mark of Evasion for a while now. As long as you don’t have staff and focus its really nice to keep up permanent regen.

Will it allow siphons that are useful, and the ability to click & flip traits when you join a group & be a support? Will your siphons only work if your minions are alive, and you have the choice to either minion support to keep them alive OR have siphons keep you alive? Will there be a MM, in heals & condi gear, that works as attrition? (Non burst condi, but damage over time, chills, poison, ya know slow the fight down, to slowly win) Or will the synergy still only work properly in Pow/Pre/Heals gear that isn’t in the game? Will my brain bleed out my ears before the patch even get’s released?

I’m afraid this will be nerf if the numbers they’ve stated are correct. They said something about buffing the base “steal” to 80% of previous Bloodthirst numbers(150%) and nerfing Bloodthirst to 20%. This would mean our new steal % will be @ 1.5 * 0.8 * 1.2 = 1.44 or 144%. I find this quite sad as I quite liked the idea of stealing health and the likes.

The way I understood stealing was that it dealt a flat “damage” no matter how much toughness or protection the target had so whenever I went into DS and used Life Transfer with the on-crit + on-hit steal with a 100% crit chance I’d be dealing about 900 additional damage. I also liked the effects of stealing combined with our wells and our Axe 2 and Dagger 2 for such a silly amount of numbers popping up due to bleeds proccing from 5 pt in Curses and so on.

a) Transfusion and DI were ok even before in selfish use, allowing builds that want additional sustain but not go a full out siphon build, it unlocked a new slot
b) Shenhua if you mean across all 5 targets then yeah you got about 0.9~1k bonus damage

As of now, Bloodthirst as an adept trait makes no sense at all anymore. They should switch it with Vampiric (actually a long time ago).

DD wont be appealing for bloodlust, i create more hits with wells than crits or hits with dagger.
Besides i would thing siphon will be broken with the update..

But i have my gear for siphon ready and we shall see

One thing to remember is that Siphoning will now be scaling with Power and Healing power in regards to how much damage is dealt and how much healing is given. What remains to be seen is whether or not this bonus is calculated before the 20% bonus given by the trait. If the dev’s felt free to drop the bonus to 20%, it’s likely that the bonus damage and healing from attributes will scale pretty nicely, and we will likely end up with having that 20% actually be noticeable. It’s purely conjecture at this point, but 20% of what will likely amount to a large increase life drain outside of the already base increase should be pretty sweet.

Andele.1306:

b) Shenhua if you mean across all 5 targets then yeah you got about 0.9~1k bonus damage

Hm, what I meant was that my Vampiric(on-hit) deals 42 damage and Vampiric Precision(on-crit) deals 50 damage. This means every crit deals an additional 92 damage. Since I have almost 100% chance to crit in Death Shroud and the 4th Death Shroud skill hits 9 times it will do about 900 damage more on each target.

Oh, and I think they added scaling to our siphons a couple of patches ago. It’s not huge, but it’s definitely there.

The ‘scaling’ is an absolute joke on everything except transfusion, that one is amazing. Vampiric, with a full set of exotic healing gear goes up…(drumroll) 5 points. Vampiric Master is a little better but only goes up 25 points. /sadpanda

Well at least it’s something.

Isn’t the healing scaling 0.01% with a 20% nurf to base?
Also wasn’t base a total joke before? Haven’t I seen the devs in interview laugh and say, oh yeh it’s totally useless. Wasn’kitten.01% our max life to a good ‘peak’ of 0.1% per second with fastest weap & minions helping out? Isn’t it now a huge trait cost for 1/4th the heals per hit that other class’s get without a trait cost? (Tho better in some ways than the 1/8th it was)