I was going to wait to make this post until after I saw the updates. I had most of this written out and I had hoped some of this would change in the upcoming patch but it clearly doesn’t seem that way. So here it is.
Over the years I have criticized the Death shroud for its inability to properly provide us with defense, combos and offense. Death Shroud was advertised as a means to cheat death yet its always felt like wearing a mattress as body armor in a gun fight. Sure the Mattress provides you with some protection. It will slow down a bullet, though to call it effective would be far from the truth. But that really isn’t a fair comparison. Death Shroud does allow you to cushion blows quite a bit in some situations. It’s scaled rather well for 1v1 and even has some extremely powerful traits. But things aren’t always what they seem from an outsider’s perspective. Some might look at us and thing “Two health bars. Thats insane” but don’t see what we have to trade for that.
I’ve touched on the idea of how predictable death shroud can be and how a tenacious player or group could take advantage of the necromancer’s death shroud at the necro’s expense. And I’ll explain how. When you enter death shroud you drop from having 10 active skills available to a total of 5. Right at that moment you are trading down. Now you might think “Well that’s okay, I’m also getting the health bar”. But what you’re missing is that depending on the build the player might not want to use that “health” and would rather save the defenses and just use the skills. Or a player might want the padding but not the skills. In both cases the necromancer player is losing out on something major with little to no pay off for doing so.
Looking back at the skills. Lets look at that. So in death shroud you always have the same 5 skills that look and act the same give or take a few minor differences because of traits. An opponent fighting you only has to account for your 5 skills you have access to while you have to account for their 10-15 assuming they don’t switch skills. They suddenly have a much easier time figuring out what you can do while in death shroud because of your limited skills. While you have to try and figure out what they could do with their 10-15 skills(again not taking kits, transformations, weapon swaps, attunments or what have you into account.). The game to try and out predict your opponent becomes an up hill battle.
It actually gets worse from there. because death shroud is also supposed to be our defensive mechanic as well as a sort of weapon swap it can become painfully predictable when we enter death shroud. So not only are we extremely limited when back into a corner we have to push our selves into death shroud meaning we have less of a chance to survive against skilled foes. We end up only delaying the inevitable.
Necromancer players, myself included, have learned to reflexively enter death shroud when we’re in trouble. Though a few of us have learned to work with other mechanics to defend ourselves in other ways we all eventually have to act on that reflex to enter death shroud. And as I just explained above, we can easily be taken advantage of in this situation.
Even going Further than that the necromancer doesn’t have access to scaling defensive mechanics. Which makes us a sitting duck when fighting in and against organized groups. Some players have learned to target the necromancer to force them into death shroud and back them into a unwinnable situation. Putting the necromancer in downed state quickly tipping the scales in the other team’s favor. Some People have described these situations as the necromancer needing a babysitter in case they run into trouble and they’d be right.
Further issues can be elaborate on through the skills themselves though I don’t want to go into those in this post. As those I believe that deserve their own post. This is focused more on the Mechanic itself. And from what I’ve played and what I’ve seen our profession mechanic is supposed to both be a defensive mechanic and a weapon swap but this just means its worse off at both of these attributes rather than excelling in either or both.