Guild Wars 2

I just read a post of a player that inspired me a bit. What if, INSTEAD of having a pre-set skill bar in DS, we could choose skills we want to be put there. The skills we would have at our disposal should be healing skills that restore our actual HP, blocks, evades, immune states and mobility skills which would enable us to get out of combat if really needed and give us other ways to maintain ourselves other than just soaking the damage in until the LF pool is eaten which happens quickly.. We should also get special deathshroud traits and so on. The skills should cost life force but to make up for the fact that we’re loosing LF as we take damage AND from using skills, LF should be easier to get and we should get a bigger pool. This is a thing that just came to my mind, but it seems like it would work to me. If this was to be fixed and condis were buffed again, I’d love to be back to necro. Would love to hear some feedback.

Having a select-able DS bar would be really cool, but don’t expect it to be vastly different than what we have now (it presents more balancing, because they have to balance each DS combination with each possible weapon/utility/trait combination).

It wouldn’t innately solve anything though, any more than them fixing our trait system. My issue with DS is much more that it can’t really be defensively boosted, despite being our major defensive utility. It stems from a general lack of any kind of viable defensive options. We don’t have truly defensive weapons (whereas almost every class has at least defensive off-hands), we have very limited defensive utility skills (spectral armor, mainly), and defensive traiting is massively lacking.

Also, barring minions and very few abilities, the only working defenses we have are entirely related to condition application; applications which can be dodged, and conditions which can then be nullified afterwards, all while being strictly weaker per-second than standard defensive options. No one else has to put up with that.

It’s kind of maddening that Death Shroud was originally intended to make you stronger based on how much life force you have (Life Blast did more damage with higher life force) but then there were never any abilities added that directly use life force as a resource. What’s even more maddening is that the “corruption” traits are kind of based around damaging yourself to give yourself more power. I think it makes perfect sense to have it so that Death Shroud-related abilities cost life force to cast instead of having them all tied together to Death Shroud itself. Having these life force-specific abilities set to be selectable like utility abilities would be interesting, but no other profession has a customizable profession mechanic bar yet. I still think it would be a great change, but we’re still waiting for even a small change, let alone a major mechanic change.

amiavamp.9785:

but no other profession has a customizable profession mechanic bar yet.

What about ranger?

i will just be happy if our #1 DS skill gets affected by condition damage as it is affected by power and if toughness affect DS will be great (if its not doing it already)