Guild Wars 2

Hey Necroforum, a lot of you might remember me, I got bored with this game but decided to forum lurk and saw the pretty harsh patch notes!

Anyway one thing we’ve all pretty much been disappointed with in regards to the necromancer is life stealing. All those little numbers from the blood magic traitline only make very slight boosts to sustain.

Lately I’ve been playing a lot of Fire Emblem games, a tactical srpg. In many of these games theres one dark magic tome (a book-like weapon for spellcasters) called Nosferatu. It is only usable by Dark Mages/Sorcerers (and shamans/druids which were the same thing in some of the older games) and its a spell that heals the user for half of the damage they inflict.

Why don’t necromancers have something like that? The only lifestealing weapon skill is dagger 2 which is slow and clunky to use, channel skills aren’t fun at all. What if it was replaced with a .5 or .75 cast time 600 ranged life steal skill that does damage in one chunk and heals the user for half of the damage inflicted, instead of scaling off of healing power? It could even be some other skill on a new weapon.

tl;dr-Anyway I think my underlying point is that life steal shouldn’t be some barely noticeable extra numbers on other attacks or a slow clunky channel, but rather tied to decisive attacks that rewards increasing direct damage.

Feel free to agree or disagree.

Some of these effects already exist in the game and generally have trouble working. I think the primary problem is that while they work great in other games (see: Life Steal in League), in GW2 there are so many stall effects that any kind of windowed %damage to life is pretty easily dealt with. On the other hand, having non-windowed life steal could be too “win more” – if you’re able to hit enough to heal, you are dealing enough DPS to win anyway – or too much defense from offense.

Not that it is a bad idea, mind you. I think it would be really interesting to have. But I think it would probably have to be locked behind an Elite spec so that they have more control over the combinations it can have. For example, it could be good to have a “Vampire” shroud, that instead of giving you LF as HP, allowed you some kind of really heavy vamp state.

I do get your point though, even when strong, life steals don’t often feel amazing, especially the trait ones. They just kinda… happen.

I think the main issue with our lifesteals is the scaling and reliance on many small hits.

If I’m running around with middling power and swing my greatsword at someone, I’ll see an ok number, but nothing impressive. If I put on a zerker amulet, str runes, and swing it at someone, I see big, impressive numbers.

If I equip some lifestealing traits, have middling healing power and am stabbing things with my dagger, I see a lot of piddly numbers come in. This doesn’t change if I equip more power or more healing. I see roughly the same numbers coming in.

If I put on my greatsword, a cleric’s amulet, and go hit something, I don’t see a BIG number come in. I see… the same numbers as I had with the dagger, just much less of them. Same if I put on more power. The damage portion of the lifesteal doesn’t become more impressive.

They need to scale better, and they need to match the weapon they’re being used with. If I stack a bunch of healing power, and attack a bunch of times quickly, I should get a decent amount of healing out of that window, in the form of a bunch of heals.

If I stack a bunch of power and healing power, then slam someone with a Gravedigger for a few thousand damage, I should get a big, fat lifesteal damage and healing number popping up.

If I stack a bunch of condi damage, and slap a fat wad of bleeds on a target, I should get some decent level of healing over time rolling in. Or a quality amount of damage added to my dots / or added to the strike of the condi weapon, based on my condi damaage (this last section would require that the lifesteals have dual scaling though or be split between differing traits : /).

This would also help prevent Blood Magic builds from suffering with the dearth of stats available. You could stack power, condi damage, and healing power, be able to sustain yourself and allies, and still do ok damage. And the build has the same effectiveness with any weapon wielded, not just dagger being far and away the best.

Necro life-steals may be weak because shroud is so strong. Players are expected to fully utilize shroud and its skills.

Having Reaper Shroud get nerfed in damage is, I think, at least as significant the nerf to Deathly Chill because every Reaper build benefited from shroud skills. I really like Soul Spiral and now its combo’s are cut in half. I have not checked to see how much damage is impacted, yet, but the nerf saddens me.

At the same time, not having any improvements to Death Shroud feels like a nerf, too. Unyielding Blast could be buffed, at least. It does close to nothing for Death Shroud and could be rolled into Decimate Defenses or Relentless Pursuit.

Life steal is weak in GW2 mainly because if it was strong it would kill PvP by generating unkillable uber necromancers. Changing it into percentage damage is not a good idea either since it would kill stat diversity even more than they are killed atm.

imo, it hurt me to say it but life steal number are somewhat balanced at the moment. Well I’d like them to scale both damage and heal on healing power (and thus with better coefficient) but, I still think that the number are balanced.

I don’t think that the necromancer will have an elite spec heavily focused on life stealing. We may see some traits/skills that feel great in addition of the blood magic but that should be stopped at that.

ex :

- Any main hand weapon auto attack like spatial surge, solar beam, arc lightning, Ice shard_ …etc. would give a lot of depth to the base life stealing ability of blood magic.

- traits that would buff the damage or healing done by the necromancer’s life stealing abilities would still stay in a balancable range.

- trait that grant conditional life stealing abilities (on skill use or something else).

All of these can stay in a balancable range if they ain’t stackable. As soon as there are to much focus on this kind of effect it would become detrimental first to the PvP area and second to the PvE area where these numbers would be laughable (like they are at the moment )

Dadnir.5038:

Life steal is weak in GW2 mainly because if it was strong it would kill PvP by generating unkillable uber necromancers. Changing it into percentage damage is not a good idea either since it would kill stat diversity even more than they are killed atm.

imo, it hurt me to say it but life steal number are somewhat balanced at the moment. Well I’d like them to scale both damage and heal on healing power (and thus with better coefficient) but, I still think that the number are balanced.

I don’t think that the necromancer will have an elite spec heavily focused on life stealing. We may see some traits/skills that feel great in addition of the blood magic but that should be stopped at that.

ex :

- Any main hand weapon auto attack like spatial surge, solar beam, arc lightning, Ice shard_ …etc. would give a lot of depth to the base life stealing ability of blood magic.

- traits that would buff the damage or healing done by the necromancer’s life stealing abilities would still stay in a balancable range.

- trait that grant conditional life stealing abilities (on skill use or something else).

All of these can stay in a balancable range if they ain’t stackable. As soon as there are to much focus on this kind of effect it would become detrimental first to the PvP area and second to the PvE area where these numbers would be laughable (like they are at the moment )

Surely you jest. What if its one moderately hard hitting skill on a 15 second cooldown with a 3/4 cast time that crits for 4-5K tops with a berserker amulet? If you crit that would heal for max of 2.5K health, it wouldn’t be something overpowered and spammable or low cooldown, just a way to incentivize burst builds more by providing a minor sustain incentive.

Yeah traits would have to be rebalanced for sure to make it work.

Anyway back to fire emblem so I can Nosferatu tank everything.