Guild Wars 2

Lots of people believe that Death Shroud is one of the more poorly-designed special class mechanics of the game (at least from what I’ve read on here). Given that, I wanted to see what people’s thoughts are on how it could be made better.

I would encourage you to think as far out of the box as possible and give ideas, whether or not they are already common thoughts. Not necessarily every idea will be viable (obviously) but still good to brainstorm.

These are things I’ve commonly thought of/heard people might like with Death Shroud:

1. A alternate death shroud that allows you to keep using ALL of your normal skills/doesn’t replace anything. A lot of people seem to want access to the life Force pool as additional health – but hate that they have to be stuck with the 5 given skills and no access to utility skills.

2. Another variant that is more productive for those who wish to avoid Death shroud switching on/off altogether. Maybe a set of skills that can consume some percentage of the life force bar for added effect without having to actually transition into shroud.

3. Add more skills. Have like 10-15 different alternatives and allowing people to choose which 5 they want to use to supplement their build rather than either being stuck with the 5 from regular DS or the 5 from RS

4. Utility skills and healing usable in DS, although many people have already pointed this out as you all know.

Those are the biggest ones. Obviously not all of them are viable nor may they even be interesting to some percentage of people, but ideas are ideas.

The part of shroud that is fun for me is the requirement that it be charged like Warrior’s adrenaline. That, alone, makes it a challenging mechanic; no hits, no deaths, no LF. Compare that to elite skills on fixed cool down no one can influence.

Sure, there are interesting skills associated with the transformation but shroud is not flat immunity skill like Blurred Frenzy so it works like an invulnerability duration that scales inverse to the number of opponents.

Option 1, a full profession redesign to have LF do something aside from a transform, is my favorite.

Give us 4 shroud skills (f1 – 4) which consume life force on use, similar in theme to current shroud skills but more useful.
F1: damage/condition skill (ranged for ds, melee for rs).
F2: some sort of gap closer (ground target projectile for ds, instant teleport to foe for rs).
F3: ??
F4: Block enemy attacks with maybe a siphon small amounts of health from those that hit you. Rs stops you from taking damage (like endure pain) instead.

edit: bad grammar

Yeah. I kinda think its a bit boring. Effectively I only use it as a bunker, while my blood minion heals me. Its not that its too weak IMO just that its so boring.

Eneldiar.9670:

1. A alternate death shroud that allows you to keep using ALL of your normal skills/doesn’t replace anything. A lot of people seem to want access to the life Force pool as additional health – but hate that they have to be stuck with the 5 given skills and no access to utility skills.

2. Another variant that is more productive for those who wish to avoid Death shroud switching on/off altogether. Maybe a set of skills that can consume some percentage of the life force bar for added effect without having to actually transition into shroud.

Both of these would be cool for elite specs.

Eneldiar.9670:

3. Add more skills. Have like 10-15 different alternatives and allowing people to choose which 5 they want to use to supplement their build rather than either being stuck with the 5 from regular DS or the 5 from RS

An elite spec does this, Reaper Shroud is just an actually good lineup compared to base Shroud. Give base Shroud more synergetic skills and we are AG.

Eneldiar.9670:

4. Utility skills and healing usable in DS, although many people have already pointed this out as you all know.

An Elite Spec that gets access to Glyphs would be cool as heck.

Death shroud is many things in 1.
-Large absorption shield /reduced damage while in shroud
-“reducing” skills cooldown while safe in shroud
-Different set of skills along with your 2 weapons, can aoe, pierce, fear, torment whatever. And then theres reaper shroud and all the traits that make it a near invincible killing machine
-Shroud builds and life force regeneration technically grants you thousands of “health” regeneration per second.

Idk why those people who you read from think DS “is one of the more poorly-designed special class mechanics of the game”… perhaps they think “gain 30 adrenaline for a single hard hitting attack that can miss” is a much better designed class mechanic?

Eles dont even really have a profession specific mechanics, they just have 10 extra skills for each weapon available on switch (+1 aoe while being tempests)

I agree that shroud isn’t terrible, just boring. Lifeforce should be like Insanity in WoW.

1) Builds from using skills instead of things dying.
2) Increases damage the longer you are in shroud instead of a second life bar. Lifeforce seems like a crutch to not give necro DPS anyways.
3) Depletes significantly faster so it’s a race to use skills to keep it up as long as possible.
4) Can use utility skills in shroud.

Overall, it’s the best of both worlds. A faster more fun class mechanic and a fleshed out transformation instead of a couple spell changes in shadowform. Hopefully it wouldn’t be too difficult to implement.

Thank you all for the ideas and thoughts on the matter.

Like some of you said, I think Reaper Shroud is a vast improvement on the normal Death Shroud. I personally like using RS builds because – like some people said – LF generation essentially counts as added healing and RS1 is much faster than DS1.

I think a big part of the stigma emerges from the fact that many people don’t feel they can use Death Shroud viably within their builds. Many other classes (at least from what I’ve played) can fit their specific “class mechanic” to boost any build they use.

It seems like many Necros – on the other hand – feel that DS and RS are useless to them unless they specifically build that way. Otherwise, all they get is a second health bar with skills that doesn’t fit their playstyle.

You guys think this could have something to do with it?

Eneldiar.9670:

You guys think this could have something to do with it?

Death Shroud, yes. Reaper Shroud, no.

Death Shroud has a middling lineup of skills that require investment to be worthwhile. Doom is okay, and that’s about it.

Reaper Shroud is good out of the box. You can never go wrong with 4 and 5.

I think there are four issues with shroud:
1. It locks out, disables passives, and obscures CD for skills 6 – 0 because it is a transform.
2. It does not scale up in damage mitigation with opponents count like other immunity skills making Necromancer especially susceptible to being focused.
3. It requires charging by hitting, taking hits, or death in addition to an ICD.
4. No other profession has a similar damage mitigation mechanic so balancing it against normal professions in all game modes has proven difficult.