Guild Wars 2

hi,
i always whanted to play a Lifesteeling necro, with the last patch i thought it would have been buffed, but we got trolled, they even write it into the patchnots, they nerft “Bloodthirst” and buffed “vampitic” and “vampiric prezision”, and then they write this note:" bloodthirst is now weeker, but with the buffs to the other traids its the same as before"…wait…what? its the same? so why patching it? if you whant to play Lifeleesh you take it anyway….. -.- what are your thoughs on this? (sry for the spelling)

My guess is that it was all just propaganda to make it look like a lot of time was spent honing the traits when it obviously wasn’t. I mean really its hard to buy that they made all these sweeping changes and…oh guess what it came out the exact same as it was before. Geeze what a coincidence!! In all reality they gave us dps we didn’t need or ask for and now don’t know how to fix survivability issues that have been apparent since day one. I can accept the lack of mobility if we were the attrition class they say we are but DS does not equate to great attrition when everyone has better defensive abilities and can outlast you or just reset the fight at will until they win.

They buffed base values so you didn’t need bloodthirst to have remotely useful values on life siphoning traits, and gave it some more scaling, so they have decent HP/s values.

The real problem with these traits is that they scale best with faster hits per second, meaning there is really weird optimization patterns (locust swarm, drop 4 wells, press the kitten out of 1 with dagger), and ends up with a smaller value than they would have otherwise.

I think they should buff them at base, and then make it once per second, like they did to Spectral Armor, to normalize it. So as long as you are actively hitting you get the siphoning, but no spike cases of getting like 15 procs per second, which ends up meaning all the other times it feels weak because those rare situations would be too strong if they buffed it.

Bhawb.7408:

So as long as you are actively hitting you get the siphoning, but no spike cases of getting like 15 procs per second, which ends up meaning all the other times it feels weak because those rare situations would be too strong if they buffed it.

Or – make those situations more frequent by having vampiric proc off of dot ticks.(Just playing devil’s advocate here, this could escalate quickly.)

It still presents an issue, it only shifts where the most powerful components lie. It would go from optimal situations going from power builds with lots of high AoE ticking capacity over to condition builds, who with things like Dumbfire+terror+poison+bleeding could get (theoretically, obviously) 28 ticks (25 from bleeding + 1 per other stack) per person.

Or specifically get up to 28*5=140 ticks AoE. If anything it’d make the problem even worse, because now the optimal case is even more ridiculous, as an amazing Epidemic is now worth massive healing as well (100 ticks/s with current values would be over 3k HP/s). So we’d end up with vampirics being closer to 10HP per hit.

Vampiric Master shows the best implementation of any of them. It is the most useful of any of them, and is the only one that people consider to support a siphon build. Why? It has a cap, you can only have so many minions, and they attack at a fixed speed. So with that, it has less optimal-case abuse, so the values remain quite high. In turn, it remains a really strong utility, even if you don’t use it at its prime use (its still a decent utility with 2-3 minions, not just 6).

Over all, if you try to a siphon build, your weaker at heals than ever before.
If your doing a support build that accidentally picks up Vampiric, you got a non-noticeable buff.

It’s another ‘fix’ of our lack of attrition by giving us less attrition more damage…
Vamp Master now adds ~75 dam per hit for minions, and you can have your minion damage scale off your gear. The damage is also ‘cheap’ in that it avoids armor or other direct damage stuff.

I think, our death shroud, covers the ‘small splash damage’ nicely.
It’s more ‘big bursts’ we can’t deal with.
I’d love to see a system where, we got more heals the less life we had. Maybe something huge with a long CD.
So, a guess example would be, Transfusion… make it heal us thru death shroud. Prob make it heal more the less max life we had.

Something where we play it on the edge. If we get it right, huge payload. If we stuff it up, we lose all.

I am still hoping for a weapon with melee cleave. Hitting multiple targets at a time will add all those little heals up, especially if you throw down a locust swarm and a couple wells first.

I really have a hard time accepting that its somehow okay that our blood traits are currently useless because they are really hard to balance. Many other mmo’s have had professions with life siphon builds done correctly and there’s no reason it cant be done here as well. Its a simple matter of scaling based on weapon speed. Slower weapons get bigger heals, faster weapons have lower heals but you get more hit on target. For condition mancer you adjust a trait in the condition line that sacrifices on hit heals for a small continuous heal on bleed ticks which are already controlled by the cap. Lower overall damage a bit and you have an attrition/DoT class that necro is supposed to be. I still think what bothers me most is everyone seems to think its ok that we have a trait line and skills that for the most part don’t scale hardly at all with a stat in the game. How would guardians feel if anet just decided “you supposed to be tanky” so no matter if you spec for dps or stack dps gear you get .01 percent of the effect from it…because thats basically what is happening with out siphons.

I dont think anyone believes siphons are ok right now. There are people using them (myself right now included), but while some people like them, they wouldn’t argue with a buff.

I compare it to pre-terror buff, pre-burning buff. Back then terror was fine. It was 700-750 damage per second, and we could at most get a few ticks out of it from a 2 second doom and a 2 second reapers mark every 20-40 seconds. It was good, but not great.

Right now siphons are a little less than fine if you plan optimally around them. The risk is the indestructible bunker, but that in my opinion is a marginal risk. Start small (scale siphon at 2% healing power), and go up from there.

The damage of siphon in my opinion is fine. The healing is what is lacking, when you trait and gear specifically to heal better.

I don’t like the concept of siphoning (in pvp) and hope they will just abandon it and come up with something better. I have never seen siphoning being balanced in any MMO I’ve played. It was either too weak (gw2) or overpowered. And whenever it was overpowered it made the whole pvp experience unbareable and led to the most kittened playstyles.
So I’m pretty ok with it being tied to minions, and minions being cannonfodder in pvp.

the biggest prb is that thex told us it will scale with healing power and power, i tried it: gor 300 HP i got 1 point more heal on vapiric. And theres another big prb: Healing Power scales weak on every class, if thex can fix this LL Necros can build it and be fine, this way they use the heal instead of a lot of vita ot toughness. this way it doesn’t get op

Sepreh.5924:

I am still hoping for a weapon with melee cleave. Hitting multiple targets at a time will add all those little heals up, especially if you throw down a locust swarm and a couple wells first.

Dagger 2 should be AOE imo. I mean what gives, Axe 3 is AOE, Scepter 2 is AOE…why the hell isn’t D2?

Dagger 2 would be nice if it was aoe healing around you as well,but go figgure

Siphoning is supplementary at the moment. “Blood magic” doesn’t really exist in GW2 anymore outside of dagger 2.

According to the art/concept book, Anet actually planned on giving the necromancer skills that sacrificed health for effects, but found it to be too complicated for players. This is probably why blood magic is almost purely limited to siphoning.

Also, Siphoning in it’s current state untraited is OK. If you pick it up as a “last few points” trait it can end up being pretty good. Especially for builds who have a high crit chance. However, blood thirst is pretty garbage. 20% increase to siphoning is about, what, 32 hp (16 damage+16 healing) difference per hit? That equates to less than a single auto attack from most weapons after 15 hits. On the other hand you have passives like the elementalists free health recovery in water attunement that, even if they only spend 3 seconds in water attunement, equates to over 600-800 health recovered passively.

IMO if they reverted improved siphoning back to 50% it would make siphoning a lot better for builds that want to really focus on it. That requires a 15 point commitment into the blood line (for the passive free siphoning and improved siphoning traits) which would bar out all of the current “strong” builds as they would need to sacrifice a grand master trait in another tree for it.

What would make Life Siphon a great ability would be an AOE up to five targets and a heal tick for each target hit. The duration of focus should be decreased too; to be more like A2. This would give me a reason to wear down the #2 key on my KB…I run D/D & D/F and the only reason I would even consider using D2 is if I have someone that is trying to run away from me and all my shiz is on cooldown, including weapon swap.

Making the above modifications to D2 would make dagger more viable for PvE too.

Adding a heal for players in your party or vicinity could be part of Transfusion; so it would work for Life Siphon as well as Life Transfer. That would be nice for groups…a bit of extra healing would make a D/x Necro more valuable than it currently is in a group.