Guild Wars 2

In conquest there are far fewer deaths/kills, and as such the necro traits soul comprehension (life force from kills/deaths), death nova (summon a jagged horror) and reapers onslaught (15% attack speed increase and recharge deaths charge on kill) are kind of underpowered. Can we/should we have them made more powerful for conquest? More life force generated on a death? Summon 2-3 jagged horrors, or they last way longer? All reaper skills are recharged on deaths?

I dont know what the average amount of kills for a player in a game is but it is probably around 5 per game???

Also could/should it be changed so that all of these apply to deaths not just kills (e.g. you can get jagged horrors from team mates being killed??)

Personally I think soul comprehension should just be scrapped and replaced with something else entirely, something that either provides actual survivability/damage mitigation or better life force generation.

Like maybe change it into a trait that gives you 1% life force when hit with a 1 second per target ICD.

That would still be reasonable for a minor trait, while it would help necro’s scaling defenses when being focused in larger fights problem, although it wouldn’t be a true solution.

Or you could just make putrid defense a minior trait for the master tier and replace that trait with a weapon-based trait in the adept tier… in fact there are so many possibilities to remedy death magic.

Death nova I feel is mostly fine, but I feel that the explosion damage is kind of weak. You also forget that theres a CD (15 secs I think) on the jagged horror being summoned, so maybe that should be removed. Personally I usually take corruptor’s fervor for the tankiness when I go death magic, but thats just my personal playstyle.

I can’t really comment on reaper’s onslaught since it was bugged to not work, but we should probably wait to see how good/bad it is during the beta before we make suggestions regarding it.

As for your other suggestions, I feel like they’re pretty sound, but I think part of it the issue is that the death magic tree wants to be a tree about death and getting stronger from the deaths/kills around you (as well as minions since that makes thematic sense too), but due to gameplay design requirements of the larger game its shoehorned into being a “personal survivability through being tankier traitline”, since one traitline has to do that, and I don’t think that synergizes well with the overall theme for getting stronger from deaths around you.

Thats why I only ever go into death magic when I run minions, just because you need necromantic corruption and flesh of the master to make those builds work at all, while the GM trait is a tossup. Shrouded Removal, the minion traits, and corruptor’s fervor are great, but everything else, especially the minor traits and the non-minion master traits don’t really provide meaningful survivability that works well with the death-master theme.

Since the death magic staff traits got merged into soul marks and baselined, there also aren’t any weapon specific traits for the traitline, but since our weapon niches are poorly defined at best (staff on zerker well build in spvp, really?) a rework that creates better niches for exisiting weapons should occur before possibly adding a weapon based trait into death magic, which I think would help it too.

Anyway those are my thoughts, I apologize for getting a bit ranty about death magic, but those thoughts have been boiling for the past few days.

Yeah I’m with near light on this one….maybe move parasitic contagion to replace soul compression? And have it provide like….1% life force for each condition you put on a foe? Eh….no that’d be op….maybe? Sorry I just wanna get parasitic contagion out of the curses line to help give conditionmancers the sustain they need.

Soul Comprehension should just be dumped and us given a new trait, one that gives actual defense. In fact Death Magic needs a bit of work still. It is great for MM builds, but Soul Comprehension, Reaper’s Protection, Unholy Sanctuary, and Corrupter’s Fervor all need some attention.

CF and US conflict too much, I’d really like to see US shifted heavily to a cheat death mechanic, instead of what it is right now which doesn’t honestly fit Death Magic well, its a healing/death shroud focused trait in a line that isn’t the primary line for either of those things. CF is honestly fine I think as is, 300 toughness is a lot, so is 20% reduced damage from conditions, it just conflicts too much.

Reaper’s Protection just doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. We don’t need a counter-CC on a massive CD, we need damage negation so that CC doesn’t affect us in the first place. Give us something like AoE blind on shroud entry.

And Soul Comprehension just needs to go. Make Putrid Defense the minor, or give it some other defensive trait. One thing I used to say was give Death Shroud a poison on entry (maybe weakness too? poison+weakness on shroud entry+ putrid defense at master major) as the adept minor, with Putrid Defense as master minor, but there is a lot they could do. I’d really like to see the traits have synergy though, I love the newer lines which have a lot of synergy among the minors.

I hate “on death” effects. They should be scrapped, since it means for PvE bosses yuou rarely get anything out of it, and in spvp people are avoiding death, so… it might take some time to get the measly effect.