Guild Wars 2

How come the scepter 1 skill does not build life force? As a condition necromancer I would really enjoy it if the scepter 1 skill provided a % of life force so I could switch in and out of death shroud more often. Just an idea I would like to see in future patches. The damage from codnition mancers is not the greatest and I think this would add to their survivability.

Nah thats a bad idea…1st scepter 3 gives lf. 2nd condimancers have nice survivability, both because of traits and rabid gear and 3rd, ds for condimancer isnt so important, life blast damage is low. The important ds skills for condimancers have a big cooldown (2,3,5)

Scepter 3 gives you 3% plus 8% per condition on the enemy. If you follow a scepter 1 chain with scepter 2 and then scepter 3, you get 27% lf. 35%, if you add a dagger 5. You’d think that’s enough to reliably generate lf.

Ravenmaster.4657:

Scepter 3 gives you 3% plus 8% per condition on the enemy. If you follow a scepter 1 chain with scepter 2 and then scepter 3, you get 27% lf. 35%, if you add a dagger 5. You’d think that’s enough to reliably generate lf.

except that your numbers are wrong.

it gives 3% LF and 8% additional direct damage per unique condition. so a scepter1-chain + scepter2 gives 3*3%=9%LF. If you add dagger 5, its 12%.

Beacuse it’s our auto attack.. if and I mean IF we make it so it also gives us life force.. it’ll have to be 1% and no higher.. But as we have scepter 3 giving us 3% (which is a lot when you look at it at 80) as well as a signet plus.. axe and focus giving us 3% as well.. we already have a lot of things that give us life force in a short amount of time.
If you only use scepter then the 3 skill should be enough as you wont be in melee range anyway.

RashanDale.3609:

it gives 3% LF and 8% additional direct damage per unique condition. so a scepter1-chain + scepter2 gives 3*3%=9%LF. If you add dagger 5, its 12%.

Wow, that’s actually pretty bad. I always thought it was 8% per condi. I guess OP has a point then, lf generation on scepter could use a buff.

It will be interesting to see what they do with lf generation. I think scepter is decent for lf regen. Staff is lacking and I find that soul marks is way more useful than master of terror.

no… no it shouldnt

LF from scepter is very poor, especially in comparison to axe. It needs a boost on #3 or add LF gen on #1 or 2.

As for scepter1 being an auto-attack, so what? Staff1 auto-attack gives LF.

And ANet recently acknowledged that our LF generation was poor. To wit, recall these recent LF boosts on 7/23, which left out scepter:

Shadow Fiend—Haunt: When this attack hits an enemy, it will grant the necromancer 10% of their life force.
Ghastly Claws: The total life force granted from this skill has been increased from 10% to 12%.
Spectral Armor: Incoming hits now grant 8% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown.
Spectral Walk: Incoming hits now grant 2% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown. This spectral skill now grants life force while Spectral Armor is active.
Spectral Grasp: This skill now grants 15% life force (up from 10%).

There’s this thing called build diversity. Death Shroud as it is seems to be aimed more at power builds, especially if used as offensive tool. That seems to be the reason power-focused weapons (axe, mainhand dagger, focus) provide improved life force generation.
Considering that dagger autoattack only adds life force generation and axe auto only stacks vulnerability, then scepter auto already seems to have its effect going.

So I’d say no to that. Leave something to poor powermancers, too.

EDIT: Changed my mind. You can have life force generation if you give me boon conversion on dagger auto.

The real problem is that it is arguably (I would at least) our best weapon.

Life force generation is terrible, but you could always take warhorn or focus, which are much better at generation than dagger in the offhand slot.

If you give it good LF generation, you take away all incentive to deviate from the standard setup, which we already have almost no incentive to deviate from in the first place.

First things firts: scepter is a condition weapon, and its main purpose is for condition builds. Having this in mind, i think its life force generation is fine. First, because scepter 3 generates life force on number of conditions, you can get a lot out of it. We have access to quite a big number of conditions: bleeding, poison, burning, chilled, cripple, vulnerability, torment, fear, weakness, blind and confusion (runes of perplexity). Even if you dont have all of them all the time, as a condition necro you should have around 4~5 of them all the time. This means you should get 12%~15% life force on a 10s cooldown, which isnt that bad. If you go with signet of spite, than you should easily have 7~9 conditions (just add chilled from staff, confusion and burn procs), which would give you 21%~27% (on a 60s cooldown)

As a condition necromancer, you probably wont sit in death shroud for long, since it actually hurts your dps. DS#1 and DS#2 are really bad without power, so you probably will use DS#5, DS#4, DS#3, maybe absorb a few hits and then get out. This shouldnt use more than 30% of your life force, and since DS#3 has a 20 second cooldown, you can use scepter#3 twice to completely restore your DS before entering it again.

We also can easily generate life force with spectral skills and Curses’s Spectral Attunement Trait. Just by using spectral walk to move faster and spectral wall just for its DS recharge, i easily am in full DS all the time.

If scepter’s Auto Attack also had life force generation, it would be the weapon to rule them all. Its already the best weapon for conditions, and it would simply destroy build diversity if anything else was added to it.

I believe even the devs have admitted that several weapon sets still lack strong enough LF generation, and Scepter is definitely one.

However, putting LF on the auto-attack would probably be a bit too easy and lazy. Maybe if only the 3rd attack, Putrid Curse, added some LF, 3-5% or so, it would be a solution, as it would require you to finish the chain and make a little more effort to get it.