Guild Wars 2

For years the primary defensive mechanic of the necromancer has been shroud. Shroud is useful in many ways from dealing damage to soaking up damage. Now the Scourge will not have shroud. The defensive mechanic for the Scourge will be barrier.

If you look at it, a single Scourge can apply a base barrier of 2.4k on themselves and those around them or their sand shades. Now think about if you have two or more Scourge on a team. If they used Sand Cascade (apply barrier) at the same time each Scourge could end up with huge barriers. In the case of five Scourge on a team, each could have about 12k barrier. That’s just a barrier spike instance. With proper rotations between different Scourge on the same team, this amounts to a lot of sustained defensive capability.

On a side note, I love the idea of barrier as a defensive mechanic. Blocks, evades, invulns work great for preventing direct damage and applications of new conditions, but do not prevent damage ticks from current conditions. Conditions will tick on Barrier before getting to your health pool. I think that this alone will help to balance power and condition damage. Granted, we will find out when we get to play around with PoF.

Anyway, tell me your thoughts.

Barrier would be nice, if the other team couldn’t just cc spam or kite you till it wore off. As it seems at the moment, there’s nothing that I see that would prevent the scourge from melting under focus fire, which they will receive, outside of a very, very good pilot and team. And a team of 5 scourges in pvp will either get picked off 1 by 1 or just get used as ping-pong balls, or both. Unless you’re in a lower division in which case, headless chickens move with more purpose. On paper at least, in practice, we’ll have to wait and see.

I just used a five man team of Scourge as an example. The point that I was trying to make is that the Scourge will be able to apply barrier very easily, Sand Cascade only has an eight second cooldown. When there are multiple Scourge, that barrier access and application only increases.

Some classes are very stackable in PvP, DH being a prime example. With some classes you only want one maybe two, Thief for this category. Scourge will definitely put necromancer in the stackable category.

Also, I tend to die most from melting from conditions than from power damage. Seeing an additional mechanic that will help mitigate condi damage is pretty cool.

Fair enough, though I don’t think you’d want more than maybe 2 scourges in your team. Remember, barrier has a cap on it and if 1 can already maintain it, what’s the point of a 2nd?

Additionally, most of the damage that scourge brings is dependent on the foe having boons. If they’re fighting someone who can hold back their boon fart, or get rid of their boons (spellbreaker), they have very little pressure.

We still have to see how this will all play out, scourges have the potential to go either way from what we know of them. For all we know the boon farters will just instantly die to punishments and ppl will complain that scourge too op, then we get heavy handed nerfs followed by half-baked buffs that end up turning us into a decent power spec.

I didn’t know that there was a cap on barrier. Do you know what the cap is?

Jakal.9582:

I didn’t know that there was a cap on barrier. Do you know what the cap is?

I believe the cap is half the total hp. Though I could be wrong.

Helly.2597:

Jakal.9582:

I didn’t know that there was a cap on barrier. Do you know what the cap is?

I believe the cap is half the total hp. Though I could be wrong.

You would be correct. Cap is 1/2 max health.

Okay, thanks. Still, having a barrier up to half your health pool is pretty nice. Most of my characters have a health pool anywhere between 16k – 24k. So that would be a max barrier of 8-12k.

oh and an additional note, the damage of scourges will come from applying torment by corrupting boons, having more than 1 scourge in your team will force them to compete against each other to stack their torment unless the target(s) have constant boon application. This doesn’t take into account any boon hate the other people in the team may already have. On top of this, the opponent team should already know to cut down on their boons when a scourge is present so 2 scourges may end up being redundant, and 1 is still a sitting duck.

oh and an additional note, the damage of scourges will come from applying torment by corrupting boons

not really. You’ll get more from dhuumfire and using F skills than you would corrupting boons with utility skills.

Assuming they the scourge takes the demonic lore trait, the damage of torment on moving foes will be comparable to that of burning. Plus it’s more accessible than burning, assuming your target has boons. Though we still have yet to see how often a scourge can proc dhuumfire, so we’ll have to see when it comes.