Guild Wars 2

This is a question more for the necromancer community as a whole rather then the devs. Though the devs can read what we have to say. That is always welcome to see what the community thinks about this situation.

So the question. Should we as necromancers be able to access our utility skills while we are using death shroud? This has been something that has been suggested multiple times and its been thrown around quite a bit. And the question is a rather big one. “What about our heal and elite?” some might ask. Would it be too much to give us those in death shroud?

I’m going to give my opinion on the discussion then open the floor to whom ever feels like discussing the topic.

To start us off lets compare us to other professions. Currently the necromancer is the only profession that locks out a major part of our bar by using our mechanic. No other profession does that. Some professions lock out some skills when using their elite but those are generally short lasting and have a major impact on the field. Death shroud will always have an impact for you but their impact can’t be so big it warps the game because of the nature of the mechanic. Because of this the necromancer can only have a total of 5 skills while in death shroud and these skills don’t change. Regardless of your traits. Now I know that the reaper will give us 5 new skills and there will be a time when people can’t predict us so easily but it will soon suffer from the same predictability that the core death shroud currently has. This has been a major problem for the necromancer since its inception. And was even worse earlier in the game’s life due to it only providing 4 skills at the start. (For those who are new to the necromancer tainted shackles was later added and not originally part of our bar.)

But looking at the other end of things, what about our elite and heal? Surely we can’t just disallow us to access those while using death shroud, right? The interesting part about this question is we could. Having both those skills grayed out would mean we would have to leave to benefit from them. Or for the elite it could just force us out of Death shroud when we trigger them. At least for the transformation. But would that be too complicated? would it be counter intuitive to the necromancer and would it be unfriendly to new players? These are a few questions we would have to ask.

So now lets get into the pros and cons of allowing access to our utility in death shroud.

Pros:

• We’ll be able to stunbreak. This is something that plagues the necromancer pretty heavily. With the changes to Foot in the grave this has helped a bit. But this only acts as a way to enter death shroud safely and doesn’t give us safety while in death shroud. If we had access to our utility then we could use a stun break without having to drop our primary mechanic. This would make hard CC less of a hard counter to us even for builds that don’t care to use FitG.

• Signets suddenly become far more useful. The community has wanted to access the passives of signets in Death Shroud for a long time. And its hard to argue that signets are just always worse with the necromancer then other professions. One possibility is that suddenly vampiric signet could become one of our best heals due to the fact that with this change, even without being able to trigger our heal, having the passive heal from this signet could make it a strong choice over consume condition which is and for the foreseeable future will be the default heal.

• More unpredictable game play. With access to our utility it becomes much harder to predict the necromancer’s next move. Suddenly we would have easier access to skills and methods for countering our DS counters.

• Skill combos. Provided we have access to our utility we also gain the ability to combo with it like we have never been able to before. Lets say you use Death’s charge through a Spectral wall and suddenly get chaos armor. Although you can do that now its much easier to see that coming. And you can’t currently do that from a defensive position.

Cons:

• Some traits are really powerful. I doubt it’ll be argued that death perception is one of our strongest traits we have. Some traits might actually become too powerful with this sort of change. Imagine taking the wells or other offensive utility and having each of them become super charged by our traits. This could create an unsettling amount of power creep.

• Why would you want to leave Death shroud? Even though I’ve suggested this change before It becomes abundantly clear that we would lose incentive to be out of death shroud. Before our weapons and utility would provide us with something. But if we get our utility along with all those powerful traits then we will never want to leave the safety of DS.

• Some skills would have to be re-balanced. If we are capable of always being in DS some skills would either need to be nerfed or completely changed while using DS. For example, spectral armor is one of the necromancer’s best stunbreaks. It gives us 8% life force when someone hits us. in Death shroud this could out “heal” the damage we are taking and sometimes it does. We could have this on active and currently its hard to tell if a person in DS has spectral armor up or not. You can look at the UI but thats not intuitive for active game play. Even going further then that spectral grasp’s tell is with the movement animation which isn’t so easy to see with the black shadows covering you while in DS. Which could be a perfect grab for the necromancer plus 15% life force while your opponent would have a much harder time seeing it.

• More work. This would be more of a con for the devs as it would mean re-balancing and retooling of the entire profession. They’d have to go to great lengths to make sure everything worked correctly and that we didn’t get out of hand.

Other:

• On the last note this could open the door for some interesting ideas for future specializations. Weather or not it could be a good thing I’ll leave it up to you guys. The idea of having skills that function differently in Death shroud was a fun one I teased with for a while. Suddenly having access to something like glyphs that have valuable functions both in and out of death shroud could create for very interesting profession design. But it also increases the balance requirement.

• One solution I will suggest that could offset some of the cons would be making the Utility skills have a life force tax while in Death shroud. Meaning that when you use them you burn your shroud through quicker then before. This could could increase the skill cap for a necromancer player as well as create more dynamic game play.

What do you guys think? What are your opinions on the idea of getting utility while in death shroud? What do you think would be good or bad about such a drastic change to us?

Yes gimme utilities in Shroud.

If Shroud is nerfed in any way due to utilities being made available then no thanks.

If utilities are not available then the shroud kit needs to be strong enough to support that.

IMO they should allow SOME utilities to be used and then modify how they work… Like how some utilities cannot be used in water and the ones that can be often change slightly. Doing that would allow for better balancing.

Utility would be great in DS to slightly compensate for the lack of scaling vs more than one target. (Personally that is not that much of a deal for ME, but an argument alot of players have when wishing for fixes/buffs)

Might be a bit too overwhelming for foes in 1v1 though.

At least ,definitely not for Lich/Plague form. That would rip too much.

Noha.3749:

Utility would be great in DS to slightly compensate for the lack of scaling vs more than one target. (Personally that is not that much of a deal for ME, but an argument alot of players have when wishing for fixes/buffs)

Might be a bit too overwhelming for foes in 1v1 though.

At least ,definitely not for Lich/Plague form. That would rip too much.

It honestly boils down to tells and traits on weather or not it would be too much in 1v1. DS doesn’t have easy to see tells. RS does, but DS doesn’t. Traits give massive power buffs while in DS which is more concerning. Lich/Plague can easily be addressed by making them force you out of DS.

I feel like the better compromise is to instead extend the DS skills into the utility slots as well. This way they can design the utility skills specifically for DS instead of trying to balance existing and swappable utilities around DS.

I think we should get utilities in DS. It’s like our own personal kit. We can already use spectrals and go in it (arguably one of the stronger mixes of DS+Utility), and have pets pre-summoned. I don’t think it would be excessively broken to be able to use our utilities.

Not heal though. Maybe they could add a unique DS/RS #6 so it covers our heal. And Transform elites would just disable DS so that’s not a problem either.

And depending on what the #6 is, I wouldn’t be opposed to losing a bit of total LF in return for the access to utilities and #6. Might even be good overall to do that.

xgalaxy.7402:

I feel like the better compromise is to instead extend the DS skills into the utility slots as well. This way they can design the utility skills specifically for DS instead of trying to balance existing and swappable utilities around DS.

If this happened, then they would need an upwards of 10 more skills to make for DS and RS. I personally think the more straightforward answer would be to let us just use our normal utility in deathshroud. That way its less predictable and gives a higher skill ceiling. If we have a static 10 skills in DS, then after someone learns all the tells and counters it makes us almost sitting ducks.

I fully support getting utility skills in DS.

ronpierce.2760:

I think we should get utilities in DS. It’s like our own personal kit. We can already use spectrals and go in it (arguably one of the stronger mixes of DS+Utility), and have pets pre-summoned. I don’t think it would be excessively broken to be able to use our utilities.

Not heal though. Maybe they could add a unique DS/RS #6 so it covers our heal. And Transform elites would just disable DS so that’s not a problem either.

And depending on what the #6 is, I wouldn’t be opposed to losing a bit of total LF in return for the access to utilities and #6. Might even be good overall to do that.

Then what about signet heals? If signet of undeath works in DS, why shouldn’t signet of vampirism. What is your take on that?

Malchior.1928:

ronpierce.2760:

I think we should get utilities in DS. It’s like our own personal kit. We can already use spectrals and go in it (arguably one of the stronger mixes of DS+Utility), and have pets pre-summoned. I don’t think it would be excessively broken to be able to use our utilities.

Not heal though. Maybe they could add a unique DS/RS #6 so it covers our heal. And Transform elites would just disable DS so that’s not a problem either.

And depending on what the #6 is, I wouldn’t be opposed to losing a bit of total LF in return for the access to utilities and #6. Might even be good overall to do that.

Then what about signet heals? If signet of undeath works in DS, why shouldn’t signet of vampirism. What is your take on that?

Two-sided. One, I could see it EASILY becoming very very broken. On the other hand. SoV blows currently… I still think it shouldn’t, we don’t really need to heal ourselves in DS so much as we need our heals/regen/external support to affect us. I’d rather SoV just not be terrible outside of DS/RS. SoU doesn’t maintain your real HP and is slower than other sources of DS/RS life force generation. The problem with making heals 100% work in DS is that they negate any reason to drop shroud. I think it’s good to make the decision to drop shout for a moment’s opportunity to heal. It also makes us more vulnerable to interrupt our heal and burst us, which I also feel is necessary. (Of course, the new Stability move in reaper will make healing much more easy anyways.)

ronpierce.2760:

Malchior.1928:

Then what about signet heals? If signet of undeath works in DS, why shouldn’t signet of vampirism. What is your take on that?

Two-sided. One, I could see it EASILY becoming very very broken. On the other hand. SoV blows currently… I still think it shouldn’t, we don’t really need to heal ourselves in DS so much as we need our heals/regen/external support to affect us. I’d rather SoV just not be terrible outside of DS/RS. SoU doesn’t maintain your real HP and is slower than other sources of DS/RS life force generation. The problem with making heals 100% work in DS is that they negate any reason to drop shroud. I think it’s good to make the decision to drop shout for a moment’s opportunity to heal. It also makes us more vulnerable to interrupt our heal and burst us, which I also feel is necessary. (Of course, the new Stability move in reaper will make healing much more easy anyways.)

No, I mean, if we allow utility signets passives and actives to work in ds, what is your stance on vampirism’s passive working too (if not the active as well).

I think your entire skill-bar should be available to you when in DS (so heal, 3 utilities, elite). It just presents a much better system for playing the Necromancer, you don’t feel like Death Shroud is this entity that separates you from the rest of your build or gameplay, it enhances it and feels cohesive.

Now, obviously there might be issues with balance. That is fine, if it happens then adjust as appropriate including nerfing DS’s LF pool if needed. I don’t see a compelling reason against having the skills though. Your heals could still be interrupted, your abilities all retain the same counterplay they did before, your elite transforms will just bring you out of DS, and any balance concerns can be addressed as they appear.

Bhawb.7408:

I think your entire skill-bar should be available to you when in DS (so heal, 3 utilities, elite). It just presents a much better system for playing the Necromancer, you don’t feel like Death Shroud is this entity that separates you from the rest of your build or gameplay, it enhances it and feels cohesive.

Now, obviously there might be issues with balance. That is fine, if it happens then adjust as appropriate including nerfing DS’s LF pool if needed. I don’t see a compelling reason against having the skills though. Your heals could still be interrupted, your abilities all retain the same counterplay they did before, your elite transforms will just bring you out of DS, and any balance concerns can be addressed as they appear.

I want to make this my sig but its too long haha.

Malchior.1928:

xgalaxy.7402:

I feel like the better compromise is to instead extend the DS skills into the utility slots as well. This way they can design the utility skills specifically for DS instead of trying to balance existing and swappable utilities around DS.

If this happened, then they would need an upwards of 10 more skills to make for DS and RS. I personally think the more straightforward answer would be to let us just use our normal utility in deathshroud. That way its less predictable and gives a higher skill ceiling. If we have a static 10 skills in DS, then after someone learns all the tells and counters it makes us almost sitting ducks.

I fully support getting utility skills in DS.

No actually. Because they would still disallow the heal and elite in DS. So you would only need 6 additional skills for the 3 utility slots with DS + RS each.

So you would rather have 3 extra utilities that probably aren’t that great, than being able to customize your utilities and carry them with you into deathshroud ??

Signet passives at least should benefit DS/RS

Malchior.1928:

So you would rather have 3 extra utilities that probably aren’t that great, than being able to customize your utilities and carry them with you into deathshroud ??

Yes. If it means that they don’t have to rebalance and possibly screw up otherwise working utility skills that are just fine outside of DS. There just isn’t a good way of balancing utility skills that can work both in DS and outside of DS. So just make 3 utility skills designed specifically to work in DS and avoid the balancing effort for all the existing utility skills.

Id just like signet passives to work in DS. And maybe see utility cooldowns with a grayed out effect. I feel like access to utility inside DS might be too much. Especially if Reaper allows permanent lifeforce upkeep inside RS under certain conditions.

No. Never.

Visible cooldown timers above the bar, in place of older endurance bar? Yes.

But save Death Shroud utility slots for DS expansion. If you just put cooldowns there, I will lose all my hope. Better replace Shroud with something else then.

spoj.9672:

Id just like signet passives to work in DS. And maybe see utility cooldowns with a grayed out effect. I feel like access to utility inside DS might be too much. Especially if Reaper allows permanent lifeforce upkeep inside RS under certain conditions.

This is also the possibility of requiring a Life force tax for using your utility skills. So for example it might cost you 5% life force to use a utility while in death shroud. so, yeah you have the option but each time you use a skills cuts your time by that much. This would be great for skilled players and still not be too much for new players to learn and adjust the the way Death shroud currently works.

No i dont even like that idea either. Maybe for a future elite spec which gives you different ways to use lifeforce other than tranforming. Otherwise no thank you.

I dont think having access to our 6-0 skills in DS/RS is necessary but seeing the cooldowns would be a nice QoL change, i definitely would approve.

The only skill we need to have access to while in DS is our Heal Skill. Nothing Else.

If that were possible DS would act as a shield bar and actually protect us. Currently while getting bursted down you have to make a quick decision whether to die trying to cast your heal or pop DS to prolong your death. The current setup is not made for survivability instead its made to prolong your death by how much life force you gain. You have to lose health to gain life force but you can’t gain health while using that life force….. One sided right? (Except for Unholy Sanctuary which is quite bad even if the regen was up while out of DS)

It would give necros the survivability they need and the ability to escape from losing battles like every other class can.

I do think it would be a nice idea to have these skills in DS, as with the reaper spec we will be in it more and more, and for longer periods of time. It may be more interesting if we could use it more fluidly with our utility skills. That said, I am not a huge fan of our elites, outside of the elite granted by reaper.
Lich form is hugely situational, used 1-2 times a pvp match, and yes, it does great damage, but we are also cut off from heal, and the attacks are slow. In pve, its ok, but then again, it cuts us off from our utility skills. Plague is ok, for condi builds when you have support in a one on one, or in pve, it blows because you can’t really do anything with it. Flesh golem is worth the charge, if a pebble is not in its way, or there is anything more than a +.05% grade of a slope.
That said, our utility skills are useful. I just don’t care about our elites, thus, if they don’t function in DS, who cares.
I

Changing DS to give access to utilities in DS would change the balance so it creates a lot of extra work.

Changing DS to show CD status of utilities available out of DS should be easier and would not have much effect on balance and would encorage smarter play.

Yes it they want to us believe and prove it’s not just extra HP with uncontrollable negative trade-offs, it’s not a great problem solver but it definitely is a solver.

Agree with OP’s first two bullets a lot, and Bhawb.

I Feel like those cons arent true.
Death perception is alrdy used with wells, others skills do very little damage, too little info on shouts
Death shroud degenerates over time.
Weapon skills can do more damage and provide different effects than death shroud
spectral armor can alrdy be used like that.

I would say that the animations would be the main problem

I would prefer using our own utilities rather than getting specific death shroud utilities

this is what you need to think about currently when entering or exiting death shroud.
death shroud decay
meaningful weapon skills
healing
utilities skills
death shroud cd
weapon swap

Death shroud will still be complex even if you remove utilities from the list

Tadsoul.6951:

I Feel like those cons arent true.
Death perception is alrdy used with wells, others skills do very little damage, too little info on shouts
Death shroud degenerates over time.
Weapon skills can do more damage and provide different effects than death shroud
spectral armor can alrdy be used like that.

I would say that the animations would be the main problem

I would prefer using our own utilities rather than getting specific death shroud utilities

this is what you need to think about currently when entering or exiting death shroud.
death shroud decay
meaningful weapon skills
healing
utilities skills
death shroud cd
weapon swap

Death shroud will still be complex even if you remove utilities from the list

Having 100% crit chance as opposed to 50% crit chances for each tick of wells or future skills isn’t so much a con as a fact of life for balance. The con comes in when we start seeing balance for these skills which might account for you having that 100% crit chance at all times forcing you to take that trait regardless if you want to or not in order to keep your damage decent.

Also, Spectral armor can’t be used like that. There is a brief window where your opponent can see you enter it without watching your UI. In a 1v1 it might not be as big of a deal as it would be annoying, but in larger fights where you don’t have the necromancer targeted this could become a problem as knowing when to attack and when not to is important.

But what do you think could be some potential cons? Because there are a few. I’m currently trying to view both sides of the issue.

Lily.1935:

Tadsoul.6951:

I Feel like those cons arent true.
Death perception is alrdy used with wells, others skills do very little damage, too little info on shouts
Death shroud degenerates over time.
Weapon skills can do more damage and provide different effects than death shroud
spectral armor can alrdy be used like that.

I would say that the animations would be the main problem

I would prefer using our own utilities rather than getting specific death shroud utilities

this is what you need to think about currently when entering or exiting death shroud.
death shroud decay
meaningful weapon skills
healing
utilities skills
death shroud cd
weapon swap

Death shroud will still be complex even if you remove utilities from the list

Having 100% crit chance as opposed to 50% crit chances for each tick of wells or future skills isn’t so much a con as a fact of life for balance. The con comes in when we start seeing balance for these skills which might account for you having that 100% crit chance at all times forcing you to take that trait regardless if you want to or not in order to keep your damage decent.

Also, Spectral armor can’t be used like that. There is a brief window where your opponent can see you enter it without watching your UI. In a 1v1 it might not be as big of a deal as it would be annoying, but in larger fights where you don’t have the necromancer targeted this could become a problem as knowing when to attack and when not to is important.

But what do you think could be some potential cons? Because there are a few. I’m currently trying to view both sides of the issue.

If they make them weaker because of the mere possibility of having 100% – which is bullkitten btw because #1 only Reapers can get it easily and #2 we can have 100% critchance in shroud even now with the appropriate gear – them giving us our kitten utilities while in DS/RS wouldn’t make that much of a difference, right? Especially if they made it so that heals give LF in Shroud, and Spectral armor gives a few hp instead of LF in Shroud. Like they did with Blighter’s Boon.