Guild Wars 2

I’m not really expecting an answer, but at least the question might cause it to get brought up in the office. Will Signet of Vampirism be made to work in RS when you’re working to make our siphon skills work better with our defensive mechanic? As it stands, outside of PVE bosses because of damage (not healing), SoV heals for less than Healing Signet IF struck every 1 second on the dot. If both parts of the heal were made to work in RS however, it would have its own unique use as an attrition based heal, rather than a burst heal.

So my question is, will signets, specifically SoV be made to work in DS/RS and will the healing effect us, coupled with the other blood magic/siphoning changes?

I really hope all leeching skill/rune/sigil/trait will work in DS/RS.

As for SoV, it hard to say it will work since it is the current general rule that all Utility is turn off during DS/RS. Well unless they are willing to change this rule to some extend.

Siva Mira.3546:

I really hope all leeching skill/rune/sigil/trait will work in DS/RS.

As for SoV, it hard to say it will work since it is the current general rule that all Utility is turn off during DS/RS. Well unless they are willing to change this rule to some extend.

Yeah, I realize some rules would have to change, but that’s why I bring it up now. SoV is somewhat of a centerpiece to a vampiric build, and is otherwise not very powerful as an actual heal outside of static PVE situations, it could be a cool way to bump vampiric bunks and maybe give them something to use other than Consume conditons 100% of the time.

All utilities should anyway.

Personally, i doubt it. Arenanet is extremely careful about limiting synergy with profession mechanics.

I’m actually pretty curious what kind of siphon are going to work in ds, imagine sov, us, siphons, vamp aura combined with the new gs siphon… and then maybe blood and leeching sigils will work through ds too?

Flumek.9043:

Is this easyautopilot class subforum?

No, so dont expect having basic things.

NeXeD.3042:

I’m actually pretty curious what kind of siphon are going to work in ds, imagine sov, us, siphons, vamp aura combined with the new gs siphon… and then maybe blood and leeching sigils will work through ds too?

Probably only the bloodmagic siphons and maybe the gs siphon if it even works with RS at all.

I dont think food, sigils, runes etc. will work in DS/RS.

This is not just a question of whether or not this specific skill is going to work in our Shrouds, but it rather ties into the whole debate about how Death Shroud conflicts with a lot of our skills and traits.

Although, Signet of Vampirism is definitely a nice example to showcase some gray-areas in regards to how some people only want to see a few traits to work in DS/RS, as opposed to the only solution that really makes sense: unrestricted access to all sources of healing.

First of all, Vamp Signet is a signet, and currently the necro is the only class that doesn’t get permanent access to their signet’s passive effects. This is a big issue, a design flaw, and there is no reason why our class mechanic should have this type of restriction.

Secondly, Vamp signet is a healing skill.
Now, I know there are some people who think anything beyond just vampiric traits would be outragiously overpowered. They couldn’t be more wrong of course, but for the sake of the argument let’s pretend we have the same opinion on the matter and then assume that we’re getting a “signets’ passives work in Shrouds”-fix for all signets.
The big question: What would this mean for healing in general if this included the passive of Vamp Signet? Shouldn’t the same privelege be extended to its active as well? What about Blood Fiend or Well of Blood? If so, would this include the traited Well of Blood from Ritual of Life? If this trait is allowed, how about other healing traits like Spiteful Renewal, Signet Mastery and Parasitic Contagion? What about traits that give you regeneration like Full of Life or Mark of Evasion? If Mark of Evasion is allowed to heal you in Shroud with regeneration, what about a regular Mark of Blood? What about regeneration applied by allies? What about other sources of healing applied by allies? What about other weapon skills that trigger finishers with dark fields, like a Necrotic Grasp that lands a hit after you go into Shroud? What about the Reaper’s whirl finisher, Soul Spiral? What about sigils, runes or food buffs?

Anyway, no healing in Shroud means one defensive mechanic stands in conflict with another, that is just bad design, nothing more. And drawing the line somewhere between nothing and unrestricted healing in Shroud makes no sense if you really think it through because it would inevitably create double standards.
Allowing all sources of healing to work through Shrouds is really the only consequent thing to do here, so allowing Signet of Vampirism to work with RS/DS would just be a side product of this general fix to our core mechanic.

Pretty sure people who have been saying no to “all healing in death shroud” but have been advocating siphons have been saying “all traits that heal you and Regeneration”

If Mark of Evasion heals you, all Regeneration boons should heal you.

What you just outlined, flow, is a great example of the steps that can be taken by ANet in giving us more and more healing in death shroud.

Personally, and not to speak for anyone else, I’d take a significant drop in total LF (upward 20%) if they unrestricted healing so I could be properly supported by allies and all of my mechanics work in unison. Even if they had to rework some of the leeches or toy with the numbers so allowing it wasn’t OP. I just want the class to stop having so many hidden rules and allow us to play with the full unique potential Necromancer has. It has the ability to be a greatly unique class in terms of fighting with and fighting against, but it gets held back by fear of being “OP” when the answer is simple. Design first, balance second…

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

If Mark of Evasion heals you, all Regeneration boons should heal you.

Naturally.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Pretty sure people who have been saying no to “all healing in death shroud” but have been advocating siphons have been saying “all traits that heal you and Regeneration”

I believe there’s quite a big spread of where people draw the line.

In your case, that would exclude our main healing skills, dark field finishers, food, sigils, runes and other sources of ally healing.
So my question would then be, why allow traits + 1 boon (even if it comes from someone else) but non of the above? Doesn’t your choice of gear or food buffs contribute just as much to your build as a healing trait? Would you really allow Soul Spiral to have one type of combo field that it just doesn’t work with? And why should healing skills other than Consume Conditions not get a chance to reach their full potential when them not working in Shroud is the main reason why they aren’t used by any type of build?
Also, you know my position on ally healing, there’s just no reason to discriminate against necros in this way when every other class has no such restriction when they use their (superior) defensive mechanics, in addition to having better sustain than us in the first place.

ronpierce.2760:

Personally, and not to speak for anyone else, I’d take a significant drop in total LF (upward 20%) if they unrestricted healing so I could be properly supported by allies and all of my mechanics work in unison. Even if they had to rework some of the leeches or toy with the numbers so allowing it wasn’t OP. I just want the class to stop having so many hidden rules and allow us to play with the full unique potential Necromancer has. It has the ability to be a greatly unique class in terms of fighting with and fighting against, but it gets held back by fear of being “OP” when the answer is simple. Design first, balance second…

I completely agree.
And one of the things they need to fix is that 50% damage reduction in DS. So once they do that they’d have to rebalance our life force pool anyway.

With the proposed specialization changes coming up, I am more in favor of all-out healing, but I still think the best course is adding it in piecemeal. The only real issue with that stance is ANet’s absolutely glacial balance pacing, but it would make sure we get into the best spot possible. It is possible for us to get too much sustain.

As for healing in DS/RS, I think Anet is trying to do something about it or at least they are fixing BloodMagic line. We know that they let siphons work in DS/RS and we should also assume that Deathly Invigoration will also heal you. But I hope Anet fix everything about healing while in DS/RS. They can go with either:
1- Healing will heal LF instead
2- Healing will heal 50% to LF and 50% to HP

Back to the topic about SoV, I think letting Necro using Utility while in DS/RS will break us more than it fix us because people will QQ about it and end up getting undeserved nerf. But I could see letting Signet Mastery allow us to maintain passive while in DS/RS, like Written in Stone.

P.S. I see people say Necro takes half damage while in DS, is this true.

Siva Mira.3546:

But I could see letting Signet Mastery allow us to maintain passive while in DS/RS, like Written in Stone.

I don’t think this fix should be tied to a trait.

Siva Mira.3546:

P.S. I see people say Necro takes half damage while in DS, is this true.

The original assumption was that our life force pool is 120% of our regular hp. Then (sept 2013) we got an actual number on our lf bar which revealed that overflowing damage to our regular health pool would substract the correct amount of damage from our life force as well. And that just makes it more likely that we have a damage reduction in DS rather than an incorrectly displayed number on our lf bar. But essentially you might as well assume that whatever number of life force you see is actually double.

How has signet of vampirism not been buffed yet? Like seriously. It is healing signet which only works if you get hit, which removes the whole point of using it. It is totally terrible. The worst heal in game probably. Seriously everything they add to necro is garbage. The new grandmaster traits were the same.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

With the proposed specialization changes coming up, I am more in favor of all-out healing, but I still think the best course is adding it in piecemeal. The only real issue with that stance is ANet’s absolutely glacial balance pacing, but it would make sure we get into the best spot possible. It is possible for us to get too much sustain.

I want them to do it piece by piece as well, I would rather it take a little while to buff so we don’t get the nerfstick for being op.

To simplify healing in DS, why not start with a flat 2 per cent healing factor for all external heals while in DS?

Being able to drop DS in time for an external heal should be fully rewarded but not making it in time should have a small per cent consolation instead of zero. Siphon heals can be separate but, for a class mechanic the dev’s want players to spend a lot of time in, they sure punish those players for it.

I always thought like a healing bank (call it what you want) that absorbs all healing you take in DS then heals that much over say 5-10 seconds when you leave DS would be really cool. Baseline, of course and still allows ample counterplay if they are close to death when entering DS a d exiting.

I’m one of those people that wouldn’t like to see much more than siphons work in DS/RS unless there’s a rework to RS/DS with much less LF available, but more LF gain.

The simple fact is with high healing power and no restrictions, one could achieve a 450+ tick SoV, plus a 300 tick Unholy Sanctuary, plus a 300 tick Regeneration, plus 300ish (scaling?) now and then healing from Blighers’ Boon (which helps with LF gain too). That would be 1050-1350 health ticks while in RS while being hit and gaining boons. Not counting any siphons, possible siphon cleave with RS AA and third party healing.

Just imagine a Power Reaper using just Soul Reaping or Blood Magic, Death Magic and Reaper traits with power, healing and toughness stats. Then add in decimate defenses for crit chance. You would have a walking tank with crazy effective healing (25% possible damage reduction from Putrid Defense and Cold Shoulder alone, while 33% reduction from exiting DS, and then added toughness/DS reduction). As long as you maintained about 25%-50% LF gain every 7-10 seconds and/or stayed in DS more than 4-5 seconds, you would have the equivalent of a full heal every 10 seconds (or 7 with Speed of Shadows) while taking no damage to normal health for the same time periods. All while criting almost on par with DPS builds w/o ferocity if you also maintain vulnerability stacks.

Even if you only count SoV passive + Unholy Sanctuary, that’s still 750 × 4 or 5 seconds = 3000-3750 healing every DS/RS pop. Without using the active and assuming you’re hit every second over 30 seconds, that’s 13500 healing from SoV alone and about 3000 from Unholy Sanctuary for 16500 healing without actually using any healing skills or regeneration. Thenwhatever you absorbed from using DS/RS all the time or if you stayed in DS/RS a lot longer than 4-5 seconds at a time.

So yeah not too much healing can be allowed in DS/RS than we already have for balance reasons. Not even SoV probably (as much as I would love it). If we want all incoming healing to give positive effects in DS/RS, they need to reduce effective healing on normal heals while in them. Or make normal heals affect LF bar on a % base while in DS/RS or something like the alternatives suggested above.

Balekai.6083:

The simple fact is with high healing power and no restrictions, one could achieve a 450+ tick SoV, plus a 300 tick Unholy Sanctuary, plus a 300 tick Regeneration, plus 300ish (scaling?) now and then healing from Blighers’ Boon (which helps with LF gain too). That would be 1050-1350 health ticks while in RS while being hit and gaining boons. Not counting any siphons, possible siphon cleave with RS AA and third party healing.
…
SoV passive + Unholy Sanctuary, that’s still 750 × 4 or 5 seconds = 3000-3750 healing every DS/RS pop. Without using the active and assuming you’re hit every second over 30 seconds, that’s 13500 healing from SoV alone and about 3000 from Unholy Sanctuary for 16500 healing without actually using any healing skills or regeneration.

First of all, you can’t get that much healing power, not in PvP anyway.
And even if it was possible, what you’re calculating here is the most rediculous outlier of the worst build ever.

Balekai.6083:

Just imagine a Power Reaper using just Soul Reaping or Blood Magic, Death Magic and Reaper traits with power, healing and toughness stats. Then add in decimate defenses for crit chance. You would have a walking tank with crazy effective healing (25% possible damage reduction from Putrid Defense and Cold Shoulder alone, while 33% reduction from exiting DS, and then added toughness/DS reduction). As long as you maintained about 25%-50% LF gain every 7-10 seconds and/or stayed in DS more than 4-5 seconds, you would have the equivalent of a full heal every 10 seconds (or 7 with Speed of Shadows) while taking no damage to normal health for the same time periods. All while criting almost on par with DPS builds w/o ferocity if you also maintain vulnerability stacks.

Yeah… no.
This might look good to you on paper, but this build sucks and you would die just as easily as other necros. And your damage would be nothing compared to zerker builds, you don’t have the same power, no ferocity and all you get to boost crit chance is 2% for vuln but you don’t have Spite. You’d actually be better off taking another master Reaper trait instead.
Anyway, all you’re doing here is trying to dump as much as possible into healing in Shroud. Even if that build wasn’t terrible and if it was actually producing the results you’re imagining it would, why shouldn’t this kind of investment be rewarded? Why shouldn’t the one class that really has nothing but high hp to defend themselves get the best healing if they choose to give up that much damage for it?

flow.6043:

/snip

The first part is just to show how ridiculous all healing in DS would be, just from our own sources. It’s easy to get similar numbers in the 250ish range with lower healing power and still just as effective and OP regen.

The Reaper build was stated to be very tanky while “criting almost on par with DPS builds w/o ferocity if you also maintain vulnerability stacks.” (as in, not zerkers). I would arguably take Chilling Force myself for the extra LF gain + Might, but Death Spiral on Greatsword alone applies 12 stacks of Vuln for 10 seconds, on a 10 second CD, in a 170 range melee cone in front of you. That’s at least 24 crit chance right there and 2% LF if you connect (or is it LF per hit?). Well of Suffering, “Nothing Can Save You!” and Death Perception can make up for the rest of your vuln stacks or crit chance.

Of course you could just build DPS, take SoV and have 325 base passive from it and 130 from Unholy Sactuary if you still take DM. That would still be considerable regen for nearly no effort while in DS/RS.

Being able to regen 1/4 to 1/3 of you’re health within 4-5 every 10 seconds, without using a healing skill and without taking damage to your real health is a big deal and not just on paper.

- LF bar is much easier to refill than normal health, period. You also effectively take 50% less damage while inside DS/RS naturally. With proper LF management you can enter DS fairly easy every 10 seconds with at least 10% LF for 2-5+ seconds of uptime.

- Any health over time healed while in DS is 100% effective in relation to your real health bar. Not like other classes or a Necro outside of DS, where you have health per second being negated by damage per second.

So when you’re in DS/RS your net healing per second is truly the numbers you see. If you heal 3000 health it’s 3000 health, plus all damage negated/absorbed by DS. Not 3000 over x seconds negated by 2600 damage over the same time period.

Although we like to dump on DS a lot for very good reasons (Lackluster LF gain and our LF Bar becoming far less effective vs multiple DPS sources), it tends to work well in low number fights. The above would technically be the equivalent of having 4-5 seconds of invulnerability while healing 3-6ishK health every 10 seconds vs. one or two players. Especially when you take into account the 25% damage reduction from poison/chill we don’t have yet and 33% damage reduction on exiting DS with DM and Reaper traits. With that amount of damage reduction a lot of DPS will be disappearing against us Necros compared to now.

Before any healing in DS, the mechanic fell utterly flat because no healing meant that at some point, you wouldn’t have enough time/health to self heal, regain LF or renter DS before someone killed you. That time was usually about 15-45 seconds into any fight or 1-3 DS pops. Pretty much the opposite of attrition. The more DS healing we get, the more LF gain we get and the easier it becomes to last those 10 seconds in between, the better our sustain becomes… by a lot. If Anet allows too much healing in DS that we regen way more effective health/LF than we take effective damage in 10-15 seconds spurts, then there’s gonna be issues with balance.

The trick is finding the sweet spot. There’s a difference between reward and just menacingly OP. One tends to have more maniacal laughter and QQs than the other. :p

Honestly, I think we’re about to see a paradigm shift in how necromancer is played.

With Blighter’s Boon and siphons working in DS, we’re going to go from just using DS for offense, soaking damage and prolonging the inevitable, to using it as a recovery tool.

I can see, unless all the numbers are absolutely pitiful when it comes out of the box, necromancers ensuring that DS is always available when the enemies burst is, tanking their sustained damage on their regular health bar and then restoring that relatively small amount during DS, which takes the big spikes because it’s more easily replenished.

Which is an interesting playstyle, I think, and will maybe turn Death Shroud into the thing it was meant to be. Especially since it’s got our strongest offensive capabilities, so we have to make the judgement call, not leaving ourselves too open because we decided to burn some LF and our shroud cooldown on cranking out some numbers, but also wanting to not play tooooo defensively.

I’m getting a little ramble-y.

Balekai.6083:

flow.6043:

/snip

The first part is just to show how ridiculous all healing in DS would be, just from our own sources. It’s easy to get similar numbers in the 250ish range with lower healing power and still just as effective and OP regen.

The Reaper build was stated to be very tanky while “criting almost on par with DPS builds w/o ferocity if you also maintain vulnerability stacks.” (as in, not zerkers). I would arguably take Chilling Force myself for the extra LF gain + Might, but Death Spiral on Greatsword alone applies 12 stacks of Vuln for 10 seconds, on a 10 second CD, in a 170 range melee cone in front of you. That’s at least 24 crit chance right there and 2% LF if you connect (or is it LF per hit?). Well of Suffering, “Nothing Can Save You!” and Death Perception can make up for the rest of your vuln stacks or crit chance.

Of course you could just build DPS, take SoV and have 325 base passive from it and 130 from Unholy Sactuary if you still take DM. That would still be considerable regen for nearly no effort while in DS/RS.

Being able to regen 1/4 to 1/3 of you’re health within 4-5 every 10 seconds, without using a healing skill and without taking damage to your real health is a big deal and not just on paper.

- LF bar is much easier to refill than normal health, period. You also effectively take 50% less damage while inside DS/RS naturally. With proper LF management you can enter DS fairly easy every 10 seconds with at least 10% LF for 2-5+ seconds of uptime.

- Any health over time healed while in DS is 100% effective in relation to your real health bar. Not like other classes or a Necro outside of DS, where you have health per second being negated by damage per second.

So when you’re in DS/RS your net healing per second is truly the numbers you see. If you heal 3000 health it’s 3000 health, plus all damage negated/absorbed by DS. Not 3000 over x seconds negated by 2600 damage over the same time period.

Although we like to dump on DS a lot for very good reasons (Lackluster LF gain and our LF Bar becoming far less effective vs multiple DPS sources), it tends to work well in low number fights. The above would technically be the equivalent of having 4-5 seconds of invulnerability while healing 3-6ishK health every 10 seconds vs. one or two players. Especially when you take into account the 25% damage reduction from poison/chill we don’t have yet and 33% damage reduction on exiting DS with DM and Reaper traits. With that amount of damage reduction a lot of DPS will be disappearing against us Necros compared to now.

Before any healing in DS, the mechanic fell utterly flat because no healing meant that at some point, you wouldn’t have enough time/health to self heal, regain LF or renter DS before someone killed you. That time was usually about 15-45 seconds into any fight or 1-3 DS pops. Pretty much the opposite of attrition. The more DS healing we get, the more LF gain we get and the easier it becomes to last those 10 seconds in between, the better our sustain becomes… by a lot. If Anet allows too much healing in DS that we regen way more effective health/LF than we take effective damage in 10-15 seconds spurts, then there’s gonna be issues with balance.

The trick is finding the sweet spot. There’s a difference between reward and just menacingly OP. One tends to have more maniacal laughter and QQs than the other. :p

Dude, unholy santruary is a grandmaster trait that gives regen some of the time. It is so bad. So bad. Its is occasional conditional regen

MonkeyButtFace.4862:

Honestly, I think we’re about to see a paradigm shift in how necromancer is played.

With Blighter’s Boon and siphons working in DS, we’re going to go from just using DS for offense, soaking damage and prolonging the inevitable, to using it as a recovery tool.

I can see, unless all the numbers are absolutely pitiful when it comes out of the box, necromancers ensuring that DS is always available when the enemies burst is, tanking their sustained damage on their regular health bar and then restoring that relatively small amount during DS, which takes the big spikes because it’s more easily replenished.

Which is an interesting playstyle, I think, and will maybe turn Death Shroud into the thing it was meant to be. Especially since it’s got our strongest offensive capabilities, so we have to make the judgement call, not leaving ourselves too open because we decided to burn some LF and our shroud cooldown on cranking out some numbers, but also wanting to not play tooooo defensively.

I’m getting a little ramble-y.

Unfortunately the numbers will be pitiful, and so it wont matter. Look at stufg necro has had added. Unholy sanctuary, parasitic contagian and signet of vampirism. All these new additions, and others are a LONG way from being viable, at least in pvp. We arent talking 20 to 30% away. We are talking 300 to 400 % . At the rate anet balances, 8% changes every 12 months, these additions will only be viable just before gw3 comes out in 2022. Like really….the siphon numbers will be the same. They will be so bad that it will take a decade to make them viable. Which will never happen

Lordrosicky.5813:

Dude, unholy santruary is a grandmaster trait that gives regen some of the time. It is so bad. So bad. Its is occasional conditional regen

Lordrosicky.5813:

Unfortunately the numbers will be pitiful, and so it wont matter. Look at stufg necro has had added. Unholy sanctuary, parasitic contagian and signet of vampirism. All these new additions, and others are a LONG way from being viable, at least in pvp. We arent talking 20 to 30% away. We are talking 300 to 400 % . At the rate anet balances, 8% changes every 12 months, these additions will only be viable just before gw3 comes out in 2022. Like really….the siphon numbers will be the same. They will be so bad that it will take a decade to make them viable. Which will never happen

The numbers look pitiful on paper, but for reasons above when combined with DS they’re pretty potent. Healing in DS for 130 health per tick is a lot more effective healing than 130 ticks from Regeneration outside DS.

That said, Unholy Sanctuary on it’s own with no investment it is pretty bad. 130 regen per second isn’t going to keep you from being 1 shotted eventually when you exit DS. Nor is it going to help you if you kite for a couple seconds with only 500-1000 extra health to show for it. However, with healing power getting it closer to 200-300 ticks per second, it’s much better. 10 seconds of kiting all of a sudden becomes 2000-3000 health instead of 500-1000 upon exiting DS. That’s enough to apply some regen, self heals, weakness, gain LF etc.

Is it better enough to sacrifice other opportunities for Death Magic and sustain? Right now no. However, with new Siphons and Blighters Boon, there’s definitely potential. Beyond the Veil will give DM Necros even more opportunity to recover. I plan on playing a few different builds to see how viable everything is from super sustain to glass cannon builds.

Sometimes I look at things from super extremes to get my head around how things may work.

If we didn’t have any healing in DS, but could gain 100% LF on every hit outside of it, DS still wouldn’t help us much more than it does now. This is because we would still have to wait 10 seconds to use any LF we have gained. Sure we would have 100% LF bar everytime we entered it, but that doesn’t help you if you’re at 1% health and an enemy is waiting out LF degen to kill/spike you.

Another scenario is if we could barely reach 5-10% LF within 10-20 seconds of skill use, but healed 100% of our health upon entering DS. It would effectively become a full heal every 10 seconds if you pull it off. Unfortunately we wouldn’t have the absorption aspect of DS since we have too little LF gain. With little else to fall back on, we would still die a lot if LF generation is interrupted or too low.

Now if we easily gained 50% of our LF outside DS in seconds, while easily healing half of our health inside DS in seconds, a Necro would become an unkillable wackamole.

Unholy Sanctuary gave us a very small taste of this possible aspect of DS which was surprisingly more effective in my opinion than I originally thought. I think Siphons especially in RS will be too. Now if we added SoV to the mix I personally think that it would be a bridge too far when combined with other DS healing in HoT. I could be wrong, but I’m in the 20-30% off not the 300-400% off camp. At least when invested stat wise.

Siphons in general are about 100-200% off for the record. SoV passive needs to steal health as well with a bigger active siphon… and I would be fine with just the active siphon working in DS/RS.

Balance healing and DS after our mechanics are made to work logically. Mechanics should always take priority, with balance coming in after the mechanics of a profession and build feel good.

Signet of Vampirism needs to change.

All it effectively does is reduce each packet of incoming damage by 342. This is NOTHING.

Warriors and Elementalists have signet heals and their passives are AMAZING. Why do we get stuck with this trash?

Bhawb.7408:

Balance healing and DS after our mechanics are made to work logically. Mechanics should always take priority, with balance coming in after the mechanics of a profession and build feel good.

I agree, too. Dhuumfire is a prime example of what happens when something new is grafted onto a profession.

I like to leave less specific suggestions for “fixes” because I know how hard it is to implement a change that impacts a complex system.

Bhawb.7408:

Balance healing and DS after our mechanics are made to work logically. Mechanics should always take priority, with balance coming in after the mechanics of a profession and build feel good.

This^

I personally think they need to make some radical changes to DS/RS. I think the attrition theme they have for necros is a failed experiment. In a game all about active defenses, trying to fit one attrition based class (square peg) into an active defense game (round hole) just doesn’t work…at least not very well. They need to peel off the baseline survival aspect of DS/RS and put it where it belongs…into utilities, other skills, and traits. That would finally give them the opportunity to allow utilities/all healing while in DS/RS. DS/RS would fall more in line with other class mechanics…it would be less of them trying to insert a pseudo tank into a game with no tanks/healers. The whole concept of blocking all utilities because you use your class mechanic is such a terrible idea that it blows my mind that that got past their quality controls.

ODB.6891:

Bhawb.7408:

Balance healing and DS after our mechanics are made to work logically. Mechanics should always take priority, with balance coming in after the mechanics of a profession and build feel good.

This^

I personally think they need to make some radical changes to DS/RS. I think the attrition theme they have for necros is a failed experiment. In a game all about active defenses, trying to fit one attrition based class (square peg) into an active defense game (round hole) just doesn’t work…at least not very well. They need to peel off the baseline survival aspect of DS/RS and put it where it belongs…into utilities, other skills, and traits. That would finally give them the opportunity to allow utilities/all healing while in DS/RS. DS/RS would fall more in line with other class mechanics…it would be less of them trying to insert a pseudo tank into a game with no tanks/healers. The whole concept of blocking all utilities because you use your class mechanic is such a terrible idea that it blows my mind that that got past their quality controls.

Yeah I think part of the problem was the conversion from Death Shroud being a special downed mechanic into its current form. It made sense to block all utilities, passives, traits and siphons when you were supposedly in an OP downed state that had to be killed off like normal play.

However, once it became an F1 skill, that whole concept should have been abandoned.

Thinking about it more. If I were to design Death Shroud around what Anet intended it to be, I would do the following:

- I would make the LF bar much smaller. I’m thinking 10-33% of what it is now.
- I would add more LF gain to different skills on weapons and utilities across the board. If you’re using and connecting with skills you’re gaining LF period.
- Reduce the CD to about 5 seconds.
- Rework DS skills to fit the quick CD, but small LF bar playstyle. Or get rid of them entirely with Weapons skills replacing them.
- Possibly keep LF degeneration to balance for the huge increase in LF gain and CD reduction.
- Add a damage cap against total LF per second. About 15-20% total damage. That way it becomes a unique active/attrition defense and works no matter how many enemies are attacking you.
- Allow all healing, utilities and effects through DS.
- Death Magic would have an added GM trait, which provides Lifeforce bars to nearby party members on DS activation. Think of a “barrier/forcefield” like mechanic. (I doubt Anet ever intended this but it would be a great idea).

I know the above wouldn’t be perfect, but this balances DS to be much more fluid with our normal state and a great spike absorber. We wouldn’t need to worry as much about Necros switching between two large healthbars and trying to balance things like SoV, siphons and passives around it.

I have a feeling we’re stuck with the mechanics we have now though. I’m guessing this debate will never end, because the current design of DS has too many variables pulling it in two different directions balance wise. Especially when we start thinking about adding healing in DS, utilities in DS and the likes into the equation.

Siva Mira.3546:

As for SoV, it hard to say it will work since it is the current general rule that all Utility is turn off during DS/RS. Well unless they are willing to change this rule to some extend.

but minions currently also work while in DS. while signet passives are disabled.

seems to me that there actually isnt much of a general rule.

All it effectively does is reduce each packet of incoming damage by 342. This is NOTHING.

dont forget the internal cooldown.

If SoV actually decreased all damage taken by 342 it would be incredibly strong.