Guild Wars 2

Simple Improvements to Death Shroud and Boons

Some background on me: I’ve been following the Necromancer and posting on the Guru forums since pre-BWE, back to when Dark Path was a teleport that could go through ceilings, and when you could trait Necrotic Slash to be a ranged attack. I play some sPvP, minimal dungeons, and primarily WvW on my Necro, Mesmer, and Warrior.

I feel that the Necromancer and Death Shroud aren’t as bad as many here claim them to be. Surely we have several bugs, as most classes do. DS isn’t a great profession ability — its just about average, but a bit boring and a bit too lopsided for those that focus on power.

One area that the Necromancers are severely lacking is boons. Despite DS, my Mesmer is significantly more ‘beefy’ or ‘tanky’ than my Necromancer due to the high uptime of several boons like Aegis, Regeneration, Vigor, and Protection. As Necromancers, we are limited to some Regeneration, and very limited Protection. Note: Well of Power also provides us boons on conversion, but this has a high cooldown and is far from as reliable as other professions.

My proposal are some very simple improvements to both Death Shroud and some traits and trait lines that might help fix some of these issues.

1. Improving Death Shroud itself

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t feel that DS is really very underpowered. With a good amount of Power and Precision, it can hit pretty hard. However, its rather niche for those that are specced this way. I’m not going to try to reinvent new abilities to replace what we have — I don’t think that is a realistic option for the Devs at this point. However, I do believe that much of what would improve DS already exists, and it lies in the underwater version of DS (linked: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Death_Shroud).

Some combination of these abilities would make for a well-rounded DS that is useful and fun for all specs of Necromancers.

Life/Plague Blast- Allow the land version to also transfer one condition to the enemy. This spell would also greatly benefit from being a shorter cast time. Adjust damage to balance, if necessary.

Dark Path/Water- I think these abilities work well as they are, and wouldn’t recommend any changes.

Doom/Wave of Fear- I’m a big believer that our Fear is underpowered, especially as it was billed as a key component of the profession. I’d greatly prefer the underwater version, and would help reaffirm Fear as being a Necromancer-focused condition.

Life Transfer/Gathering Plague- I am a proponent of having BOTH of these abilities in both land and sea forms of DS, putting one as the 4th skill, and adding the other for a 5th skill.

These changes work off of abilities that we already have in the game, and therefore have theoretically been balanced at some point. These would also make DS much more valuable for conditionmancers and support focused Necromancers, and make DS more enjoyable.

2. We need more Boons

Necromancers have the following boons available:

Aegis- none
Fury- one trait
Might- one ability, three traits
Protection- two abilities, one trait
Regeneration- two abilities, one trait
Retaliation- one ability, two traits
Stability- two elites, one trait
Swiftness- two abilities
Vigor- none

Like the improvements to DS I suggested above, I’m not going to go and try to reinvent too much, as I don’t think that is likely to happen — and I think we can reasonably get to a good place with boons without creating too much new stuff. I’m going to base my suggestions around two traits that I believe work well, and would synergize with the changes to DS above — Furious Demise and Spiteful Spirit. To mimic the Furious Demise trait (Master trait for Curses), each trait line would have a specific boon in the Master (15 point) location of the trait line.

Spite Master Trait: Spiteful Spirit, gain RETALIATION when entering Death Shroud. I run this trait pretty often in my Condition build, and it is pretty decent, already in the game, and fits into the trait line.

Curses Master Trait: Furious Demise, gain FURY when entering Death Shroud. Already in the game, is a great trait and nothing to change here.

Death Master Trait: New trait, gain PROTECTION when entering Death Shroud. Adjust duration based on balancing needs.

Blood Master Trait: New trait, gain VIGOR when entering Death Shroud. Adjust duration based on balancing needs.

Soul Reaping: Keep Last Gasp.

These changes would greatly help our lack of Boons. Each build would be given appropriate boons to their playstyle, and would be able to use DS more than a meatshield or merely to fear. Being able to jump in-and-out of DS for a few boons would be more interactive, rather than jumping into DS and using most, if not all, of your Life force at once.

3. Adjusting Trait Lines

Every few weeks, someone comes onto the forums and says that “It would be great if Condition damage and Condition duration can both be in the same trait line”. Well, this isn’t going to happen, for several reasons (Balance, Primary vs Secondary attributes, etc). However, that doesn’t diminish the fact that our current trait line bonus’ are ill-designed. So lets get to my suggestions:

First off, Power and Condition Duration is going to stay the same. Every single profession has these connected, and I’m not going to suggest a change here. I also believe that Vitality and Compassion are correct to be linked together.

Based on the changes proposed above, it would be much more beneficial to have our Class Mechanic paired with Boon Duration, since the vast majority of our Boons would be coming from Death Shroud. Additionally, the current bonus of Critical Damage continues to be primarily focused on one playstyle, and this would continue the path of making DS more enjoyable for all builds.

Critical Damage makes the most sense to be paired with Precision. For those with balance concerns — this is already the setup for BOTH the Mesmer and Elementalist. It is, by far, the most logical place for Critical Damage to be located, and pairs well with the Fury buff from DS.

That would leave Toughness and Condition Damage, paired with Protection trait for DS. This line makes sense for condition damage, as this requires you to out-last your opponent. Toughness and Condition damage are already paired on the Elementalist — and these new trait lines would actually pair 100% with what the Elementalist has currently.

Of Note: This may (will) require some movement in current traits, for example you wouldn’t want Lingering Curses to remain in a Precision/Crit Damage trait line.

Of Note, Part 2: The third part of this thread is where I believe would run into troubles with the Devs — while I think the suggestion is reasonable and needed, I think it might be “too much change” for them to consider, unfortunately.

Thanks for reading!

I don’t agree with any of your trait stat distributions at all. They don’t make sense with ANY of the traits in those lines.

There’s also extreme bias saying that the condition tree is our class mechanic when the necromancer is evenly split between all of his possible utility builds.

striker.3704:

I don’t agree with any of your trait stat distributions at all. They don’t make sense with ANY of the traits in those lines.

As I said in the note above:

“Of Note: This may (will) require some movement in current traits, for example you wouldn’t want Lingering Curses to remain in a Precision/Crit Damage trait line.”

The point was to pair the primary and secondary attributes that best fit to each trait line. From there, you can distribute the specific traits as needed.

There’s also extreme bias saying that the condition tree is our class mechanic when the necromancer is evenly split between all of his possible utility builds.

The crux of the entire argument was primarily dealing with Death Shroud. I’m not sure where you are getting the idea that I believe the “condition tree” (?) is our class mechanic. I merely wanted to bring up some ideas on making Death Shroud more fun and useful for various builds and playstyles, while also addressing one of our biggest problems — the lack of boons.

alanis.6094:

Life/Plague Blast- Allow the land version to also transfer one condition to the enemy. This spell would also greatly benefit from being a shorter cast time. Adjust damage to balance, if necessary.

Life Transfer/Gathering Plague- I am a proponent of having BOTH of these abilities in both land and sea forms of DS, putting one as the 4th skill, and adding the other for a 5th skill.

I really like this first one, it makes total sense considering we cannot see conditions in DS, I think something along the lines of 20%-50% chance to transfer or 100% to remove a condition in DS

I love your idea about merging DS underwater skill with land skill.

Would help a lot for condimancer to be effective with DS.

Cone AoE fear on land = delicious

Really nice post OP, I really hope someone from ArenaNet read it and keep it in mind. So nice changes for what we are missing, boons and DS utility. Because it’s true that we need a better way of getting boons than stealing them from enemies on long CD and we really need some more love on our fear, but I think having AoE fear on DS will be a lil bit OP since we can enter DS when we are CCed so.. I propose to have just longer fear on DS (2 seconds) and change our Downed fear to be an AoE.

Anyway, this post deserve a serious look from the staff of ANet. Congratulations OP

I think that we’re missing boons on purpose as part of our character design. Maybe that’s why so many of our feats are mere percentage boosts… because we can’t generate our own boons.

Maybe there should be a shroud form that’s bound to F2, and shares cooldowns with the first shroud. This shroud could be more like plague, and it’s damage should be condition-based. The idea is that conditonmancers use this one instead because it complements their strengths.

protection is cool. retaliation is cool. people who spec into them get just fine uses out of it. why would we need aegis? no reason. why would we need vigor? to dodge more? no reason.

having another source of stability would be nice, but its not necessary for me to win. having it in SR grand trait and in elites is sort of situational.

I actually find one of the necro’s strengths to be that it doesn’t rely on boons at all. sure, having a boon or two running really amps us up, but we don’t need them running to be efficient. (as opposed to the sea of boons guardian that drops in moments when you nerf him with a corruption utility)

not relying on boons is a good thing.

These are some interesting and honestly rather reasonable changes you’ve suggested.
Precision only directly benefits conditions builds with barbed precision, and any crit sigils they might be using. While you can certainly build around this idea, precision doesn’t have any direct link to conditions, so this change would overall strengthen condition/hybrid builds by streamlining the stats they’re investing in.

I feel like anet deliberately separated precision and critical damage for most classes, but I don’t see an issue in it myself, although perhaps anet doesn’t want necro’s to be able to max out power, prec and crit in the traitlines?

While boon duration moving to soul reaping along with your proposed minor master trait changes creates a nice synergy, I’m unsure if how many people will be able to justify investing heavily into soul reaping, as any serious commitment to SR means they’ll most likely be getting 2 15pt minor traits in the other lines at most, while overall the traits in SR are lacking. With my current build I would probably keep 30 in SR, but that’s purely because stability is that significant for pvp, but if you’re not going for foot in the grave, I don’t see much reason to go beyond 15 for last gasp. (This isn’t necessarily a fault with your idea, but more a fault of the existing traits themselves)
Also I’m not certain whether your proposed DS traits would be better as major adept or 15pt traits, as having them at the 15pt mark makes it harder to grab more of them, but then most of our 15pt traits are… poor, other then the spectral armour and fury ones.

I like the idea of life blast being more similar to plague blast, but gathering plague is far to gimmicky of an ability in my opinion to bring on land, I’d rather just replace it underwater with life transfer altogether, as the ability is just stupid if you’re playing on your own. Someone else suggested having a 5th ability based on your weapon, which I think is more interesting and gives us some variety.

Edit: The current DS fear is actually very useful as is since it’s an instant cast ability, so even though the underwater fear is really great, overall I would actually find Doom more useful (and having both would be to much, maybe a trait to change it? I dunno.

alanis.6094:

striker.3704:

I don’t agree with any of your trait stat distributions at all. They don’t make sense with ANY of the traits in those lines.

As I said in the note above:

“Of Note: This may (will) require some movement in current traits, for example you wouldn’t want Lingering Curses to remain in a Precision/Crit Damage trait line.”

The point was to pair the primary and secondary attributes that best fit to each trait line. From there, you can distribute the specific traits as needed.

There’s also extreme bias saying that the condition tree is our class mechanic when the necromancer is evenly split between all of his possible utility builds.

The crux of the entire argument was primarily dealing with Death Shroud. I’m not sure where you are getting the idea that I believe the “condition tree” (?) is our class mechanic. I merely wanted to bring up some ideas on making Death Shroud more fun and useful for various builds and playstyles, while also addressing one of our biggest problems — the lack of boons.

Alright I apologize for my original post. I assumed you were putting the traits in order of their in-game placement, so I thought you were calling conditions our “primary mechanic”.

However, I still disagree with the way you moved the traits about. Condition damage on the toughness tree in my opinion would really mess up minion masters as that utility line only has synergy with power builds as of right now.

I do however like the inclusion of new buff applications in each trait line. I’m a big fan of making each tree have something to offer each build type in order to create more diversity. If you included a trait in soul reaping to make the buff application AOE I could see support necromancer becoming a lot more beneficial to teams.

One thing to consider though; necromancer has always been an “offensive” support through debuffs, especially in guild wars 1. In that sense the necromancer already has the traits to support that sense in the same way you mention. So it might be more in line with his design to add traits like weakening shroud to other trees.

Since a certain dev is making his rounds, I’ll bump this up. Not that I expect a “you read our mind, your minor traits, DS, and boons are a mess”, but we can dream, eh?

:)

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

Thanks for the reply, and I do understand that you guys like to make small, incremental steps (which is probably the right decision).

You normally write something along the lines of “and this will be implemented in the 12/14 patch”, but since that wasn’t written here — safe to assume this is still a work in progress at this point?

If he hasn’t confirmed anything for a specific date, then don’t get your hopes up for it being in for that date! Unlike simple number fixes for skills, a DS UI enhancement is a much larger task with, I imagine, a larger group of involved developers and artists. I also imagine, like all things, it’ll be ready when it’s ready.

YEAH! Making DS consistent with Plague, Lich, and all of the other transforms in the game will make a big difference. The question, of course, is will that mean adding a fifth skill to the bar?

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

so, we’re getting some aestethic improvements in some time in the future, while rangers and even thiefs are getting buffs in damage this patch… sounds fair enough for me.

vicious.5683:

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

so, we’re getting some aestethic improvements in some time in the future, while rangers and even thiefs are getting buffs in damage this patch… sounds fair enough for me.

Nowhere in his post did he say that his comment regarding DS was all-inclusive of what was being worked on for this profession.

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

Just the UI for DS is not enough. DS is in desperate need of a major revamp.
Every other class can use utililities with their class special. For every other class, the special is an passiv increase of the basic play mechanic or the core of it, but in no case it restricts the player or rips him of everything else the class defines and their utilities. I don’t even want to begin how we have to actual trait our class mechanic to make it more then a HP bar to stay alive longer and wait for our cooldowns to come down or how it does not snyergize with support and condition builds…

If I see other mechanics like Ele that is great and makes the class so versatile, or hunter that is always usefull, traited or not and so on, it just is completely clear to me, that this mechanic was just implemented as an excuse before beta, because the former was too strong/week or whatever.

Just implement other (second and third F2 or F3) mechanics to choose how we spent our deathpower like I posted before in the suggestion forum, or make something like benefits if we use our utility skills while in Deathshroud or whatever. Right now I consider the Deathshroud the thing that limits the necromancer, rather then pushing it into a more versatile or interesting class.

First off, Power and Condition Duration is going to stay the same. Every single profession has these connected, and I’m not going to suggest a change here. I also believe that Vitality and Compassion are correct to be linked together.

“every class got those two paired up” is not an argument imo

Life/Plague Blast- Allow the land version to also transfer one condition to the enemy. This spell would also greatly benefit from being a shorter cast time. Adjust damage to balance, if necessary.

if its damage is lowered anymore i’d probably do more damage with dagger auto-attack…

Doom/Wave of Fear- I’m a big believer that our Fear is underpowered, especially as it was billed as a key component of the profession. I’d greatly prefer the underwater version, and would help reaffirm Fear as being a Necromancer-focused condition.

the underwater-version has a cast time and that would make it worse.
no matter what is going to be changed with that fear, the zero-casttime should stay.

yay finally making DS the way people have asked for since Beta 1, gj Anet.

Nice, we now know that this is being worked on.

Just don’t go expecting it in the 14/12 patch, I’m guessing I’m going to be seeing a lot of players complaining when it doesn’t happening, claiming broken promises

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

Will we be able to see the normal skillbar as well? For instance, it would be nice to know the cooldown on my heal skill while in DS. Actually, now that I think about it, it’d be nice to see the current state of the cooldowns of the DS bar while not in DS.

Good news for us…well at least it is a start…ty anet.

It’s really nice that DS is being worked on, it really needs it. On another note, I hope if it will be implemented like a transformation, we will get a 5th skill, that would be great.

There’s no CD on transforming out of DS once in it, so I occasionally click myself out of DS unintentionally because it is the same key as entering DS form, which is really frustrating.

I really think that exiting DS should be the #5 skill (as with many other transformations in the game) or should map to the weapon swap keybind.

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

That would be extremely welcome!

mjharrison.3209:

There’s no CD on transforming out of DS once in it, so I occasionally click myself out of DS unintentionally because it is the same key as entering DS form, which is really frustrating.

I really think that exiting DS should be the #5 skill (as with many other transformations in the game) or should map to the weapon swap keybind.

Wait… what? I can’t remember Lich or Plague forms having a 5 skill to get out of the transformation, in fact, plague doesn’t even have a 5 skill button.
I really think that your problem is a bit a l2p issue, plain and simple. Just don’t spam F1 (or your attached button) like a mad and you won’t have that problem anymore.

Edit: Sorry if I was too rude, it wasn’t my intention.

JonPeters.5630:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

Thanks, at least we know it is being looked at, but I must express that DS still feels like a mobile down state. Really, when you decided to change it from a down state to our special ability, it seems like you just left everything for a down state in place. In a downed state you can’t see conditions being applied either.

What bothers me the most, is that it is only now getting looked at, and I don’t see you coming in with a fix anytime soon, because you might have to go back and start from scratch in my opinion. DS is neat idea, but as is right now, its clunky, slow on all counts (attack speed, movement, cc, etc.) and it just seems like a mechanic that was hastilly thrown together.

I have to agree with what has been posted, there are no devs that play necro, there are no devs that actually like the necro class, and therefore our class is so obviously not polished due to the lack of love. You can tell that thief, warrior, guardian and mesmer have gotten some love and were really set up. You can tell that the devs played them extensively and worked them to be rather unique. For Necro, it is like you threw some crap together, slapped on some traits (A lot that are useless) and said, here, a casting minion class. To top it off, you gave them more hps, because they need all their hps to even have an impact in a fight.