Guild Wars 2

Traits

Last Gasp in the Soul Reaping Line – now categorized as a spectral skill and affected by spectral traits. Additionally, recharge reduced from 60s to 50s.

Unholy Sanctuary in the Death Magic Line – In addition to healing, this trait will now activate Death Shroud if you have enough Life Force when you take a lethal blow (i..e an attack that would kill you). This trait has 30s internal CD and even if your Death Shroud is on cooldown it will circumvent that cooldown.

Skills

Death Shroud – can now interact with things while in Death Shroud form. You can now rez allies or finish downed enemies.

Corrupt Boon – Cast time increased 0.25s, bringing the skill to 0.5s cast time. This change also reduces the aftercast of Corrupted Boon by 0.25s.

Signet of Vampirism – The active time of this ability has been increased from 5s to 6s.

Spectral Armor – Recharged reduced from 60s to 50s

Rending Claws – Aftercast of this ability has been reduced by 0.25s

Ghastly Claws – Damage increased by 10%

Necrotic Slash – Stab and Bite have all of their targets increased from 1 to 2. This means you will have a slight cleaving effect on your dagger abilities. The positive effect of these abilities can only occur once per swing.

Locus Swarm – Duration of swiftness increased from 10s to 15s

Lich Form – Transformation reduced from 30s to 20s. Reduced its power scale to the player’s normal power scale. To compensate for this, we have increased the damage multipliers of the Lich abilities to be about what it was before. This change ensures your Lich Form damage remains as high as before but Signal of Fire/Air and other outside activations don’t deal exponential damage.

Wow, you can stomp/res in DS now? That’s a great change.

Axe remains questionable.

ArchonWing.9480:

Wow, you can stomp/res in DS now? That’s a great change.

Axe remains questionable.

you could have always stomp/res in DS.

archon you can do that now at live too and you still cant activate things

Did you not have to bug out the system to do it though?

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Did you not have to bug out the system to do it though?

Obviously but we should have not needed to “bug out the system” for years now. This should have been added from day one. The only reason we could not interact while in DS was because DS at one time was our downed state. Which is why it has had so many bugs associated with it over the years. Two years later and I think we can safely say they finally got DS working correctly – We still want healing/siphons in DS however

-Axe remains questionable
-Dagger gets slight cleave (ok, but still no real cleave weapon)
-Siphons get jack
-SoV gets an additional second which is supposed to be our boost to sustain…really?
-Unholy Sanctuary gets an additional effect similar to beta DS where it just automatically goes into DS if you take lethal damage. May sound ok, but not sure in practice (unless it negates any excess damage rather than absorbs into your DS pool which I doubt will happen). They could have made it allow healing in DS to help with its real functionality, but nah!
-Nerf to Lich, but really that was expected and not unwarranted
-No help in stability (we are still ping pong balls)
-Spectral Armor…ummm yeah, that is really going to help
-DS can interact now. Nice, but is really just a bug fix (and not a huge deal since we could already stomp via exploit). Only potentially good if you can pop it in the middle of a rez without it ending your rez action.

Over all, was very disappointed and will likely have to shelf my necro.

A fix to minions not attacking would be worth more than the entire list.

I like the swiftness increase on locust swarm, nice QoL.

The exploit fix with power on lich form is fair enough. I don’t like the duration nerf — that’s my “I need to go up a gear to beat this elite risen subjugator for the skill point” skill, and the alternatives are a buggy minion that doesn’t attack or a condi skill.

Cleave is nice for fighting the risen farmer and his turret, I guess. Why isn’t it on axe too?

Most of it just doesn’t seem relevant to me.

I only have 1 question, regarding the Unholy Sanctuary, if we are in Death shroud and get 1 shotted (as we do a lot in PvE if hit) will Unholy Sanctuary still proc and make sure we survive or will we just die flat out?

Unholy Sanctuary should proc assuming you have enough life force.

Actually thinking about it, I kind of like the change to Unholy Sanctuary. I’ve got a build in mind that I would post if the only good build calculator wasn’t currently down. Did you guys know that only gw2skills.net has newer stat combos?

What a disappointing update. Guess I was right, they still don’t care about actually fixing our class. Oh well, longer extended break for me I suppose. Minecraft here I come.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Unholy Sanctuary should proc assuming you have enough life force.

Actually thinking about it, I kind of like the change to Unholy Sanctuary. I’ve got a build in mind that I would post if the only good build calculator wasn’t currently down. Did you guys know that only gw2skills.net has newer stat combos?

But we won’t have enough life force when we are 1 shotted while in Death Shroud?, if that’s the cause that makes US kinda useless in a Death Shroud build.

Azzer.8137:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Unholy Sanctuary should proc assuming you have enough life force.

Actually thinking about it, I kind of like the change to Unholy Sanctuary. I’ve got a build in mind that I would post if the only good build calculator wasn’t currently down. Did you guys know that only gw2skills.net has newer stat combos?

But we won’t have enough life force when we are 1 shotted while in Death Shroud?, if that’s the cause that makes US kinda useless in a Death Shroud build.

Not really. It could be that you had exited death shroud before the one-shot attack came. In Death Shroud, you might have survived it, but now it’s on cooldown.

Realistically, though, this is more of a PvP trait than a PvE one. Survivability traits in PvE are kinda unecessary for most content.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Azzer.8137:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Unholy Sanctuary should proc assuming you have enough life force.

Actually thinking about it, I kind of like the change to Unholy Sanctuary. I’ve got a build in mind that I would post if the only good build calculator wasn’t currently down. Did you guys know that only gw2skills.net has newer stat combos?

But we won’t have enough life force when we are 1 shotted while in Death Shroud?, if that’s the cause that makes US kinda useless in a Death Shroud build.

Not really. It could be that you had exited death shroud before the one-shot attack came. In Death Shroud, you might have survived it, but now it’s on cooldown.

Realistically, though, this is more of a PvP trait than a PvE one. Survivability traits in PvE are kinda unecessary for most content.

I am still not convienced that it will be worth taking. Unholy sanctuary still has the same problems. It needs high healing power and long DS durations to be useful but healing power and Deathshroud conflict each other.

I still believe they should simply reduces the scaling and in order to compenstae give better base healing.

I’m not totally convinced, but I have a build in mind that I’ll be trying out post-patch to see how it works out. Healing Power and Death Shroud don’t fight each other when all of your healing ability (save Unholy Sanctuary) can only occur outside death shroud, after all.

I like the hints that dagger would get a 2 target mini-cleave on more than just the auto-attack. Dagger has trouble with multiple target dps. This should help dagger perform better; especially against PvE trash mobs where ranged weapons are used more.

The changes to axe were surprising. I expected nothing despite the earlier hints. A fair buff to axe was due after Dhuumfire was taken off of it, rendering axe back to the vulnerability applicator it was. It is nice that Axe Training remained a Master trait, too.

The spectral changes were welcome and wholly unexpected. Perhaps a true spectral build will be more viable. The tweaks were not very great but they are positive.

Extending warhorn’s duration also reduces the need for SotL, which is highly addictive and pretty much a wasted slot similar to how other professions need to burn a master level trait for the same thing. At least now the options are better for swiftness and Locust Swarm will do a little more damage.

The auto-turtle feature of Unholy Sanctuary is interesting but I have no good feel for how much effect it will have but seems focused on PvP.

Corrupt Boon and Lich form probably needed the adjustments for PvP.

SoV is still pretty much useless to me. It never sees even 5 seconds outside of PvP. Most of the time, the stack is used up in a fraction of a second when I try it elsewhere. I would have liked to see it give a one-second random boon or condi-removal to allies at one per two seconds for every ally claiming a siphon – anything to make it more valuable to the team.

The largest change is to DS, I think. The ability to interact with the environment will help the transform’s utility a lot.

The changes are pretty much par for the course for Necro. I never really expected a whole lot so at least they met my expectations.

Currently im finding it harder and harder to motivate myself to log in and play the game. With WvW feeling a bit stale and even with the new tournament its not going to change much as alot are just burnt out on it. PVE other than living world is pretty much stale and other than the initial few days enjoyment of living world it’s starting to wear thin.

Now with these new balance changes which would be welcomed if I knew in a couple of months time there was going to be more. But 6 months between passes there needs to be more meat on the bone other than what we are getting. So with Necro being stagnant and it being the class I play the most I find it very demotivating considering all the time spent by people on the forum giving really useful feedback and seeing it pretty much being ignored.

Hopefully one day I will see siphons become viable or some player feedback being taken into consideration when having these balance passes but until then im pretty much taking a break from GW2. By my estimates I wont be missing much to the class as im sure it will now remain stagnant for another 6 months. Anyone that thinks that after 6 months of inactivity that what we received is more than enough is living in a pipe dream.

We got small changes to a useless skill and trait which still pretty much make them still useless. Small buffs to a skill and trait which make them still good. Fix for DS that should have been in before launch but as such we all used the naughty method for doing it anyway. And then a few weapon tweaks and a change to Lich which will probably turn out to be a nerf as I know what school of maths the devs went to if you look at their siphon calculations that they consider viable.

Azzer.8137:

I only have 1 question, regarding the Unholy Sanctuary, if we are in Death shroud and get 1 shotted (as we do a lot in PvE if hit) will Unholy Sanctuary still proc and make sure we survive or will we just die flat out?

If you get hit with something strong enough that can go through your health and your life force, then all the Unholy Sanctuary does is to make sure you start out with 0 life force after you get rezzed!
If that’s not the case however, it makes you survive that hit only to die with the next one. I see this mainly useful in dungeons as dying there is costly (you can’t waypoint or wait for a spawn while the fight is still ongoing) though who’d take a necro to a dungeon anyway?