Guild Wars 2

Before SoV was released i thought it would be what makes vampire builds actually viable. when i found out about the ICD i notice the ONLY way i live is if a condi mesmer fights me with staff auto attacks. thats it. im not one to go for what works only, i like to make anything and everything work even if it doesn’t scream OPOPOP. but what i really want to know is if you guys (anet or the devs or whoever) see anything wrong with this skill. i mean, im not asking you to change it tomorrow or even next month, but to know if you actually see a problem. the only place it sustains a necro and a group is in low level pve. personally i love the idea and see how difficult it would be to balance the skill because of runes and because it borders the line of op and up with no medium. but it seems that this skill is just going to waste and its a shame :[

Yeeeah dude they don’t care. They couldn’t have made it much more obvious lol

The general impression I got when watching the unveiling of the new healing skills is that ANet pretty much doesn’t care. You could tell just by the tone of their voices, how quickly they passed over the skill in the show case video, and just how hilariously bad the person showing the skill off got owned by the test golem compared to the other heal skills, showed that ANet isn’t interested in doing anything about it.

SoV looks to have been designed as a hybrid heal. It does 3 things: half a normal heal for the caster, minor heal for allies focusing the same target, and minor target dps improvement.

SoV is frustrating not just for being so weak, but also for not providing feedback on siphons claimed by allies. I cannot see it do anything productive except give me half a heal. If I could see allies getting heals and the target receiving damage from ally attacks I might feel better about it.

SoV should have been an opportunity to make lifesteal builds into a real thing instead of a faint hope. Instead they have only solidified their lack of effort toward fixing broken mechanics.

I love the idea of vamp siphon builds, but it is a very slim margin between total kitten and op, most likely we will never be satisfied with siphons because anet is too afraid of making an unkillable tank with decent dps. Although seeing how we can’t even stay on our feet to attack our siphons currently need a buff. Maybe SoV should give stability or vigor.

I think that this heal would work nicely with one upgrade:
Make it so Signet of Vampirism (and all signets eventually) are still active within Death Shroud. This way, for builds that focus on DS and have some vit/tough it would really make a good choice and add another way of playing.
SoV healing and doing damage (possibly affected by crit, but doesn’t have to) inside DS would be very interesting and I’m sure people would figure out some good usage for that.

Rym.1469:

I think that this heal would work nicely with one upgrade:
Make it so Signet of Vampirism (and all signets eventually) are still active within Death Shroud. This way, for builds that focus on DS and have some vit/tough it would really make a good choice and add another way of playing.
SoV healing and doing damage (possibly affected by crit, but doesn’t have to) inside DS would be very interesting and I’m sure people would figure out some good usage for that.

Making it so signets continue to function in death shroud wouldn’t help Signet of Vampirism at all, since there’s also the “no healing” bit, so the signet would still be useful in exactly as many ways as it is now: none.

Removing the ICD’s is what needs to happen. Perhaps the numbers change after that, but it would go a tremendous way toward making it useful.

This kitten, like leeching, is impossible to balance properly, and frankly I’d rather they spent their energies on the problems we have as a class which actually stand a chance of being resolved.

Each time we see leech/vamp changes in the patch notes I wince.

I don’t think removal of the ICD would work… there are too many incidental short low damage attacks that happen, imagine dueling a GS mesmer with that signet…

However, it wasn’t hard to see it was going to be a bad heal. Look at the premier awesome heal, Healing signet. It heals for more on passive, doesn’t require you to get hit to get the healing, and generally will heal more if you burn the signet.

And all the while Anet talks about how weak and terrible the warrior healing signet active is, and it still in 90% of cases gives more HP than the necro active. All we get to make up for that is the minor active damage if it can actually proc more than a few times.

It is easy to fix. It should heal more than the warrior signet, period… it requires you to be getting actively attacked, so should heal around 600 if you want to leave the ICD in place. The active should have a shorter ICD of 0.5 seconds. The passive should also be effected by bloodthirst.

There you go, now you have a STRONG healing signet, that punishes people who ignore the signet and what it does. They have to time their burst damage to not proc lots of HP on the necro, or burst only while they are in DS to avoid healing.

But that won’t happen, because Anet doesn’t want a healing necro build to be viable, because they are in fear of the unkillable necro build, and will continue to design around that, while ignoring the unkillable warrior builds out there.

Imagine a world where the counter tactic to necro wasn’t… just blow him up with all your damage. Would be a nice place to pvp. I for one would give up gobs of condition damage to have that.

Dueling a GS mesmer is as cheesy as a hammer warrior against us. Counterplay.

They should have just made the guardian active heal our heal and kept the passive.

Considering how much of a crutch consume conditions is for necro as a class any other heal has to be very good before you could consider replacing consume as a heal.

Not only is Sov not competitively good, it’s utter trash even under best circumstances

I’ll repeat my idea : SoV working, healing and doing damage while in DS would be a great heal.

I’ve been constantly tweaking a build to work around SoV and I’m actually getting the feel it’s a good heal when traited, most of the new heals are aimed for specialty builds rather then generally good in all builds. Compared to Consusme conditions it looks like a better heal by far. Though i like the face that it gives 3 Stacks of might, (Signet trait) and a siphon heal. Pair this with Regen sources and life steal things and this show it can have synergy as well as team support. Solowise it adds a bit of kick to your damage output(non full condi builds) as well as flat damage mitigation per sec if hit(ICD 1 sec). More testing and crafting must take place before a final verdict is made.

Testing and crafting has been done. It still sucks. You get more damage out of a single life blast than you do out of the Signet in a power build, and the life blast takes less time to fire in addition to needing no setup for max effectiveness.

If they want to make it useful, the ICD on the active must go entirely and the ICD on the passive must, at bare minimum, become per-attacker or go away entirely.

Honestly, they’re never going to make it useful. They’re afraid of life stealing, have been since before gw1’s Factions came out. Why they feel they need to keep putting it in the game when they can’t make it worthwhile is beyond me.

I mean, it wouldn’t take much work to make the skill worthwhile without making it OP, simply adding 2k healing to the self heal and doubling the scaling with healing power would make it comparable to other heals and wouldn’t make anyone using it unkillable.

But again, they’re not going to buff this skill to be useable, and sadly, I doubt they’re going to say anything on the subject in this thread, maybe they would have if it was under profession balance, but the necromancer sub-topic seems to be ignored. Maybe they’re just reading it without replying though, can’t be sure.

azuzephyr.7280:

They should have just made the guardian active heal our heal and kept the passive.

Considering how much of a crutch consume conditions is for necro as a class any other heal has to be very good before you could consider replacing consume as a heal.

Not only is Sov not competitively good, it’s utter trash even under best circumstances

It doesn’t need to compete with consume conditions to be good. Plenty of people would have used it if it just siphoned like how most of us imagined it would. I personally want any excuse to drop consume conditions since I prefer sending my conditions back and could use some passive healing to decrease their impact till I do. I’d be a little low on the dps side so I expected SoV to alleviate a bit of that problem too. I was so deep in lala land before SoV dropped that I’m still sick to this day looking at the final product.

You can’t make direct comparisons to other classes but I still can’t believe that this skill heals for less than healing skills like healing signet and only when we take damage to boot. If the developers weren’t so scared/lazy/indifferent I would love to hear their thoughts on SoV and why it is the way that it is.

If I remember correctly, they said they created the professions balance forum so they wouldn’t have to go through all the other forums. I think this forum is just for necros. If you want them to hear you about issues of skills or balance, I think you need to take it to the professions balance forum.

amiavamp.9785:

SoV should have been an opportunity to make lifesteal builds into a real thing instead of a faint hope. Instead they have only solidified their lack of effort toward fixing broken mechanics.

Life steal specs dominated gw2 alpha testing, hence the over nerf. If you want to go farther back take life stealing necros in guild wars 1. They virtually destroyed anything that went up against them with armour ignoring damage. Then anet over nerfed it and made the life stealing concept a joke. With that said, you can understand why anet don’t try to popularise the concept since they have no clue how to correctly deal with it.

Ehm wouldn’t be a easy solution to handle the scaling of the damage and the healing differently? I mean, lower the damage to the abyss and don’t bother with it, the heal is what we need from it anyway.

Guys it’s not like any of the other new heals are any good. The mesmer signet is the only one worth using.

DanSH.6143:

Guys it’s not like any of the other new heals are any good. The mesmer signet is the only one worth using.

I dunno, I see Water Spirit used a lot.

The others (with exception of Skelk venom) are good, just not general-use.

The ele Arcane Wave is useful as it’s both a heal and a field blaster. I use it on my ele.

Developer callout. Oh dear.

It’d be a risky thing if anyone, even the mods, read this forum >.<

SupahSpankeh.8452:

Developer callout. Oh dear.

It’d be a risky thing if anyone, even the mods, read this forum >.<

You think they would actually read this thread. I don’t even think a HR rep would bother reading this thread.