Guild Wars 2

SS is an adept tier major trait in the Spite line that currently gives you 3 seconds of retaliation. While I do believe retaliation to be an interesting mechanic that fits the necromancer flavour, it relies heavily on being on you for a long duration. The way I see it, in a fight (especially if you wield a MH dagger) you are going to get hit and if you can turn this into another source of damage, that’s a very viable and necrolike thing to do. This is only possible though if you have a reliable way to regularly apply this buff for a significant (10s+) amount of time. The necro has a few options to do this in axe 3 (3s per target hit) and in comboing with your well of blood’s light field (18s in an area if you putrid mark and putrid explosion 2 bone minions). Given this, I don’t even see a place for a 3s extra retaliation in a build that focuses on retaliation, let alone in another build. This is especially bad because a short duration retaliation forces you into a sour choice between playing ‘good’ and avoiding damage, or putting the trait you chose to use and just soak it up (returning like 2 auto-attacks worth of damage in the proces… wooptiedoo!). Suffice it to say, this trait doesn’t exactly leave you with a ‘fun’ feeling and, except maybe the most niche of niche situations, taking Reaper’s Might will always be a better option.

SS’s skill description reads:
“Elite Hex Spell. For 8…18…20 seconds, whenever target foe attacks or uses a skill, Spiteful Spirit deals 5…29…35 shadow damage to that foe and all adjacent allies of that foe.”
So in GW2 there are no hexes and ‘damaging adjacent allies’ seems rather not straightforward to implement (especially if it’s ‘only’ for an adept tier trait). That aside though, this description doesn’t exactly scream retaliation to me, on the other hand it does scream confusion… So when the problem with the trait boils down to factors related to the retaliation boon and the retaliation boon doesn’t fit the flavour of the skill, the solution seems pretty straightforward to me…

So I think making the trait “Confuse in an area when you enter death shroud.” would solve a lot. In this respect, it basically boils down to an area confusion (similar to the area weakness combo) upon entering death shroud. This would just make the trait a lot more viable as it is obviously a lot less rare for enemies to do something than it is to hit you specifically and it doesn’t discourage good play (avoiding damage). Furthermore, interfering with an opponents ‘tactics’ without necessarily having to kill yourself over it just brings back a lot of the magic and flavour that was SS into the trait…

From my limited knowledge about general condition durations and in comparison to Weakening Shroud (another adept tier trait), I would tentatively suggest to make it 2-3 stack of 5s confusion, although the developers will obviously have more resources to judge this.

As stated many times, the necro is a condition class. (Although a lot of people seem to mean ‘condition damage’ when they say this, I specifically also want to include non-damaging conditions here, as power builds also rely on conditions in general; making conditions truly a defining aspect of our class.) So, in addition to the arguments above, when having the choice between two similar concepts, one a boon the another a condition, the necro will naturally have more synergy with the condition version (think Feast of corruption and Target the Weak for example). Also, it was recently argumented that the necro could really use limited access to confusion or burning.

Finally, I would like to point out that this (in my opinion) fits into the line of some changes that were recently made to skills like Blood is Power and Spectral Walk, in the sense that the developers are apparently not afraid to truly change some aspects of a skill/trait, instead of just messing with the numbers a bit.