Guild Wars 2

I think a huge improvement to Necromancer would involve replacing boon duration with crit damage in the Death Magic trait line, similar to the guardian’s setup. THus, the SR trait line would be boon duration and Life Force pool increase, and the Death Magic trait line would be toughness and crit damage increase. I think it would be a huge improvement to necromancers.

Also, why are our “best” grand master trait skills so lackluster? Most of the builds I run now dont use any of the grandmaster trait skills.

I think it would be a huge improvement to necromancers.

why? Necromancers dont use many boons. ANd why do you think CritDamage would be more useful in Death magic?

If anything, SR should be changed to SR+COnd.Duration, since thats something every necro can make a use of.

Trait lines are fine as they are for necro, and i can tell u why, usually if u run crit damage means you will be probably squishy, SR line increase life force pool which is our second hp bar, this way increasing your crit damage you also increase your survivability with LF.

cuge.5398:

Trait lines are fine as they are for necro, and i can tell u why, usually if u run crit damage means you will be probably squishy, SR line increase life force pool which is our second hp bar, this way increasing your crit damage you also increase your survivability with LF.

If crit damage was with toughness, it would improve survivability more so than increasing the life force pool.

And then if you go 30 into SR, you could have 4 seconds of stability instead of 3 if you take foot in the grave.

The problem though is boon duration and increased life force pool isn’t very attractive, at least to me it isn’t.

No one goes into Death Magic that wants to do high damage, so the crit damage is going to be wasted on MMs and people who like staff, neither of which are going to care about crit damage much. DS builds, however, do like the crit damage they get, and a fair number of glassy builds take up at least 15 in SR.

Have to disagree with you, Bhawb. People put points in DM because of the traits, not because they want a bunker with less damage.

The problem with the OP’s suggestion is that it would make that build OP.

And high damage people don’t want the DM traits.

Agreed. Adding % crit bonus with greater marks and staff mastery, or on top of DS or minion buffs would make a DM build OP.

Yes. It also would totally ruin quite a few DS based builds that get really nice damage with the (up to) 30% crit damage from SR and pretty high crit chance with just a bit into Curses (15 into curses gives you around 31% crit chance with fury on DS) and still retain a lot of damage soaking.

My god thats the worst suggestion ive seen. Soul reaping traits are mostly about making DS offensive. Therefore crit damage should remain in soul reaping. Toughness is about defense or support (Staff is a support weapon on every single class). So boon duration is fine but really it would be better to change boon duration to something necro’s actually get more benefit from. Maybe reduced condition duration onself.

I would probably go for something besides boon duration. It’s nice to have (we do actually have access to a couple of boons), but I don’t know of any build where I’m always feeling like “man, if only my (insert boon here) lasted just a second or two longer”.

@ Spoj – I agree. Combining crit and toughness and, theoretically, moving boon duration in it’s place, would totally imbalance the trait tree. it would probably create a one-build profession.