- And a few minor ‘balance tweaks’ wherever needed.
1) Have the amount of Healing that was reduced while under the Poisoned condition be transferred to us.
2) Have Chill, while maintaining the current effect, make skills used while under the Chilled condition recharge 33% slower until the skill is available for use.
While maintaining the ‘Master of Conditions’ theme, I feel one of these two (Or both) changes would serve to augment our proposed ‘attrition’ playstyle in an outstanding manner.
In regards to the poison change; Poison, as it currently is, is rather underwhelming. The heal reduction isn’t particularly massive, and the damage is negligible in comparison to a stack of Bleeds. If my assumption is correct, I’d believe the majority of Condition Necromancers would love to see our third Scepter swing simply apply 2 or 3 stacks of bleed instead of poison, but correct me if I’m wrong here. However, if Poison was changed so that we would actually receive whatever healing (Or a percentage of it) was reduced in the form of a heal, I believe it would both offer up a larger variety of builds, add a decent chunk of skill to the Necromancer gameplay, and bring back some of the mentality of the Guild Wars 1 Necromancer.
For example; Assuming a Warrior uses a skill that would normally heal him for 5k. If healing while poisoned, this 5000 heal is reduced to 3300. We would then gain that 1700 negated healing in health. This would both make Poison far more desirable to -any- Necromancer build, while also serving to boost our status as the attrition Class; The longer a fight lasted, the stronger we would become. Literally.
On top of the standard change this would bring, we just might actually see skills like Corrosive Poison Cloud being used, as well as the Fall damage reduction trait. Hybrid tanks would more than likely become at least slightly more viable than they currently are. It would open up a decent number of build options while retaining a very Necromancer-esque feel to it. It could also bring back some of the Guild Wars 1 Necromancer feeling of punishing foes while sustaining ourselves via Hexes.
As far as the Chill effect goes, I feel that it is currently an underwhelming condition for both the short application time it generally has, and also for the lengths of which we have to go to reliably apply it. Without creating a build revolving around Chill and nothing else, we really do not have many sustainable ways of applying it. Because of this, I would like to see it be changed to more of a niche, utility condition that, when used properly, can cripple an enemy in a longer fight. You would still get the standard effect of movement reduction (Which I personally use it for; Not so much for the cooldown reduction, as it is barely noticed outside of burst PvP builds), while also promoting good playstyle of predicting when an enemy is about to use a cooldown ability, and promptly chilling them.
This, like the above mentioned Poison change, would both promote our Master of Conditions title, as well as serve to augment our attrition playstyle. That being, the longer the fight goes on, the more often we get to Chill. And the more often we get to apply Chill, the longer the enemy cooldowns will become, leading to a long, drawn-out fight; That is what we were built around doing.
This change would more than likely open up build variety revolving around Chill as well, particularly in PvP (Getting someone’s Elite chilled would hurt them quite a bit).
While both of these changes together may very well push us over to ‘Horribly broken’ status, I feel as if one or the other, with a few number crunches, would not push us into the broken zone. These changes are also not attempting to alter the core concepts of the Necromancer himself, but attempt to promote the idea of the Profession as a whole.
TL;DR version; Change current conditions so that Bleedspam isn’t the only thing that Conditions are about.
Thought? Comments? Criticisms? Discussions?