No introduction needed. We have a tone of problems with trait placement and there isn’t a single trait line that doesn’t have at least one useless trait. If not more. So I’m going to go through a list of traits I feel should be changed and give a few suggestions to help improve their usefulness. Gimmicks will be included as well since not all builds can be meta builds. Some should just be really fun in concept and execution. We also have a few skills that just aren’t very good.
I’ve had some time to calm down about yet another nerf so I wanted to post with a clear mind. Well, lets get into it.
Spite
Spite has 2 useless traits in its line. The rest are fairly solid. We have Spiteful Spirit and Unholy Fervor. Spiteful spirit could be improved but Unholy Fervor is only useless because of how bad of a weapon Axe is. If axe was a better weapon Unholy Fervor could see allot of use.
- Spiteful Spirit: Cast Unholy Feast when you enter shroud. When you corrupt a boon the condition applied lasts twice as long. A bit of a odd change, but I feel with the axe changes I’ll be suggesting later this will make allot of sense. The extra duration can go along way into making this a contender for Signet of Suffering.
- Alternative Spiteful Spirit: Retaliation you apply steals life rather than just dealing damage. I honestly couldn’t decide between these two. I really like the increased corrupted condition duration, but at the same time giving the necromancer a actual retaliation build that rewards you for being hit is also tempting.
Curses
Probably the worst trait line out of all of them, this one needs the most work.
- Barbed Precision: Increase its bleed on crit trigger back to 66% and reduce its duration to 2 seconds. The only justification for the change was reaper. But even that is flimsy as other professions hit 2 to 3 times more often than even the reaper’s shroud does with a comparable trait that does almost the exact same thing.
- Chilling Darkness: Blinding a target will also apply chill. Cannot occur more than 5 times in 10 seconds. The nerf was uncalled for. But I understand why. The reaper might cause a problem with this trait. But they shouldn’t be afraid to use experimental ideas with these traits. Allowing it to trigger multiple times will cap it quickly against multiple foes so it can still scale without totally crippling the trait. It is just a minor after all. Although I’d much prefer its old function this is a decent compromise. Not that I’m really in that position it would be nice if arena net listened to these ideas and use the tools at hand.
- Master of corruption: Reduce recharge reduction from 33% to 25% and have each corruption skill grant 3 seconds of resistance along with the bonus conditions. It doesn’t make sense to me why we weaken ourselves even further by taking this trait. It just doesn’t. From any stand point. The “Oh I can just send it back” argument is really bad because that fails to understand that we’re sacrificing vital defenses to do that with potentially no pay off for doing so which means we sacrifice a trait slot and a skill if not another trait to achieve this effect. Basically the pay off isn’t remotely worth it. With resistance it becomes worth it but still risky as someone else might corrupt it or strip it off before you can send the conditions back, giving it some more interesting counter play as well as providing a defensive trait that can go wrong if used poorly.