Guild Wars 2

Hello people, I am just wondering if anyone else finds underwater DS skills very underwhelming?

I am running a power build and on land I use DS quite a lot for both damage and utility. Underwater I am struggling to make any use of it apart from absorbing a few hits until my heal is up and occasional fear.

Life blast tooltip underwater states that is should be 1/4 of a second slower that the land version but it feels like the animation after casting it takes a long time making it even slower. It feels to me like its almost 2 times slower but I have no way to actually test this. Sending a condition seems like a great thing but the speed of it makes using it more than 1 time a pain. Damage is also very lackluster – same as land DS under 50% LF. It also seems to me like it was renamed from Plague Blast to Life Blast at the last minute – a trait that causes life blast to apply vulnerability and pierce does not work with it but the one that says life blast and plague blast gives you might works fine. Wiki also refers you to underwater life blast if you search for plague blast.

Dark water seems not that bad but I didn’t play around with it too much because how underwhelming everything else seemed.

Wave of fear is the skill I use the most, usually that’s the only reason I even remember DS underwater.

Gathering plague… Well this one is plain useless if you’re not with someone. More than useless actually – you get self weakness. Is it the only skill in that game that is of no use if you’re not playing with someone? I can’t seem to think of any.

So, anyone feel the same way? Or maybe you find it useful and I’m just missing something?

I agree, for the most part. Underwater DS still has some uses (If I have a bunch of bleeding stacked on me, then it’s nice to use Plague Blast and pass it off), but on the whole I really don’t care much for it.

I’m primarily curious as to what it’s purpose is. All signs point to control (you can control conditions, make the foe blind and cast an impressive fear), but the implementation feels quite lackluster.

Plague Blast is so weak and slow to fire off, I find that it’s only real purpose is the condition transfer. However, to transfer 2 conditions, you have to essentially channel yourself for ~4 seconds, in which time the opponent(s) are free to apply more conditions and whittle away at your remaining LF.

I like Dark Water. It applies 2 of the most annoying conditions in the game and is AOE. However, it’s still a control skill while you’re in a form that, really, has no way to take advantage of any control.

Wave of Fear is very nice. It’s our best fear skill and can hit multiple targets. I have issues getting it to hit, but I figure that’s a me-problem and not a Wave of Fear problem.

As for Gathering Plague…yeah, it’s fairly bland. I’d much rather it be a 2-part skill, where the first channels all conditions to you (and you gain LF per condition), and is replaced by a second skills that does an AOE condition transfer (with a 60 second cooldown, or something). I’d also like to add that there may be a bug with Gathering Plague that causes it to only take 1 condition from allies but copy the rest onto your character.

So those are my thoughts…perhaps I’m missing something, but underwater DS feels unwieldy to me. It has great control skills, but oddly enough, you seem to lose out on control by switching to Death Shroud. It’s like giving a bazooka to a bear. Theoretically, this scenario would be a threat to all humanity and we’d be at risk of enslavement to our new bear overlord, but in a reality the bear will sooner blow itself up and do little to otherwise. Two theoretically powerful tools, but combined into one practically inferior package.

Bears and bazookas analogy. Why are there not more of these?

The skills are slow and unresponsive, if i don’t mash the key my necro seems to fail understanding she needs to attack.

The 4th skill is underwhelming, while the effect isn’t that bad, i honstly think they should add another effect, like dealing damage in an aoe depending on how many conditions you transferred or something.

necro underwater skills are bad alltogether….. also DS form true story…..

Yeah, necro underwater in general is just a joke. Has to be the worst class underwater in terms of boring skills AND underwhelming skills.

Trident is a joke, pretty much a pure condition dmg weapon that doesn’t do very good condition dmg, can maintain 5-6 bleeds with the auto and the poison requires you to dash into melee range, the whole thing is just a poorly designed mess. Spear is DECENT only because of it’s 2 skill.

They could really swap both weapons’ 5th skill lol.

As for DS, both plague blast and frozen abyss have that obnoxious delay that prevents you from casting anything for like 1-1.5 seconds which is what makes it so bad. If it didn’t have that delay it wouldn’t be as terrible as it is. But it’s pretty much pure utility underwater.

I quite like trident, but yeah, underwater DS sucks.

Knote.2904:

Yeah, necro underwater in general is just a joke. Has to be the worst class underwater in terms of boring skills AND underwhelming skills.

Trident is a joke, pretty much a pure condition dmg weapon that doesn’t do very good condition dmg, can maintain 5-6 bleeds with the auto and the poison requires you to dash into melee range, the whole thing is just a poorly designed mess. Spear is DECENT only because of it’s 2 skill.

Trident #1 is AoE. Trident #3 does not dash into melee range, but through the target. You’re using trident wrong. The two weapons are excellent in tandem, and arguably better than several other classes’ offerings in the water.

Perhaps you haven’t played the other classes underwater. Necro is a joke underwater lol.