Guild Wars 2

There is not a single, and/or reliable trait to actually gain life force. Not even one. No way to power the profession through traits. Reapers Precision, before it’s removal, wasn’t reliable unlike how Chilling Force will be with the Reaper Specialization. I think this is a real problem.

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

Tobias.8632:

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

And its a stupid way.

Tobias.8632:

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

Yes, I feel that there should be at least 1 trait out of the 60, soon to be 72, that provides reliable life force gain, which isn’t restricted by weapon or utility choice while, at the same time, works regardless if you are in DS or not.

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

See Signet Of Restoration

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

We do have a reliable way to gain life force! Signet of undeath! ….jokes aside it would be nice if all skills had a base life force generation, then some just sorta spiked it. Never really understood it since you could see each attack as sorta draining the life from our enemies.

Soul Comprehension and Gluttony already increase the life force gained, and I feel like gaining life force usually goes quite fast. Then again, I mostly use dagger-warhorn.

Silverkey.2078:

Soul Comprehension and Gluttony already increase the life force gained, and I feel like gaining life force usually goes quite fast. Then again, I mostly use dagger-warhorn.

There’s a difference between increasing life force and gaining life force.

There would be if you had no way to get life force. But there is a life force gain on all weapon sets and on skills that are desirable to use.
Now it is true also that for some reasons developers are very scared of the death shroud. I remember the initial developer comments on the necromancer (Jon Peters I believe) that they didn’t want to buff it because it is very strong and people just didn’t realize it yet.

I think all weapon skills should generate a bit of life force when they hit.

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

Holy moly guys, did we just find a way to make SoU’s passive not complete garbage?

Still not worth it.

Bhawb.7408:

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

Holy moly guys, did we just find a way to make SoU’s passive not complete garbage?

Still not touching it with a 10 ft pole until cast time on active isn’t 5 years or is changed.

Gryph.8237:

Still not worth it.

Make it an elite and up it to 3% per cast.

Jayce.5632:

Tobias.8632:

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

Yes, I feel that there should be at least 1 trait out of the 60, soon to be 72, that provides reliable life force gain, which isn’t restricted by weapon or utility choice while, at the same time, works regardless if you are in DS or not.

I agree. One of our biggest weaknesses is that we have to wait for the environment to power us. We need to attack or kill something or be attacked to use our core mechanic. Other than warriors adrenaline we are the only class that doesn’t come out of the gate fully powered and there is no way for up to put up our defenses until the fight is 10%-30% into it. We need some sort of passive SOLO way to generate LF.

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

In the thread about new necro elites SoU was mentioned as a suggestion as a new Elite skill. I think with modification it would be a great elite. Make the regeneration constant when passive so you don’t need to be in battle to regain LF. That’s one major flaw we have.

The reaper is going to have big life force generation problems.

What? Reaper will be just fine unless they massively nerfed its traits.

Wut… Am I the only Necromancer without issues whatsoever with Life Force? In PvE I use Daggers, and in PvP, I use Spectrals, Staff, and Wand.

Honestly, Life Force seems fine to me.

It’s dat Consume Conditions which… disturbs me.

Bhawb.7408:

What? Reaper will be just fine unless they massively nerfed its traits.

It’s not that they are nerfing its traits, they keep on nerfing chill, which is the only pillar upon reaper stands. Right now we can no longer chill on blind reliably, which would’ve been wonderful with nightfall. Chill also no longer affects movement skills, so instead of an enemy needing to cleanse before being able to run away with a leap or dash, they can just run and cleanse after the fact, lessening our chance of stopping them. And the worst is that most of these chill and trait changes, seem to be happening because of how scary reaper would be otherwise. I mean beforehand people were wondering how much of a hard time they were going to have getting away from the reaper. Now it’s looking more like what we’re having problems with right now, little to no mobility or lockdown to force the opponent to stick in the fight. We finally got some reliable stability, self sufficient boon stacking, and sustain, now they need to stop taking away the tools for us to force others to fight.

What are you smoking? The Chilling Darkness nerf was stupid, but it hardly affects Reaper, the only builds that would have picked it up were condi builds. The stacking “nerf” is hardly a nerf, it won’t affect Reaper in any meaningful way, and the movement change is unlikely to matter a huge deal. I get that the “woe is me” crap is popular on the forums, but if you’re going to complain at least be reasonable about it.

The Chilling Darkness nerf seems because Reaper Greatsword supposedly has a permablind AoE skill, and the issue is that it’d trap people inside the permablind AoE.

From what I see, the skill is on a considerably lower CD than Well of Darkness, too.

I am doing pretty well with staff so far in terms of life force regeneration. I can maintain a fight against 3 people for really long time. But some traits to boost it would be cool too.

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

That could be insanely good passive for this Signet. I would put some small 1s ICD on it, however and bump it to 2-3%. Otherwise it would be balanced around Dagger and subpar for Scepter and Staff.

+1, full support.

LF gain rate could just be increased on the current SoU for a similar result but none of this helps the active become better. Cast time is slow and super obvious while the cluster resurrection feels unnecessary. If the active auto procs for the Necro on down and was a much shorter cast time, the signet would be way more useful.

Regarding Reaper, all I have seen so far is some cleave on golems. I am afraid the trait line may be balanced to be equivalent to the other trait lines. The game cannot have Reaper be the Necro meta, can it? That would limit build variety. It feels like there is something going on we are not aware of. What if Blood Magic and Curses were not selectable when Reaper is slotted or if great sword dps is low making the weapon more like axe or staff?

I feel like assuming Reaper will be better than any other trait line is asking for disappointment.

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

Signet passives while in shroud please :-/

Bhawb.7408:

Tobias.8632:

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

And its a stupid way.

Agreed. Our class mechanic we can’t escape from runs on LF and only certain utilities offer it and maybe one skill per weapon.

Meanwhile warriors just have to attack………….

nekretaal.6485:

The reaper is going to have big life force generation problems.

reapers actually generate more lf than base necro by a large amount.

LF and DS just don’t feel right in GW2. Unlike GW1, enemies are just too few for LF generation. Then they give skills LF but it now feels more like adrenaline except slower gain. The slow build up makes you expect something powerful but it just replaces your skill bar with 5 mediocre skills that aren’t particularly powerful and most importantly, rewarding. They are just as good as the weapon skills. It would make sense for the skills to be just like another weapon set if we can camp DS 24/7, have sustainable LF regen inside and have LF replaced our hp completely but it doesn’t work like that. For most build it becomes a dps drop if you camp in DS for too long and losses all the utilities. And those so called DS builds spend half the time outside to just to gain LF. Turns out DS is nothing but a secondary health bar.

Reaper probably won’t change that for a bit.

minionmancers can tank 3 people simply by kiting and going in deathshroud.

Bhawb.7408:

What are you smoking? The Chilling Darkness nerf was stupid, but it hardly affects Reaper, the only builds that would have picked it up were condi builds. The stacking “nerf” is hardly a nerf, it won’t affect Reaper in any meaningful way, and the movement change is unlikely to matter a huge deal. I get that the “woe is me” crap is popular on the forums, but if you’re going to complain at least be reasonable about it.

Thats true. But it was a motivation to take Curses. And at the moment I’m considering not taking curses at all on a condition build with reaper. Their multiple attacks along with dhuumfire combine with either death magic or spite has me covered pretty well. I don’t really want to take curses when not taking it should almost feel like a loss. At the moment it looks to be a burden to take it.

@Afya
I perfectly agree with you. While DS is a very strong defensive ability, its offensive strength is sub-par. You do more damage with your dagger than with your DS. The main benefit in PvP is that this damage is ranged. But one would hope for the DS to be a bit more like lich form: activating it does make you dangerous.

Lily.1935:

Thats true. But it was a motivation to take Curses. And at the moment I’m considering not taking curses at all on a condition build with reaper. Their multiple attacks along with dhuumfire combine with either death magic or spite has me covered pretty well. I don’t really want to take curses when not taking it should almost feel like a loss. At the moment it looks to be a burden to take it.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration…sure, chilling darkness would’ve been an added incentive to take the Curses line with reaper, but I’m positive that the main motivation for taking Curses for a condi reaper is to get Barbed Precision, Terror (or Path of Corruption), and Weakening Shroud. You already get chill on fear with the Reaper, it’s not as if Reaper desperately needed the chilling darkness to work.

Buuuuuuut I agree with the majority of necro community…this nerf was unwarranted and mostly only killed build diversity without really balancing anything (as far as we know; but maybe reaper has more blinding than we think?).

Rym.1469:

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

That could be insanely good passive for this Signet. I would put some small 1s ICD on it, however and bump it to 2-3%. Otherwise it would be balanced around Dagger and subpar for Scepter and Staff.

+1, full support.

Why not make SoU like ranger’s signet of stone with the passive being: 2% lf gained when using a skill with a 2s icd
Active: puts you in a shadowy, undeath like state that makes you immune to physical damage for 4-6s on a 80s cd untraited.
With this you could get some ok lf generation that’s not op due to the cast time on our skills and a active that can keep you alive during oh kitten moments when focused. Not to mention pairing this with plague signet to toss all the condis that will be put on you back to an opponent or use the invuln time to let your siphons heal you up a bit then jump into ds or wurm port away.

apoidea.7095:

Lily.1935:

Thats true. But it was a motivation to take Curses. And at the moment I’m considering not taking curses at all on a condition build with reaper. Their multiple attacks along with dhuumfire combine with either death magic or spite has me covered pretty well. I don’t really want to take curses when not taking it should almost feel like a loss. At the moment it looks to be a burden to take it.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration…sure, chilling darkness would’ve been an added incentive to take the Curses line with reaper, but I’m positive that the main motivation for taking Curses for a condi reaper is to get Barbed Precision, Terror (or Path of Corruption), and Weakening Shroud. You already get chill on fear with the Reaper, it’s not as if Reaper desperately needed the chilling darkness to work.

Buuuuuuut I agree with the majority of necro community…this nerf was unwarranted and mostly only killed build diversity without really balancing anything (as far as we know; but maybe reaper has more blinding than we think?).

Well, Don’t misunderstand me. I was actually saying I already had little to no motivation to take Curses as is with a reaper. That change just seals the deal. If I want boon removal Signet of suffering is always available combine with high vulnerability stacking which Curses doesn’t provide. At the moment curses really doesn’t provide me with enough to really want to take it or feel good about taking it.

I dont know why this just occured to me.. the “Chilled to the bone” skill is really bad, monumentally bad actually. It can miss.

Our elites are summons and transformations so no chance of a misfire unless interrupted, and even then it goes on partial CD but this new elite has a 2 second cast time which is complete BS because during that time anyone can blind us which means the skill will miss and go into full CD. Someone please tell me i am mistaken, please tell me Anet didnt just give us a useless Elite.

Ragion.2831:

I dont know why this just occured to me.. the “Chilled to the bone” skill is really bad, monumentally bad actually. It can miss.

Our elites are summons and transformations so no chance of a misfire unless interrupted, and even then it goes on partial CD but this new elite has a 2 second cast time which is complete BS because during that time anyone can blind us which means the skill will miss and go into full CD. Someone please tell me i am mistaken, please tell me Anet didnt just give us a useless Elite.

I wouldnt say its useless. Can be a game changer if you land it. Other elite skills can also miss or be made useless if you use them at the wrong time so no reason why this shouldn’t be any different.

Sigmoid.7082:

Ragion.2831:

I dont know why this just occured to me.. the “Chilled to the bone” skill is really bad, monumentally bad actually. It can miss.

Our elites are summons and transformations so no chance of a misfire unless interrupted, and even then it goes on partial CD but this new elite has a 2 second cast time which is complete BS because during that time anyone can blind us which means the skill will miss and go into full CD. Someone please tell me i am mistaken, please tell me Anet didnt just give us a useless Elite.

I wouldnt say its useless. Can be a game changer if you land it. Other elite skills can also miss or be made useless if you use them at the wrong time so no reason why this shouldn’t be any different.

I dont mean useless in the sense that the skill it self is useless, I mean that it has an extremely high chance of not hitting. If it had entangle’s cast time and CD then that is a different story, but two second cast time? 120 second CD? first of all you would need to use infusing terror to stay stable, a skill that pretty much requires another skill to be successful is already a bad sign. To make matters worse you would need to drop an Aoe blind to prevent being burst down during the cast. Finally if a DP thief (or any class with blind for that matter) is in the area, forget about hitting. That is what i mean by useless.

Sigmoid.7082:

nekretaal.6485:

The reaper is going to have big life force generation problems.

reapers actually generate more lf than base necro by a large amount.

Here’s why reaper life force generation is terrible.

(1) Greatsword. According to the wiki, only Greatsword 5 generates life force and only on stupid long cool down.

But even if life force was added to #1, that skill is really slow and player are going to learn that no autoattack chill, no reaper combos. They are going to kite it sucessfully.

If a player takes greatsword, they are in life force trouble. They lose the ability to flash swap to less used weapons & likely they are stuck with staff (losing Warhorn in the process) If a player doesn’t take greatsword, they lose pretty much all of their chill access and reaper combos.

(2) Shouts. Of the shouts, only the heal and the weakness shout generates life force. Both of these look bad & any utility skill spent on a shout is one not spent on a spectral skill or minion. Also the shouts have to hit.

(3) Traits. There are two life force generating reaper traits. First, blighters boon, which basically requires your teammates to carry you since your own boon generation is terrible. Second, chilling force, but your chill access is bad if not on greatsword & your life force generation even with the trait isn’t great because slow attack speed.

(4) Tradeoffs. To get reaper, you are losing one of your other trait lines, & if you lose soul reaping that’s a lot of life force. But you are also losing traits that generate reliable life force in other lines too.

nekretaal.6485:

Sigmoid.7082:

nekretaal.6485:

The reaper is going to have big life force generation problems.

reapers actually generate more lf than base necro by a large amount.

snip

Here is why i think you are wrong:

I know you are wrong about GS because GS #3 , Deathspiral generates 2% lf per strike for a total of 12%.

You dont have to take shouts.

And especially on point (3). Depending on set up and if combined with chilling force reaper will generate a ton of might. Each stack of might you generate outside of shroud equates to 1% extra lf. Considering you can generate so much might as a reaper just because of this trait alone you will have more lf than base necro.

You seem to pin chill generation to the GS which is a mistake because there are lots of ways for getting chill on your enemy, just GS has easy access but by no means makes other ways useless. Here are a few combos you can do with just chilling force and blighters boon. :

• Using a staff you can use #3 to generate chill. Each mark after this will not only be striking a chilled target but will also generate might. every target you hit after dropping staff #3 will generate an extra 2% lf. This gives the potential for staff marks to generate up to 10% lf after #3 has been used. Combined with soul makrs you can gain up to 26% life force. Far more than now.

• Using a great-sword with hydromancy as a swap there is potential to aoe chill. use #3 afterwards. because it hits 3 targets 6 times as well as generates upto 12% lf on its own you have the potential for this single skill to generate up to 48% lf.

• numerous combos with chilling nova in itself striking targets and applyig/extending chill. This has the potential to grant an extra up to18% lf every 10s.

As well as the standard GS auto granting chill and comboing with itself, granting potentially up to 18% lf for the chain. Also dagger can benefit since we have many ways to chill targets outside of GS. The dagger combo can generate up to 24% lf.

There are several several more combos as well. No matter how you look at it reaper will generate way more lf than necro does now, it will also allow you to start any pvp match with lf from gaining boons from an prebuffing.Besides that they have access to all the lf generation a necro has. There is no way a reaper wont generate more lf than base necro because of these two traits. Also there is the potential to stall out in shroud longer because reapers shroud #1.3 generates lf.

TheDevice.2751:

Bhawb.7408:

Tobias.8632:

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

And its a stupid way.

Agreed. Our class mechanic we can’t escape from runs on LF and only certain utilities offer it and maybe one skill per weapon.

Meanwhile warriors just have to attack………….

I will add that warriors also have two skills that will instantly fill that adrenaline bar; signet of fury and the heal “To the Limit”. Necros do not have an instant LF generator. Comparing the two is largely an apples and oranges type of thing as far as core mechanics go, but LF is much more difficult to acquire than adrenaline is in my opinion.

We have to sacrifice too much to gain reliable LF regen in my opinion, and that’s part of the theme to necros… we can’t seem to have nice things without negatives that greatly hinder this class to shine properly.

I’m forced to have to take Soul Marks in WvW because I can’t generate LF reliably any other way other than when zergs clash and we’re in melee combat. Taking Soul Marks means I can’t take Unyielding Blast…and by not having Unyielding Blast, my life blast simply don’t function as well as it should, it becomes lackluster. To fix this problem, make either Soul Marks or Unyielding Blast baseline. And what’s funny is doing either will not make necros overpowered.

Axe 2 is a good form of LF regen, but it’s only 600 range. Dagger 1 is a great form of LF regen, but it requires you to be in melee range where necros could suffer and get caught. With lack of escapes and mobility, getting caught out of position usually means death in WvW. To fix this, simply increase Axe 2 range will help (as Axe as a whole can use an upgrade across the board).

Warhorn 5 is a good source of LF, but again, melee range, small radius. It’s ok however as blowing the horn then going into DS to execute DS 5 + 4 offers great synergy. BUT, here we go again, DS skills hit for less unless you’re wielding a staff. This makes the synergy a bit harder to accomplish as you’ll have to wait for the weapon swap cooldown which effectively ruins the combo of warhorn 5 > DS 5 + 4. This is an easy fix and a boost to necros if they stop making DS 4 scale with offhand weapon damage. But nooo, necros can’t have nice things without being hurt somewhere.

Focus 4 offers ok LF regen, it’s now 1200 range, good boost. However cast time on both focus skills are ridiculous. Anybody half awake can see this coming and dodge it. I think we’ve been asking for focus skills to have shortened cast time for awhile, I really don’t get why we aren’t getting it. These skills are niche and not overpowered.

It’s just a lot of these things can be tweaked and fixed to make the class work better. But it’s as if the people designing necros don’t play necros enough to really feel what we feel. Things don’t have good synergy and that’s why we complain about them. These little small fixes and tweaks could easily fix a lot of the problems, yet we can’t have nice things without getting hurt elsewhere. None of what I suggested above would make necros overpowered in any shape or form, that’s just the stupid thing.

I want to make a suggestion concerning chilling nova trait. It would be great if it also caused a combo field just like Death Nova. I’m sure this isn’t a balance breaking suggestion since the two traits are so similar.

Also want to again say that the “Chilled to the Bone” skill needs a complete revamp. 2 second cast time with a 120 second CD is basically saying you don’t want the skill to be used outside PvE. I would suggest dropping the cast time to 3/4 of a second, fast enough so we can avoid getting blinded during the cast most of the time but slow enough for people to avoid it sometimes. The cooldown should be at about 60 seconds, because it can be negated quite easily. Using Augry of Death to shorten the cooldown to 39 seconds is fair since we would have to give up the close combat control trait Chilling Nova for it.