Guild Wars 2

For all necromancers and reapers that want to use soul reaping line use the vital persistence to reduce life force draining. This trait is extremely dominant to Fear of Death and Spectral Mastery traits . I have never seen an experienced player that use FoD or SM traits over VP because of -%50 degeneration .

Before the last biggest patch (i dont remember the date ) vital persistence was an Adept tier trait with only -%50 degeneration and it was merged with %15 cd and shifted to Master tier. But something was forgotten . This trait was a mandatory for almost all builds.

Anyway. My suggestion for this %50 degeneration decrease .

Vital Persistence (Grandmaster Minor)

%50 degeneration Decrease
Maximum Life Force Increase %15

and

Strength of Undeath (Master Tier)

Shroud skills recharge %15 faster.
Damage increase while above %50 life force : %5

What do you think my necro and reaper friends ? I just swapped names and one feature.
(Sorry for language)

Still mandates Soul Reaping on the vast majority of builds, but at least there’s almost more choice at Master tier.

FYI, nobody runs Fear of Death because Spectral Mastery is so much better, even if it only affects Last Gasp. Spectral mastery is already a viable alternative for Vital Persistence, but Spectral builds as a whole have fallen out of popularity due to Cele Signet fitting the meta better.

I’m going to say something I already said… Mesmer got illusionary persona baseline. It was a GM trait mandatory for shatter builds (that is all viable builds). This made mesmers “a tad too strong” (because they could now get other great trait lines) at first, but after a few corrections, they are now reasonably balanced AND have great build diversity. dom+duel is key to power builds, and thus the 3rd traitline is very much open with all possibilities regularly seen in tournaments. If you want condi, you do duel+illusions and still free for the 3rd line.

The same should happen to VP. Even without VP the SR line is good, so it won’t kill the line. But it will majorly increase build diversity WITHOUT breaking anyone’s build (for example they wanted to make deceptive evasion baseline for mesmer, but PvE mesmers didn’t want, that is why dueling is still mandatory for PvP mesmers).