Guild Wars 2

Hardly anything even changed…
Anything that was changed made every necro go, “Wtf?”

Since I don’t get paid to do this, I will just redo the minor traits for you – free of charge – to re-theme what each traitline is about and you can take over and do the rest of the changes for yourself, balance team. Deal? Ok. Here goes!:

Spite
Congrats – the minors are very good. Nothing needs to change.
This is clearly the offensive damage line.

Curses
From a balance perspective, this line actually doesn’t really make any sense and has no theme to it. Realistically, all of the minor traits should probably be condition based or boon-hate based. But I’ll just say that it’s good as it is (even though it’s really not).

Death Magic
This line is absolute crap, no need for explaining. This is supposed to be our survivability line. I don’t care what you do with the rest of the traits (well I kind of do). But this is what the minor traits should be:
Adept – Shrouded Removal: Remove conditions in shroud.
Master – Unholy Sanctuary: Heal in shroud. (Auto shroud if lethal blow)
Grandmaster – Foot in the Grave: Break stun/gain stability entering death shroud.

Soul Reaping
Okay, so Gluttony needs to be replaced with a real trait because gluttony is from an age since past when the game was more balanced/we accepted the reality of boring traits because all of them were boring. What even is the Soul Reaping line? It’s the line that’s supposed to focus on shroud abilities and life force. This is what our minor traits should be:

By the way, Speed of Shadows directly competes with Relentless Pursuit with the recent change – so one of these traits has to change (hint: change relentless pursuit since power necros should take chilling nova for the burst)

That’s all I feel like writing TBH. I was expecting real changed to our traits… was disappointed.

I’ll chime in with what I said in another thread:

Vital Persistence and Speed of Shadows….why

Vital Persistence just didn’t have anything to compete with, it wasn’t “too strong”, the other 2 options are just too situational or just complete garbage….so there was only 1 option to take honestly.

Speed of Shadows is nice for swiftness since we don’t really have great mobility, but the loss of 20% shroud recharge really make it feel awful, now rotations are even slower and there is less reactionary play when swapping between shroud and weapons.
Maybe the balance team just plays insanely casually and think these are great changes, but to people who actually have mechanical skill and can weave these traits into their playstyle, this is gutting.

Even more gutting to a class that doesn’t have a place in the game anyways.

It’s pretty clear that they just want to make everybody run scourge. I have always liked being the damage output of a party, so running scourge is not gonna be as fun

And that’s what games are supposed to be about. Having fun.

The biggest cancer I can find with these changes and the upcoming scourge is that you can make signet of spite inflict 9 conditions. Kappa