Guild Wars 2

Recently, I tried combining the Near to Death gm trait from the sr line (halfed DS recharge) and Weakening Shroud from the curses line (casts Enfeebling Blood whenever you enter DS), only to find out that Weakening Shroud has a ‘hidden’ internal cooldown of aproximately 15 seconds, which is 10s less than the normal cd. So much for making a lovely combo (ok it’d be on the OP side).
Bug or intended, a small note saying ‘can only trigger once every 15s’ would be appreciated.

Probably intended. Tons of traits are not that descriptive, and that includes many with hidden internal recharges.

Ill have to check this out, but I use weakening shroud regularly without reduced DS recharge and have noticed no IC effecting it at 10 sec recharge. Interesting if it doesn’t work, makes DS less a focus for condi builds but I never minded it since it still has relevance.

It still kinda puts the cd to every 15 seconds instead of 20 (only able to go DS every 10 seconds), reducing it by 5 seconds just like the DS grandmaster trait does to DS.

Its had an internal CD for a while, its at 15 seconds and separate from it’s weapon skill counterpart.

It is quite a shame that they put an internal cooldown on it. The reasoning would most likely be, as a result of the interaction of a 5 second cooldown on a free PBAOE bleed/weaken. See also internal cooldown on dodge roll MOB.

I actually looked into this before, and noticed that many of these style of traits in other classes DO NOT have cooldowns like this. For instance, caltrops on the thief has no cooldown, while MOB on dodge does. All the elementalist on dodge abilities have no cooldown as well.

Don’t catch yourself confusing OP with good. This game has plenty of OP things, but this with an internal cooldown of 10 seconds, or no cooldown at all would not be that bad, or hard to deal with. It is still melee only, it still requires you to burn your DS at a time when you may want to save it for a heal fear.

Weakness as a skill is also largely a tool good for low crit players, and mostly useless otherwise. Some bleeding and the weakest (no pun intended) debuff in the game every 5 seconds does not OP make.

Doesnt that arcane grandmaster trait have a cooldown though? Difference is they started out without a cd. Also weakness reduces endurance regen, i guess thats our counterpart to vigor. woop woop

I think the dev’s balance all these “on entering death shroud” traits on us having 5s DS traited. Since weakness stacks in duration, I assume the thought is you could essentially give someone perma weakness. Thus, they added a cooldown that would give a small lapse. The problem I have with it is that I typically toggle DS when I first start a fight before I’ve closed into melee range, so enfeebling blood never hits until 15s into a fight at a minimum. Since I pop in and out every 5s to keep fury up, there’s no guarantee that I’m going to be in melee range at the 15s mark. It’s a shame because it would be a great addition to my arsenal. As it is now, it’s pretty useless for me.

I think they should, in our case reconsider an IC seeing as it is linked to our very unique class mechanic. I think, while I have never tried for it, a hybrid DS tank might be possible but that would require the removal of ICs on DS specific traits. DS has about the lowest complaint ratio by any other class besides necros themselves and I think there might be a few small changes/moves, including removing that IC, that might help. Does anyone know how this functions with the death magic trees condi removal on DS?

Regardless we are still in a good place and I really enjoy weakening shroud with certain specific builds.

Condition removal on DS entry has no internal cooldown.

Weakness if very underrated in pvp. Even if a player has 50% crit and 50% crit dmg, 1/3 of their damage direct damage is from non-crits, which means it reduces their DPS by 1/6 on average. Plus the reduces energy gain is pretty big as well.

But IMO both weakening shroud and mark of evasion should have no cooldowns. Anything that ups the synergy of DS traits to make the near death trait more appealing is a plus IMO, it will open up more viable builds. And why mark of evasion has a 10s cooldown I have no idea since necros can only dodge once every 10s anyway since we have no access to vigor.

They have a 15 second internal CD because if it didn’t, or if it was 10s, it would be perm AOE weakness, which would be pretty neat, but probably stronger then they want it.

Of course it’s still a dumb idea because it punishes you for using DS more frequently, especially if you’ve invested in shorter DS CD, which is why I suggested a while ago removing/reducing the CD, but reducing the effect durations somewhat.

Mark of Evasion is silly to have an internal CD. I guess they might be able to make the case that if you made some weird build using endurance sigils, that you could use MoE and some other bleed stacks to get some pretty hilarious results (you could get 4 dodges + staff for 5 consecutive MoBs, which would be funny but I don’t see it being OP).

Weakening shroud having an internal CD makes sense though, permanent weakness + a few stacks of bleeds would be a bit ridiculous (not OP on its own by any means, but I think too strong).

Skyro.3108:

Weakness if very underrated in pvp. Even if a player has 50% crit and 50% crit dmg, 1/3 of their damage direct damage is from non-crits, which means it reduces their DPS by 1/6 on average. Plus the reduces energy gain is pretty big as well.

But IMO both weakening shroud and mark of evasion should have no cooldowns. Anything that ups the synergy of DS traits to make the near death trait more appealing is a plus IMO, it will open up more viable builds. And why mark of evasion has a 10s cooldown I have no idea since necros can only dodge once every 10s anyway since we have no access to vigor.

In that scenario, weakness would reduce their over-all damage by 1/12th, or 8.3%, not 1/6th. (50% reduction to 50% of non-crits, so 25% * 1/3rd = 1/12) For reference, someone with 5% crit chance and no bonus crit damage takes around a 23% reduction in their output damage. The reduced endurance gain can be pretty big though, less dodges, less big spells (epidemic, for example) whiffed.

I have no idea what the logic is behind Mark of Evasion’s internal recharge. It’s also one of the few “on dodge” traits that triggers while out of combat.

Softspoken.2410:

Skyro.3108:

Weakness if very underrated in pvp. Even if a player has 50% crit and 50% crit dmg, 1/3 of their damage direct damage is from non-crits, which means it reduces their DPS by 1/6 on average. Plus the reduces energy gain is pretty big as well.

But IMO both weakening shroud and mark of evasion should have no cooldowns. Anything that ups the synergy of DS traits to make the near death trait more appealing is a plus IMO, it will open up more viable builds. And why mark of evasion has a 10s cooldown I have no idea since necros can only dodge once every 10s anyway since we have no access to vigor.

In that scenario, weakness would reduce their over-all damage by 1/12th, or 8.3%, not 1/6th. (50% reduction to 50% of non-crits, so 25% * 1/3rd = 1/12) For reference, someone with 5% crit chance and no bonus crit damage takes around a 23% reduction in their output damage. The reduced endurance gain can be pretty big though, less dodges, less big spells (epidemic, for example) whiffed.

I have no idea what the logic is behind Mark of Evasion’s internal recharge. It’s also one of the few “on dodge” traits that triggers while out of combat.

Oops you’re right. Forgot to factor in the 50% of 50% of non-crits.

I completely understand the cool down on mark of evasion. You could easily get 3-5 marks of blood + geomancy sigil + scepter 2/dagger 5/weakening shroud, and then you have 16 or more stacks of aoe bleed in a very short amount of time. Combo that with epidemic and fear and it would be insane. We can already do a quick stack of 10 aoe bleeds; I don’t think we need more help.

Yea, lord forbid we do it the ronger way (when it comes to bleed stacking), or the engi way (when it comes to stacking loads of high-damage condis).
Especially because scepter2 and dagger5 are such guaranteed hits, given their lightning speed execution.

I don’t understand. Rangers can stack well on a single target, but don’t have our aoe capabilities. Engineers are generally squishier and need more skill to be effective. I don’t think landing scepter 2 and dagger 5 is significantly harder than landing grenades—practice leading targets, chill before scepter 2 if necessary, then dagger 5 once crippled. And regardless, you can still get a quick stack of 8-10 aoe bleeds without scepter 2/dagger 5 (which you can then epidemic). More marks of blood aren’t necessary; cool down on weakening shroud is also fair.

Don’t forget we are the only class with boon corruption and condition reproduction. Our way about things takes more skill but has much higher aoe condi potential.