Guild Wars 2

With the expansion coming out we know that the profession mechanics are going to change. Although as time goes on I’m thinking that the change isn’t going to be as drastic as I’ve previously speculated. Such as I’ve speculated that it could be possible that the mesmer could lose their clones for the chronomancer’s mechanic. Now I still think that’s possible I don’t think it likely.

So I’m here going to ask you guys a question. Its been suggested by me and others before, asking for more unique ways to use life force besides just death shroud. And a few ideas have been floating around in the past for exactly what it could be used for. So I’d like to know what you guys think, if we lost death shroud for our specialization but kept life force, what would you think it would be used for in the coming expansion and what could it be used for in future expansions?

I’ll go ahead and start. A few ideas come to mind. The first idea is having death shroud being replaced by 4 rather short rechargeable f1-f4 skills that require either a payment in life force to activate or if you don’t have enough life force, actual life to activate. Scaling from low payment to much higher payment, as much as 50% of your life force.

Another idea I had was using it was summoning. We have the generic summoning with minions. But i think its possible to use this life force from fallen foes to summon more spammable minions or use it to heal them or allies.

These are just some ideas that have been rolling around in my head. Using it with utility as well was a possibility as well. And I wonder what you guys think.

The main problem is that changing life force from fueling death shroud to anything else requires a massive infusion of traits and skills for defense. More than I am willing to bet any specialization will deliver.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

The main problem is that changing life force from fueling death shroud to anything else requires a massive infusion of traits and skills for defense. More than I am willing to bet any specialization will deliver.

Don’t count it out yet. And besides, have a bit of fun and speculate.

Hypothetically? Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry (not the stupid reboot). A different name, perhaps, but I think it could be very fun to play with.

Lily.1935:

Another idea I had was using it was summoning. We have the generic summoning with minions. But i think its possible to use this life force from fallen foes to summon more spammable minions or use it to heal them or allies.

Yeah I also think that would be a great idea. And I don’t even know why you’d need a specialisation to deliver it. You could easily introduce life force-gated weapon or utility skills, that consume LF sort of like a thief’s initiative bar. Alternatively, you could introduce weapon or utility skills that aren’t gated by life force (you can use them even with 0), but consume life force if you have any to make them more powerful. For instance, what about a durational skill that has a base duration of 3", but consumes 20% life force to last 1" longer up to a maximum of 6"? You could make them sequence skills so the necro can end them prematurely if they don’t want to eat up all their LF.

You don’t even need new skills for that: you could use traits to modify existing skills. Wells, for instance, could get a grandmaster trait that modifies them to last longer at a cost of Life Force. For instance, Well of Darkness could become base duration 5", maximum duration 8" at 10% LF/second. On activation, Well of Darkness is replaced with “Blast of Darkness: end Well of Darkness and Weaken foes in area of effect” so you have the option of ending it prematurely (sort of like Warrior’s Impale→Rip).

I could see it just turn into a ‘rage’ type mechanic like Warriors have.

Greatsword auto would build life force rapidly and skills 2 through 5 would use a set % of life force and deal damage directly related to the amount consumed.

Like number 5 would be an arcing slice type attack that did x+25% of your life force. So if you had 15k life force saved up, it would use ~4000 of it and deal that much more damage on your attack.

The F1 skill could be changed to an overpower shot that drains 5000 life force a second and once you reach 0 life force, it shoots a beam attack at your target dealing XX% of your life force drained in damage.

Alternatively, it could just be a channel where you root yourself in place and rapidly build life force.

But that’s just me wish listing. In reality, do you guys honestly feel the class is in a position to have the shroud mechanic changed substantially? The class would be a sitting duck imo. It’ll probably be something far more basic. A hybrid of my first point perhaps where several of the greatsword skills cost life force to use for example.

Changing a core mechanic like DS is tough.

I could see, though, things like locking out DS traits and enabling a switch to medium armor for effectively a wash in sustain.

In other words, encourage players to buy more skins and consume materials.

Max dps will probably be the same with specializations so expect the trade will pinch.

It’s very tough, but with necro being so difficult to balance, can they really afford to leave it as it is? It’s a constant juggle between necros being the most toxic thing in pvp and them being utterly useless.

The main balancing problem for necro is that death shroud completely absorbs damage while degrading life force.

This makes it incredibly strong vs 1v1 but progressively weaker the more enemies your fighting where as other damage reduction skills/traits/effects are consistent & based on time.

If they were to redesign death shroud into a percentage based damage reduction with the duration based on life force pooled (degrades while DS is active but not from damage) then it would be easier to balance & allow many things like healing to occur while in death shroud.

Judging from the Warrior burst skill changes, I don’t think it’d be crazy if the Necromancers didn’t lose DS but instead gained other uses for LF, while still having DS. But I think its kind of fun to think about what they’d have to give us to make up for it. Also I notice people being really unoriginal, all you have to do is provide similar utility to make up for what was lost.

Death Shroud gives: Health and a type of health regeneration tied to LF, burst protection, ranged offense, gap closer, CC/interrupt, AoE. Arguably some of that isn’t as important, but the offense, gap closer, CC, and defense are really big. Also, we don’t want to step on the toes of other professions’ mechanics too much either.

One idea:
Channel your Life Force to heal yourself. Block all attacks while channeling, losing 20% LF per second and gaining HP for the LF consumed (HP gained = LF consumed directly, so SR would give you more healing, maybe increase it with healing power as well). Acts a bit like the Guardian heal but the heals are constant so even if interrupted you still get some heal, but the skill goes on full CD. Gives us both HP and mitigation, both of which would be sorely lacking without DS. You can also manually cancel it after 1s.

Drawing a blank on more, I’ll revisit this though because I think it is an interesting excersize.

Only thing I find very interesting is some sort of trade life force for mobility situation. Other than that we’re just copying mesmer shatters, essentially.

Was thinking on the way home from work that consuming LF for a Shadow teleport might be pretty awesome. Trailing the group in dungeons or fractals because we have nothing but DP, which puts us in combat, to port just sucks. Every other class seems to have tools to skip content and most players use them to leap ahead of the group. Dark Path even fails on uneven terrain so it is not that reliable.

Perhaps you could use LF as a toggle that empowers your abilities based on the school you invested the most traits in, continually depleting while toggled. If there’s a tie, it uses both. If you’re in Blood Magic, it empowers all of your attacks while it is toggled to siphon some greater amount of health. If you’re in Death Magic, perhaps it increases toughness by some additional amount and makes you immune to CC. If you’re in Soul Reaping, perhaps it makes your LF generation abilities generate more LF to keep the toggle on longer. Spite could increase the general damage you do, and Curses could increase your condi damage for a period of time.

In PvE, you could run a Spite/Soul Reaping build to try to max your duration of a “burn phase” while you’re empowered with LF. In PvP, you could bunker down with Death Magic/Blood Magic and use LF to help refill your health more reasonably. Or, if you were Condi-focused, you could toggle your LF to empower a “condi burn” phase to add more pressure to a single target.

The longer you keep your empowered state toggled, the longer the cooldown is before you can re-enter.

All of this could be wildly unbalanced, I realize, but it was an idea I had since we’re just thinking of general things. Alternatively, F2-4 could be similar toggled states that are based on the specialization or just hard-coded (a Blood state, a Death state, and a Spiteful state, perhaps).

I’m talking about it for over a year now.

Life. Force. Management.

Add 6-0 DS Skills, using them consumes LF, Life Blast empowers itself depending on how much LF you use for the skills.

Turning it in to literal armor was the idea I had.

As of right now, we enter Death Shroud and lose the ability to access our weapon and utility skills but are given a new set of of skills to compensate. I was thinking an interesting and plausible change would be when entering Death Shroud we’re still able to access our weapon and utility skills but gain a second, slowly decaying health bar like what we have now. Kind of like an armored veil to pull over ourselves when things get rough.

Or, maybe infusing weapons with our Death Shroud. When entering DS, instead of gaining a second health bar and/or new skills, we infuse our weapons to gain new weapon skills and more powerful attacks that perhaps siphon life with their AA’s as well.

You guys saw the Revenant article they posted today? They’re apparently getting upkeep skills that you consume a certain amount of energy for as long as they’re active.

Here’s hoping that we’ll get somehting similar for our Life Force now that they’ve bothered to build that functionality into the game!

I actually like Life force and Death shroud.

We can pretty much reach back to GW1’s mechanics for a lot of inspiration. Life force is basically a hybrid replacement for corpse exploitation and mana.

In GW1, necros siphoned mana from anything that died, and could use that mana to power any ability, including but not limited to corpse exploitation abilities. This sort of broke down as a mechanic when factoring in secondary classes, as the necro, compared to the primary stat effects of other classes, had a pretty huge advantage when it came to cross classing. This was responsible for a lot of neat meta builds that often made necros better at specific subclass jobs than their primary classes.

Corpse exploitation did the same thing, wells, minions, etc. allowed necros to use corpses to top off HP, do zone denial, DPS, and all manner of things.

Puting the two together, in theory, created a class that was designed around a snowball effect. Necros were powered largely by death. This was limited somewhat by the fact that corpse exploitation was limited to enemies that left corpses, corpses being a limited resource, and the point cost of gaining tons of mana was offset by the inability to put points in to other skills.

GW2’s method was, essentially, twofold. Corpse exploitation was removed because it cuased a design problem with their open world event systems. The potential for an extremely large number of necromancers participating the the same fight, all competing for precious few corpses would result in an amplified corpse starvation effect, making cthose skills very difficult to build around or use effectively in a large section of combat, and driving players to avoid rather than team up with others. This is counter to one of the main gaols of the GW2 design: all players should be able to do nothing but help you. Why they didn’t consider this same design problem when designing conditions (across all classes) I don’t quite understand.

Life force, on the other hand, was a mechanic that WOULD scale nicely to large player numbers, could be unique to the necromancer, and was thematically appropriate.

So, life force became the primary necro mechanic, and death shroud implemented to replace the snowballing mechanics of the GW1 necro with the sustain mechanics for the GW2 necro.

So, what’s that mean for specializations?

We know that the current implementation of death shroud is about sustain in order to prop up a class design that would, without it, be extremely fragile. We know that the design of life force necessitates the necro be able to initiate a fight at a deficit, and that it is implicit in its design that it allows the necro to complete encounters that would otherwise overpower his ability to stay alive until the end.

I’m willing to guess that since we know that greatsword is a feature of the new spec, that life force usage will swing the other direction, and that rather than granting a greater ability to withstand damage, it will impart a greater ability to inflict it.

Given that our principal GS necro, Marjory, wields a sword imbued with the spirit of her dead sister, I’d also be willing to bet that this new life force mechanic is largely tied in to a weapon enchantment system similar to the GW1 ritualist’s weapon skills.

I’m betting that life force’s use will either be a binary heightened damage state, similar to death shroud, that provides a limited pool of bonus damage added to all skills, with each application costing chunks of LF in addition to LF draining over time while it is active, or a limited bar (f1-f4, or so) of personal weapon enchants that work much life thief venoms, adding X strikes of Y effect to the necro’s attacks until depleted.

Death shroud elite skill: use life force revive allies by applying self-torment.

Could be used as a resource for healing regen.. suck the lifeforce into your health bar like a straw in a milkshake until full (passive ability) or for a duration (timed ability).

essentially another life siphon type ability.

Yeah, I suspect that the only change they’ll do to death should is change the skills.