Guild Wars 2

Because Deathshroud is a bloody heal giving you a gazillion extra hitpoints? Sure its not permanent, but neither is a heal since you’d just loose that HP to the same attacks you’d get while in Deathshroud.

Dawdler.8521:

Because Deathshroud is a bloody heal giving you a gazillion extra hitpoints? Sure its not permanent, but neither is a heal since you’d just loose that HP to the same attacks you’d get while in Deathshroud.

This is wrong. DS is a mechanic given to us to compensate for the fact that necromancers don’t have any evades/blocks/invulns/immunities to things like the other classes have. Its supposed to be what makes necromancers an attrition class, however, its current implementation falls rather short of that concept.

The real reason we don’t heal in DS is because of what happened in Beta Weekend Event #2 where supposedly someone made an unkillable build in sPvP that utilized DS. Ever since then ANet has had this really bad mentality when it comes to this class regarding balance.

Saying “life force generation isn’t good unless you’re fully spec’d for it” is like saying “Healing isn’t good unless you’re fully spec’d for it” or “crit isn’t good unless you’re fully spec’d for it.”

Virtually nothing is really good unless you’re fully spec’d for it. That’s why it’s called a “specialization.”

I love my necro. It’s not perfect, but nothing is. Every class has short comings — some are simply more glaring than others. That’s why you want a mixed bag when it comes to party composition — bring in other strengths to counter your weaknesses.

One of the builds I commonly visit is a heavy Death Shroud build (current favorite is 10/30/0/0/30, though I mix it up a lot). It’s very fun and rewarding, but very self-serving. I get to see some fun numbers pop up on the screen and have fantastic survivability. However, this build brings essentially nothing to the table in regards to group support (unless you consider good damage and one less dead person group support).

It’s a very interesting mechanic with a lot of fun little toys to it. I do dislike the in-ability to issue commands to my minions while in stance, but it really doesn’t detract from the overall gameplay.

You have to spec for additional life force generation because if you need additional life force, you’re playing a style that requires death shroud for a number of circumstances - whether it’s for survival, damage, conditions or a combination thereof. Your build must be built, no class is going to have features of their class mechanic enhanced by default, or trait points automatically spent. A thief must trait for additional initiative regen, and to benefit from its use. An elementalist must trait for attunement rate cool down reduction. A mesmer must trait for shatter cool down reduction and phantasm/clone buffs and cool down reduction. The only class that is different is warrior, who can generate a full adrenaline bar before the burst skill’s short base cool down of 10 seconds is done without traits. But we’re used to warrior being unbalanced so there’s no point trying to say "but warrior has this so...".

Your life force is a second HP pool. Some builds actually have life force active more than normal health. Life force is very quick to generate, since it is regenerated as a percentage rather than a fixed value. You can regenerate life force while in death shroud. So what you’re asking for is already implemented for one health pool. Having it implemented for both would be over-powered. However, while you are sitting in death shroud, your healing skill is cooling down. You are effectively making one health pool invulnerable until it can be significantly regenerated.

EDIT: Also don’t forget that having the largest base effective health in the game makes armour significantly more beneficial to you than any other class.

Healing in DS needs to happen it ruins team support during intense situations where ele’s and guards need to throw their heals out but you also know you need to enter DS to survive. We can risk it and not enter DS to attempt to get healing from our teammates but more often than not we need to enter it. Maybe allow healing to persist through ds for 1st 10 seconds?

If you take a build that has 0 LF generation, that is your fault, not ANet’s. Just like you can’t complain if you somehow make a Necro build that can’t remove conditions.

The no healing in DS is because DS is not your HP bar. It is a secondary defensive mechanic, yes, and there needs to be a UI change so teammates stop blowing all their healing on me, but besides that DS base doesn’t need healing. It works very well on its own already. Its not like Necros can’t build very defensively already, our issue is far more that we can’t also support allies while building this. But that is an issue of our traiting far more so than DS itself.

At most, the ability to self-heal your HP while in DS should be a GM Blood Magic trait (maybe minor?) that allows regen, traited siphoning, and those sort of self-heals to go through DS and heal your actual HP bar. Maybe even a Master.

I think a bigger issue is that, as a necro, using your class mechanic turns off a traitline for the duration. Never mind that we are the only class that can be made immune to a boon.

Self-healing in DS should be limited, I definitely agree. The Regen boon, bare minimum, needs to do something for you while in DS by default.

I think a decent change in the right direction is to allow all sources of healing besides utility healing to be effective in death shroud. This includes regen and any life siphoning abilities and traits that a Necro get, or flat healing from other classes.