Guild Wars 2

in my opinion ds is a joke , 4 abilities that is jack crap , and does not help in attrition at all for survive ability . here is what i would do to death shroud

remove it entirely , give us necros 4 abilities that we can use much like with mesmers and guardians .

F1 major life steal that hits 2500 that not only weaken someone for 10 seconds but gives them 2 stack of vulner . recast would be 20 seconds

F2 would be major dot that freezes , poisons , 4 stacks bleeds , for 12 seconds , recast 30 seconds range 1200

F3 sends 3 bone minions that go to their target and blows up dealing damage , recast 40 seconds range 1200

F4 pbaoe that fears for 6 seconds , recast 60 seconds range 400

Personally…I think it would be cool if your weapons affected what abilities you had in DS. Or if nothing else when in DS you could “switch weapons” and get a new bar of abilities. Not sure exactly how I would redesign the abilities though. Personally I think Life Blast is somewhat week but honestly the teleport, fear, and life transfer work quite well as it is.

Life Blast: 100% projectile finisher, adds at least 1 bleed stack
Dark path: remake the projectile/animation to kind of a black ride the lightning, which requires a target. Lower cast time. Applied conditions, recharge etc. stay the same.
Doom: is fine, stays as it is. But mobs that are specifically immune to fear are stunned by fear-abilities instead.
Life transfer: stacks bleeding with every tick. add something special to the last tick, like extra confusion or somethign like that.

A new fifth defensive ability. Maybe a stunbreaker or stability.

And then i would put at least 1 minor trait into every traitline except soul reaping, which adds a new effect to the death shroud. something, that fits the theme of the traitline. (A buffed) Deathly invigoration for blood magic for example.

I would also add some utility-skills that consume life force.

The only possible changes I would make to DS are giving it a 5th skill that is more defensive in nature, maybe making dark path to a straight teleport instead of a gap closer relying on hitting enemies, and possibly making the first ability based off of weapon, and then making it a similar thing to that weapon. Heck, I wouldn’t mind if it had minions in it, but we’re already reaching overpowered status.

Thats it. Stop asking for ridiculous things. Life blast and life transfer already have the chance to apply bleeds for any build that specs conditions (5 into curses gives that), and the OPs suggestions are just bad. Sure, I’d love completely ridiculous abilities that did insane damage with no skill requirement too, but thats not going to happen because we need balance.

I mean really, your F1 would make necros nearly unkillable; you’re giving me essentially a second heal that does damage AND causes conditions, how is that balanced at ALL.

F2… I mean come on, really? With the right build, thats potentially permanent stacks of 4 bleeds, poison, AND chill. We already have the ability to do half of that with builds, but now you want to just make it so every necro can perma bleed/poison/chill people, thats ridiculous.

F3 Yes, one of the strongest damage minion skills, except with 50% more damage, 1200 range, and on a pretty short CD considering they’d create poison fields and do damage from big range. However, this is probably the most reasonable of your ideas.

F4 NO, just no. Go watch Nemesis’ fear build. With traits, we are talking about a pbAoE that does (if I remember right) 1k damage per tick, with at least 9 ticks (could probably get 11 with the right rune buildout). How is it balanced at all, in any shred of an idea?

People have been throwing around activated abilities instead of DS. If anything, I wouldn’t mind if they gave us a balanced extra abilities in F2-F4 that cost Life force to cost and had multiple build synergy (ie: a minion on one, conditions on another, straight damage on a third, w/e), but what you are asking for would make this Necro Wars. I just feel like you didn’t really put a lot of thought into what would make DS better, or be a good replacement considering our class mechanics/concept, but just threw out a ton of stuff that sounded cool until you think about its uses and realize its beyond the range of being OP.

It is very simple. Just do not disable the player’s skill bar when DS is on.

F1 turns on Death Shroud and enable the following 5 skills going from F1 to F5.

F1-Life Blast
F2-Dark Path
F3-Doom
F4-Life Transfer
F5-Return to normal

That way, the player can use DS skills, weapon skills, utilities and elites while they are on DS. That way DS is all positive and non negative.

Mostly it’s visual changes for me. EDIT- Actually I should come clean on this. It’s visual changes as well as allowing for utilities and elites to still be available, and the hope of healing going to your regular life bar. I’ve seen enough remakes of Death Shroud that I’m burned out on the idea of trying to re-imagine its skills. Frankly at this point of the game’s life, I don’t think I’d change its actual functionality much as a dev.

Hitting DS now alters your skillbar, instead of replacing it with a Downed-style UI. You could possibly add ghostly green effects, as inspired by how a guardian’s virtue of justice causes those blue fire effects.

• Since everything else is in place, all boons / buffs / debuffs / conditions / control effects are still visible in the standard places.
• Functionality change: You can receive healing while in Death Shroud. This is a strict buff, but I’m tired of feeling like Regeneration and other constant heal effects are wasted on me.
• Instead of the single long bar for life force, your health circle is covered in a translucent green coating that fills / empties similarly to regular health. It also shows a static life force total. Your regular health level would still be visible behind it, (possibly darkened) but the exact total is then hidden for the sake of UI space.
• When not activated, your life force total would still be shown as a bar above your 1-5 skills. It fits with the general location of class mechanics, and keeps it easy to read.
• Your first five skills are replaced with the current death shroud skills. You could add a fifth, I guess, but frankly I don’t want to go there.
• Your heal skill is visible, and usable, whether or not you are able to regain health. If the skill won’t regain health, the 6 skill should have a heavy, obscuring green/black border while in Death Shroud. The timer should still be visible though.
• Functionality change: Utility skills and elite skills are visible and usable. Any skill that would normally be cancelled by entering death shroud (Spirit Walk, Lich Form, etc) will now cancel death shroud on use, placing death shroud on full recharge. These skills might also get a unique UI effect to symbolize that they’d cancel it, but this doesn’t seem as necessary as for the heal skill.

My major worry is that these changes would make it too much like an Elementalist attunement visually, and personally I’d like to distance it from that comparison a bit.

CHIPS.6018:

It is very simple. Just do not disable the player’s skill bar when DS is on.

F1 turns on Death Shroud and enable the following 5 skills going from F1 to F5.

F1-Life Blast
F2-Dark Path
F3-Doom
F4-Life Transfer
F5-Return to normal

That way, the player can use DS skills, weapon skills, utilities and elites while they are on DS. That way DS is all positive and non negative.

Hmm… I really like that!
Just imagine all new possible traits! But Life Blast should be changed to something less spamy, because we’ll have our weapon’s autoattack.

i agree with the change in UI, it would help to have an eye on the healing CD
and only dark path should need a little tweak that makes it being cast faster
so it doesn’t miss that often due to enemy running beyond range.

There is a couple things that should be changed with DS but even something as small as making DS#1 as some sort of charge shot would add some depth to DS. Could make it like some of the quest weapons in the game and give it 3 levels of charge, more charge=more damage=more lifeforce used. It would give us a pseudo form of bursting as well as a lifeforce dump if needed.
Life force is unique to the necromancer and more abilities that give us options to choose to utilize it for offense or defense would be nice and also add another layer of depth to the professions. Most other professions have there unique skill or idea central to how the profession plays, DS just has to little impact when compared to other classes how the class is played.

Let Necros res downed players while in DS.

Add DoT conditions(bleed,poison) on 1.

DS traits for Stability.

I’m cool with the rest.

Not sure what i would do to DS now since the class just feels stuck with this underwhelming class mechanic thats both a burden, annoyance and our strength.

But being a class mechanic i wish they would have considered how they could have encourages us to use it more ofen and make the flow of it ALOT better.

What i would have wished for.

Base hp lowered to that of others but Death shroud no longer consumes itself.

Half dmg taken is gone to regular hp, rest lifeforce ( might need some adjustment for this but the point is i dont like us shutting down healing skills, regen , ally heals , lifesyphon )

Death shroud changes your 1-5 skills depending on the weapon you use you get 5 uniqe abilities. While in Death shroud skills dont generate lifeforce.

Traits to boost minions while in death shroud.

Minions that scale with stats.

Condition based minions to go with the scaling.

Army of darkness from gothic II as elite skill.

Condition-spec isnt too bad but its made the class entirely one-dimensional to the point of being severely limiting to the other variations out there.

Power
Make the Axe a proper melee weapon with cleave
Give the MH-Dagger and Siphon Health abilities some proper scaling to where they’re useful.
Staff- higher projectile speed on #1, the rest are ok
Sceptre- apply longer lasting bleeds/or more bleeds per hit
Offhands- mostly ok as-is

Minions
Mostly scrapped in the current format, variety of simpler, higher-cyclic rate of targeted critters that latch onto people and bite them to death before they explode. Maybe make a limit of 5 per character out at any one time.
Defence-Minion, maybe a job for Fleshy kept on a 300 range leash and he beats people up and absorbs some damage that would normally hit his owner?
(But mostly I utterly loathe them, so its a little hard to actually come up with ideas, so utterly garbage is the current implementation!)

Life Force
Deathshroud… going back to what it obviously came from- your downed state with some modifications to make it both balanced and usable
F1 Channel lifeforce into healing
F2 Channel lifeforce into damage
F3 Channel lifeforce into defence
Downside, you get decked without lifeforce = bad! (self-healing only)

Wells
I had a thought, that they should both…
A: Last 10 seconds, assuming they have the same cool-downs
B: Aggregate them into Damage/Blindness and Condition-to-Buff/Buff-to-Condition
…I also kind of think they would also make it kind of cool as a PBAOE-Pulse effect centred on the caster, but maybe an option for people to still use them at range?

Signets
The main complaint with Signets that I hear from other necros, is that their cool-down vs effect simply is not worth them being equipped. So, either greatly improve their effect or vastly reduce their cooldown.

Defence
Seeing as this class is ‘intended’ (and fails miserably) as a relatively static class that doesn’t run away a major rethink is in order. Either give us a practical escape method, or take defence up to the next level.
Protection from spec-armour could use a much lower cooldown
Decent access to Retaliation
A non-elite access to Stability, we’re desperate here.

Elites
Lich Form, can it NOT be the size of a skyscraper? Aside from that it hadn’t got any synergy with the rest of the class like most transformation skills and thats fine if it was worth using. Maybe combine some aspects with Plague and scrap plague-form transformation.
Enhanced-Elite, basically a non-transformation elite which has some buffs and other stuff, but you still get to play your class with the usual style you’re used to doing, but at slightly higher level of power because you’ve popped an elite. Thinking something similar to Signet of Rage that warriors have but maybe some kind of debuff ability to it

Just my thoughts, I don’t expect Anet to read any of it or care.

If I were a dev, I’d do whatever my manager told me to do… :P

Ok, ok. I think DS is in a fairly good place for power Necros. Maybe I’d introduce two other, alternative DS forms via F2 and F3, one more focused on conditions, and one more focused on minions. They’d use the same life force and same cooldown but you could choose which one to activate.

F1 – Superior God of Doom; just kill everything instantly within 2500-3000 range 360° around you.

Only problem with making it weapon dependent means that its a lot like a warrior but better… id rather:

#0: When you activate death shroud you cause a blast finisher

#1: Transfers 1 condition from you to your target

#2: Chills and teleports you to the target, stealing a boon. Leap finisher.

#3: 1.5sec fear small aoe on target (underwater centers aoe on you as it does now)

#4: Cripples. Grants swiftness and regeneration to minions

#5Defiled Ground: Creates a poison aoe centered on you (like downed state 3) that is a combo field. Poisons and Steals life from enemies.

Softspoken.2410:

Hitting DS now alters your skillbar, instead of replacing it with a Downed-style UI. You could possibly add ghostly green effects, as inspired by how a guardian’s virtue of justice causes those blue fire effects.

• Since everything else is in place, all boons / buffs / debuffs / conditions / control effects are still visible in the standard places.
• Functionality change: You can receive healing while in Death Shroud. This is a strict buff, but I’m tired of feeling like Regeneration and other constant heal effects are wasted on me.
• Instead of the single long bar for life force, your health circle is covered in a translucent green coating that fills / empties similarly to regular health. It also shows a static life force total. Your regular health level would still be visible behind it, (possibly darkened) but the exact total is then hidden for the sake of UI space.
• When not activated, your life force total would still be shown as a bar above your 1-5 skills. It fits with the general location of class mechanics, and keeps it easy to read.
• Your first five skills are replaced with the current death shroud skills. You could add a fifth, I guess, but frankly I don’t want to go there.
• Your heal skill is visible, and usable, whether or not you are able to regain health. If the skill won’t regain health, the 6 skill should have a heavy, obscuring green/black border while in Death Shroud. The timer should still be visible though.
• Functionality change: Utility skills and elite skills are visible and usable. Any skill that would normally be cancelled by entering death shroud (Spirit Walk, Lich Form, etc) will now cancel death shroud on use, placing death shroud on full recharge. These skills might also get a unique UI effect to symbolize that they’d cancel it, but this doesn’t seem as necessary as for the heal skill.

My major worry is that these changes would make it too much like an Elementalist attunement visually, and personally I’d like to distance it from that comparison a bit.

I think this is probably the best way to change DS without breaking anything. The only thing I don’t agree with 100% is letting us still use our 6-0 skills. Maybe change the 1 skill to go with your MH weapon so non-power condition necros don’t feel that it’s completely wasted, as someone else suggested.

Delete it, destroy it, squash it, and forget it...

It’s a broken mechanic that they stole from WoW, but warlocks in WoW have always been crippled by it.

You get to be really good for a few seconds, and totally sub-par for the rest of the time, and even if you have a 40% uptime, that means that for 60% of the time, you suck.

...but the classes are never designed to be played for the 40% uptime, your core class is the 60% that sucks.

The first time I hit the DS button and saw that everything, every skill, every buff, every pet, every thing that made my necro what a necro was, was gone, and right then I knew that the DS mechanic was trash.

...and it should have been trashed. It should have been put into a garbage can and forgotten. It should have never made it into the game.

So how do they fix it? they don’t.

What they should do is figure out how to make a "condition class" viable in a game where half the classes are almost immune to conditions.

...and to make matters worse the other 7 classes are fairly well balanced with each other.

Does anyone care that hunters have a healing well that heals and cures conditions? or that the engineer has the same thing with 100% uptime? or that an engineer can become immune to conditions at 25% health? or that guardians cure two conditions every 10 seconds without even doing anything? or how ’bout them elementalists?

So here we sit talking about a class that uses bleeds to do most of it’s damage, and bleeds are capped at 25?!? My warrior can stack 20 bleeds by accident every 10 seconds, and even ungeared I think those bleeds will last for 12 seconds ...and necros have to juggle 5 cooldowns, and a weapon swap just to stack 12.

..and lets not even talk about how much +bleed duration a necro needs to stack to make their bleeds even worth using.

....and yes I know that every necromancer thinks warriors are overpowered, but no one else does. I mean honestly, warriors are nothing special.

They should drop DS. They should FIX PET AI, because at this point it’s an embarrasment for the company. Are they even capable of fixing core parts of their game? They should boost necro damage dramatically, and they should treat conditions for necros like they do for all other classes. Treat it like accidental damage.

...and then they should announce that there is no "condition class," because people just aren’t gonna believe it ’till they hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Softspoken.2410:

Mostly it’s visual changes for me. EDIT- Actually I should come clean on this. It’s visual changes as well as allowing for utilities and elites to still be available, and the hope of healing going to your regular life bar. I’ve seen enough remakes of Death Shroud that I’m burned out on the idea of trying to re-imagine its skills. Frankly at this point of the game’s life, I don’t think I’d change its actual functionality much as a dev.

Hitting DS now alters your skillbar, instead of replacing it with a Downed-style UI. You could possibly add ghostly green effects, as inspired by how a guardian’s virtue of justice causes those blue fire effects.

• Since everything else is in place, all boons / buffs / debuffs / conditions / control effects are still visible in the standard places.
• Functionality change: You can receive healing while in Death Shroud. This is a strict buff, but I’m tired of feeling like Regeneration and other constant heal effects are wasted on me.
• Instead of the single long bar for life force, your health circle is covered in a translucent green coating that fills / empties similarly to regular health. It also shows a static life force total. Your regular health level would still be visible behind it, (possibly darkened) but the exact total is then hidden for the sake of UI space.
• When not activated, your life force total would still be shown as a bar above your 1-5 skills. It fits with the general location of class mechanics, and keeps it easy to read.
• Your first five skills are replaced with the current death shroud skills. You could add a fifth, I guess, but frankly I don’t want to go there.
• Your heal skill is visible, and usable, whether or not you are able to regain health. If the skill won’t regain health, the 6 skill should have a heavy, obscuring green/black border while in Death Shroud. The timer should still be visible though.
• Functionality change: Utility skills and elite skills are visible and usable. Any skill that would normally be cancelled by entering death shroud (Spirit Walk, Lich Form, etc) will now cancel death shroud on use, placing death shroud on full recharge. These skills might also get a unique UI effect to symbolize that they’d cancel it, but this doesn’t seem as necessary as for the heal skill.

My major worry is that these changes would make it too much like an Elementalist attunement visually, and personally I’d like to distance it from that comparison a bit.

Definitely the best suggestion on these boards. I’m unsure about having skills 6-0 available for use, but they should definitely be visible.

I agree with most of Softspoken’s post, very good ideas.

Better UI is a no-brainer, it’s not a downed state anymore.

Vampiric/Regen should affect us even in DS (Health or Lifeforce, let’s not waste core trait choice because I’m in DS)

Remove the life force degen completely, I think it’s an outdated mechanic. Lifeblast could consume it though, which leads to my next point:

Make it so that the weapon I’m holding doesn’t affect the damage output of DS. (Right now you have to use a staff for max Lifeblast hits. If you run any other weapons you’re reducing your damage by a lot.)

There’s not many professions that are hindered by their special moves. I would love people to fear me when I pop DS, and for it to be useful whatever the build I chose. I support the idea of having acces to our skills while in DS, even if balance/rework on some of them would be needed.

Elspeth Tiriel.9243:

Let Necros res downed players while in DS.

Add DoT conditions(bleed,poison) on 1.

DS traits for Stability.

I’m cool with the rest.

really this, if we could rez during DS I would be content

Softspoken.2410:

Mostly it’s visual changes for me. EDIT- Actually I should come clean on this. It’s visual changes as well as allowing for utilities and elites to still be available, and the hope of healing going to your regular life bar. I’ve seen enough remakes of Death Shroud that I’m burned out on the idea of trying to re-imagine its skills. Frankly at this point of the game’s life, I don’t think I’d change its actual functionality much as a dev.

Hitting DS now alters your skillbar, instead of replacing it with a Downed-style UI. You could possibly add ghostly green effects, as inspired by how a guardian’s virtue of justice causes those blue fire effects.

• Since everything else is in place, all boons / buffs / debuffs / conditions / control effects are still visible in the standard places.
• Functionality change: You can receive healing while in Death Shroud. This is a strict buff, but I’m tired of feeling like Regeneration and other constant heal effects are wasted on me.
• Instead of the single long bar for life force, your health circle is covered in a translucent green coating that fills / empties similarly to regular health. It also shows a static life force total. Your regular health level would still be visible behind it, (possibly darkened) but the exact total is then hidden for the sake of UI space.
• When not activated, your life force total would still be shown as a bar above your 1-5 skills. It fits with the general location of class mechanics, and keeps it easy to read.
• Your first five skills are replaced with the current death shroud skills. You could add a fifth, I guess, but frankly I don’t want to go there.
• Your heal skill is visible, and usable, whether or not you are able to regain health. If the skill won’t regain health, the 6 skill should have a heavy, obscuring green/black border while in Death Shroud. The timer should still be visible though.
• Functionality change: Utility skills and elite skills are visible and usable. Any skill that would normally be cancelled by entering death shroud (Spirit Walk, Lich Form, etc) will now cancel death shroud on use, placing death shroud on full recharge. These skills might also get a unique UI effect to symbolize that they’d cancel it, but this doesn’t seem as necessary as for the heal skill.

My major worry is that these changes would make it too much like an Elementalist attunement visually, and personally I’d like to distance it from that comparison a bit.

This. About the only thing I’d suggest on top is allowing the life blast to transfer a condition like the underwater version does. This would help make it more useful for condition builds.

With DS? Not much maybe the second skill should be instant teleport to target and not a slow projectal. For me the underwater golem would be a greater fix.

If I was a developer, I wouldn’t have changed Death Shroud at all (at least not the ground one). I love death shroud and it has been very useful to me as a class mechanic.
Some tweaks might be nice but to overhaul the whole thing is a no no for me.
I would however change a lot of other stuff about the necromancer, but to stay on-topic, here are some related stuff that I would like:
1. I’d increase all life force gain from skills and decrease life force gain from kills to make it easier to build up life force in pvp and boss battles and harder and more challenging in regular pve. It sounds ridiculous to me that you can 1 shot a rabit and get 10% life force (11% with gluttony) and yet get so little from a skill like feast of corruption.
2. I’d make Foot In The Grave to give you 5 seconds of stability instead of 3.

Another idea. When Life Force runs out, the necro can still use those DS skills but they drain 5% hp instead. Necro’s life is Life Force too.

And yes stop the natural degen of the LF when in DS.

I like Death Shroud. It absorbs damage since we lack invulnerabilities/vigor/any sustainable heal like the Ele has with regen (our life steal hardly counts, its peanuts). It also does pretty good damage, if you build around it.

BUT as it is, it is NOT a second health bar. It’s more like an extra 1/4 of a health bar. The LF naturally degenerates in use, essentially eating away at our health. Have you ever noticed that you can take a TON of hits before you die normally, then in DS you can’t even take half those amount of hits before it runs out?

I would change the way the Life Force bar is calculated to use actual numbers, not a percentage. Yes, attacks that generate LF would still go by a %, but taking damage would actually revolve around the damage the enemy does vs the LF you have, not in some form of vague percentage based damage that doesn’t seem to work well.

I would also take away the degen while in DS, and possibly make Life Blast consume 10% LF with each hit (maybe, just a random number), and the damage WOULDN’T decrease based on your LF % remaining, making DS actually useful to use for something other than a damage pool when you’re below 50%.

It would take way too much time for them to make the DS abilities change based on your equipped weapon. The quicker option would be to add a bleed component to Life Blast, and possibly add a #5 ability. Of course the new ability would just be inserted in the middle and be the #2 or #3 ability, and the fear would be #4 (and pbAoE or a wave, like our under water version) on a longer cooldown than currently, and Life Transfer would be #5 with a longer cooldown as well. The fact that LF wouldn’t degen anymore is a good reason to make Life Transfer a longer cooldown – it actually builds your LF meter now instead of merely slowing the degen, and only accomplishes that normally when there are 3-5 enemies being hit.

In very general terms, I’d like to see the weapon at time of entering DS to cause a specific form of shroud.

Pestilence (scepter, for conditionmancer): Has an innate might bonus to keep any conditions going strong while in the form, adds conditions with attacks, but weaker attacks. Green aura to weapon and shroud..

Famine (Staff, for boon strippers): Some attacks remove or corrupt boons, Life Transfer does an extra 1% damage for each condition. Piercing fear attack. Dark Purple aura.

War (Axe: bursty, multi-strike, close range control and minion support): Reduced range on LT/LB, LB is bursty with several hits but longer cd, LT has chance of cripple on crit, +13% run speed, stacks with speed of shadows. Red Aura.

Death (Dagger, Damage necro): LB has for 1s after hit a secondary attack to “pull” yourself towards foe, fear has reduced cooldown, LT hits downed foes for 2x damage.

Also, shadowstomp. What part of “hard to get away from” is causing you mental difficulty?

Have it not hide my entire UI and just replace the skills in my skill bar like the Engineer kits or any other bundle for that matter.

I actually like the idea of having your weapon make slight changes to DS, keeping the core abilities the same (and on the same CD), but with maybe a bit more direct synergy with builds; whereas right now while it does have synergy overall, it’s synergy with certain builds is somewhat contrived or generally defensive.

Not a bad concept (slight changes to skills while in DS on weapon), so long as they synergize with what those weapons are made to accomplish, and stay balanced. I feel like what you listed might not be the right things to implement, but certainly I think its a good conceptual idea.

Such fun ideas in this thread! I suppose I will echo some of the thoughts and ideas of other people:

Patch Notes: 2/30/21

• Death Shroud UI update. You can now see your boons and conditions while in Deathshroud.
• You may now be healed while in Deathshroud, but healing is reduced by 33%.
• Entering Deathshroud replaces the first five skills on your skill bar. The first four are the same as the present skills, but the fifth skill is now based on what weapon you have equipped in your main-hand when in Deathshroud. [Blah blah, insert new skills]
• Healing Skill and Utilities remain available while in Deathshroud, but activating one costs 15% life force.
• A death in sPvP fills 15% life force, instead of 10.
• A death in tPvP fills 20% life force, instead of 10.

Take care folks!

Levian.6742:

I like Death Shroud. It absorbs damage since we lack invulnerabilities/vigor/any sustainable heal like the Ele has with regen (our life steal hardly counts, its peanuts). It also does pretty good damage, if you build around it.

BUT as it is, it is NOT a second health bar. It’s more like an extra 1/4 of a health bar. The LF naturally degenerates in use, essentially eating away at our health. Have you ever noticed that you can take a TON of hits before you die normally, then in DS you can’t even take half those amount of hits before it runs out?

I would change the way the Life Force bar is calculated to use actual numbers, not a percentage. Yes, attacks that generate LF would still go by a %, but taking damage would actually revolve around the damage the enemy does vs the LF you have, not in some form of vague percentage based damage that doesn’t seem to work well.

I would also take away the degen while in DS, and possibly make Life Blast consume 10% LF with each hit (maybe, just a random number), and the damage WOULDN’T decrease based on your LF % remaining, making DS actually useful to use for something other than a damage pool when you’re below 50%.

It would take way too much time for them to make the DS abilities change based on your equipped weapon. The quicker option would be to add a bleed component to Life Blast, and possibly add a #5 ability. Of course the new ability would just be inserted in the middle and be the #2 or #3 ability, and the fear would be #4 (and pbAoE or a wave, like our under water version) on a longer cooldown than currently, and Life Transfer would be #5 with a longer cooldown as well. The fact that LF wouldn’t degen anymore is a good reason to make Life Transfer a longer cooldown – it actually builds your LF meter now instead of merely slowing the degen, and only accomplishes that normally when there are 3-5 enemies being hit.

It is not nor has it ever been a second life bar, it is a second downed state. Think about it 4 skills, degens, pretty sure in early beta that WAS the necro downed state.

Icarus Pherae.4680:

It is not nor has it ever been a second life bar, it is a second downed state. Think about it 4 skills, degens, pretty sure in early beta that WAS the necro downed state.

I thought it was well known that Death Shroud was originally the necro downed state.

Even though the idea of having different death shroud skills were circulating around even before the game was released, it never affected Anet’s decisions. On a personal note though, I think it’s a very cool idea.

Giving necromancers a 5th death shroud skill that varies depending on the currently equipped weapon (you can already change weapons in DS) is a nice idea.

An alternative to the idea can be to just create variations for life blast and plague blast depending on the weapon. They can even have different names. They should increase the cast time of the improved blast skills probably by 100% to compensate.

Staff: Transfers a condition to the enemy.
Scepter: Causes bleeding with each hit.
Axe: Deal damage in an area around the target.
Dagger: Deals high single target damage.
Spear: Self centered AoE damage which replenishes a very small amount of life force (doesn’t transfer conditions)
Trident: Ranged AoE that transfers one condition to the enemies it hits.

This would also probably require some changes to the related traits:
Unyielding Blast: Death Shroud Blast skills become unblockable and their cast time is reduced by 20%.
Reaper’s Might: Death Shroud Blast skills grant two stacks of might for 15 seconds.

This change would be much more simple to implement than introducing a whole new skill or completely different death shroud skill sets but at the same time makes death shroud much more interesting, would complement the rest of your build better and turns a relatively boring and useless skill into an interesting one.

I am pretty confident that Anet won’t make such changes but it’s alright to dream eh?

Icarus, if DS is not a 2nd HP bar then what is it? It absorbs damage and is replenishable, just like our normal hp- just because we can trait for some nice tricks on entry and exit and tolerate a massive damage nerf with situational utility doesn’t mean it’s not just a glorified HP bar.

Things i would change:

DS replaces our weapon skills with its own revamped skills as below; our UI acquires a translucent green hue around the edges which turns to black as LF reaches zero. Our utilities are visible but not useable. Any healing we receive gives LF instead of HP. DS degenerates as it does currently.

DS 1: Becomes either a 20% chance projectile finisher or a ranged attack (like the axe skills). Its cast time is reduced by 25% and it applies 1 sec of poison. If it’s a projectile, it’s travel speed is either doubled or it homes in on the target.

DS 2: Dark path becomes ground-targettable and instant effect. It retains the same range and debuffs it currently has and strips 1 boon if aimed at an enemy.

DS 3: Dooms’ fear duration is doubled (2sec) and cd increased by 25%. It applies 5 stacks of vulnerability (8 secs) when it ends.

DS 4: Applies either cripple or chill (1 sec) to each target it hits.

DS 5: Veiled Vengeance. 0.5 sec cast, 10 sec duration, 60 sec cd. Creates an aura which absorbs attacks and grants 5 sec of stability to the necro. Alternatively it absorbs attacks and dazes foes when they attack (5 sec duration). The 30 soul reaping trait thus freed can become something more useful like a reflecting shield. Not sure on the ‘absorbing attacks’ part- basically i want some kind of decent, traitless stability so that necros can stomp and generally not be a plastic bag on a windy day; damage mitigation is included due to the long cd.

(flame shield on!)

1. Wipe out the whole second HP bar thing. When you are in Death Shroud, Life Force isn’t your HP anymore.
2. Make multiple Death Shrouds, each one which a different purposes and a different skill sets. Then either make that staying in those Death Shrouds will give you a stat boost and will cost life force or make that staying in Death Shrouds doesn’t drains LF but Death Shroud skills costs LF to use.
3. Make Death Shrouds to replace your weapon skills, giving you access to heal and utilities.

First and most important thing i d like to see changed in DS as stated many times already would be the UI. Just make it the same as with any other transformation so we can see our boons/conditions. I ll be very disappointed if i dont see this in the February patch.

Other than that i d like to have the n1 skill modified in a way that is more usefull for condition builds, but since cond builds use scepter which has a relatively slow LF gain u cant afford being in DS for long anyway so it doesnt bother me that much.

If we want to make more changes a “weapon swap” to give us another set of abilities in DS would be great too. Getting the underwater version of DS this way would be great in my opinion. The abilities already exist, we might as well get a chance to use them more often.

Edit: in order to not make DS too powerfull abilities could share cooldowns
(Dark Path shares cd with Dark Water, Doom shares cd with Wave of Fear and Life transfer with Gathering Plague)
**

Also being able to see the cooldowns on your skills but not use them would be nice for all transformations too in all classes, especially the heal

Finally give us the option to res/stomp someone while in DS.
I mean why thieves can do that in stealth, mesmers can use their shatters and guardians their virtues, eles can change attunements etc and we cant use DS?
It just doesnt seem fair and it also still wouldnt be as important as it is for the afforementioned classes.

Looking at it from a pvp perspective its annoying that we dont have any “tricks” to use on stomps (other than plague stomping).

Sorry for the long post

TL;DR change the UI in DS. the rest are secondary

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Icarus Pherae.4680:

It is not nor has it ever been a second life bar, it is a second downed state. Think about it 4 skills, degens, pretty sure in early beta that WAS the necro downed state.

I thought it was well known that Death Shroud was originally the necro downed state.

If DS was originally the Necro downed state, what was Necro’s original profession mechanic? Or did they just originally not have a profession mechanic at all until dying?

Electro.4173:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Icarus Pherae.4680:

It is not nor has it ever been a second life bar, it is a second downed state. Think about it 4 skills, degens, pretty sure in early beta that WAS the necro downed state.

I thought it was well known that Death Shroud was originally the necro downed state.

If DS was originally the Necro downed state, what was Necro’s original profession mechanic? Or did they just originally not have a profession mechanic at all until dying?

Death Shroud. That has always been the class mechanic. You could activate it while you were still up, but then you didn’t have it if you got downed. It also had a built-in Spectral Walk effect originally.

They decided that a necro was just way too hard to kill that way (immune to stomps, for one) and changed it out from being our downed state, but they never changed the UI to reflect that.

DS should:

• provide the basis for Necro “attrition”
• include functionality viable to all builds

Thus I would:

1. remove the “downed state” UI
2. ensure DS is useful to all builds, not just power. (auto determined by weapon is a solid suggestion in my opinion)
3. utilities and healing available/working (including regen boon)

then maybe add a number 5 skill because that would be cool…

Speed up the #1 skill or give it more power, speed up the #2 skill tremendously.