Guild Wars 2

This is such a teasing stat combo. Necromancers have a rather lack luster trait that steals heath on crit. its okay, not that great but it isn’t so terrible it should be removed or completely reworked. However, if the necromancer could actually benefit from life stealing in Death shroud, then This stat in combination with Vampiric precision along with other life stealing trait we could have ourselves an interesting build on our hands. I don’t know how viable it would be but I will still be willing to make all the jewels, armor and weapons to test it out at least in pve. This stat gets me so excited over something I can’t do.

Step up arena net. Let necros heal in death shroud!… If nothing else, at least let us do it in PvE and WvW first.

Well I was running cleric’s ascended weapons as filler but I decided to take a break from the game to see how anet handles this upcoming patch only for this tease to drop as you said. This would bring my siphoning necromancer right to the point where life steal food would give her 50% crit chance so I’m fairly sad about my cleric investment.

I’de rather have decent non ds life steal before the ability to heal while in ds. I just feel like it would be quicker to balance and anet wouldn’t be as scared to do so, but I’m up for any change to life stealing really.

Monoman.2068:

Well I was running cleric’s ascended weapons as filler but I decided to take a break from the game to see how anet handles this upcoming patch only for this tease to drop as you said. This would bring my siphoning necromancer right to the point where life steal food would give her 50% crit chance so I’m fairly sad about my cleric investment.

I’de rather have decent non ds life steal before the ability to heal while in ds. I just feel like it would be quicker to balance and anet wouldn’t be as scared to do so, but I’m up for any change to life stealing really.

Allowing for the necromancer to heal in death shroud has been a topic for months and months. Its been suggested on numerous occasions. One problem is its our primary defense and yet it actually functions poorly with life stealing skills which has been a major complaint for a long time. Our 2 primary ways to deal with damage actually function rather poorly together. I personally find that to be rather poor design.

Death shroud has never felt like a complete mechanic to me.

Its because DS was very majorly reworked “recently”, and it has a lot of hold-overs from its old states. Also, imo, it was a very lazily done rework, in that they seem to have done shortcuts (like making it a “transform”) which lead to a lot of issues.

Bhawb.7408:

Its because DS was very majorly reworked “recently”, and it has a lot of hold-overs from its old states. Also, imo, it was a very lazily done rework, in that they seem to have done shortcuts (like making it a “transform”) which lead to a lot of issues.

I concur. I could have agreed with arena net’s nerf to ds where it over flowed into our life, if it didn’t function so poorly as it was. I could still agree with that nerf if a few changes where put into place. And allowing us to heal in ds would be an great start.

I’ve always hoped that the nerf was made with the plan to make other changes in the future. I still hope that the upcoming death magic changes will include a 15 point trait that has a similar mechanic to “old” DS.

It remains to be seen if that is well placed hope or a pipe dream, but oh well. I agree though that as is DS just doesn’t cut it. It is pretty sad when your main defensive mechanics actively invalidate each other.

Bhawb.7408:

I’ve always hoped that the nerf was made with the plan to make other changes in the future. I still hope that the upcoming death magic changes will include a 15 point trait that has a similar mechanic to “old” DS.

It remains to be seen if that is well placed hope or a pipe dream, but oh well. I agree though that as is DS just doesn’t cut it. It is pretty sad when your main defensive mechanics actively invalidate each other.

Darn it, why aren’t we disagreeing? Stop agreeing with me! Lol. :p

Anet is pretty scared of siphoning. Just look at how they’re nerfing vampiric master, which is arguably the only acceptable form of siphoning, while leaving the rest of siphoning alone despite people continuing to point out that it’s crap? It also doesn’t help that very few of the necromancer’s abilities scale with healing power (making it a lack luster stat for us), let alone the measly amount of scaling you get from siphoning. Until Anet gets over their fear of siphoning, I wouldn’t expect them to ever allow us to heal in death shroud.

Anet seem to fear the Necro in general, leaving us in this sort of limbo. Why don’t other classes fear us as much as Anet does?!

jakalofnaar.1702:

Anet seem to fear the Necro in general, leaving us in this sort of limbo. Why don’t other classes fear us as much as Anet does?!

its because of GW1.

striker.3704:

Anet is pretty scared of siphoning. Just look at how they’re nerfing vampiric master, which is arguably the only acceptable form of siphoning, while leaving the rest of siphoning alone despite people continuing to point out that it’s crap? It also doesn’t help that very few of the necromancer’s abilities scale with healing power (making it a lack luster stat for us), let alone the measly amount of scaling you get from siphoning. Until Anet gets over their fear of siphoning, I wouldn’t expect them to ever allow us to heal in death shroud.

I think there are a few problems with siphoning at the moment. The first being that its a damage buff and a healing buff at the same time. This leads the necromancer to be dealing extra damage while getting heals. Nothing besides life stealing in the game does damage and heals. This leads to it being poorly balance.

I have a few suggestions to help this problem of it not scaling high enough while keeping it in check.

The first would be to change the Vampiric trait’s nature. Rather then being on hit, as a passive bonus, lets say it does something along the lines of, siphone on hit when your health is below 25%-50%. This makes it so the siphoning could be scaled quite a bit higher as it is no longer a passive that is always active. This also makes it more of an attrition ability as it helps you to stabilize when you are dying and pressures your foe.

Second, I would remove its damage from being able to scale with power. Both its healing and its damage should be the same numbers. You also shouldn’t be able to steal more life then what your opponent has. Much like in the first game. Both the healing and the damage sides of it will scale exclusively with healing and the damage will only be indirectly effected by traits or runes that increase healing power. This would also mean that Poison would reduce the amount of both damage and healing siphoning would give.

Third, ICDs should be used. However they shouldn’t be used inappropriately. Life stealing traits should use ICDs more often as a cap on how far they can go with out being on every possible thing. My vampiric rework, for example, wouldn’t need a ICD however something like Vampiric precision could use one and have its healing scaled up.

Fourth, Life stealing wouldn’t be damage. I’m not saying it wouldn’t harm your foe. Just that it wouldn’t be a normal form of damage. So it couldn’t actually critical and can’t be reduced. So skills like life siphon would only steal life and would be unable to critical.

But these are my ideas.

Has anyone actually noticed a difference in vampiric build performance since the patch to buff those traits? The scaling for healing is there and it is real, it just is difficult to notice; especially when receiving spike damage that utterly dwarfs it.

Anchoku.8142:

Has anyone actually noticed a difference in vampiric build performance since the patch to buff those traits? The scaling for healing is there and it is real, it just is difficult to notice; especially when receiving spike damage that utterly dwarfs it.

Ironically, the change to scaling never occurred to Vampiric Master, which has been stuck at a flat 72 per proc since the change (without scaling). It makes the nerf to it a bit more humorous, considering it should have been significantly stronger the whole time.

But yes, even with VM not working, I’ve noticed the buffs a little.

If they actually made the vampiric traits worthwhile outside of zookeeper builds then no healing in deathshroud would be justifiable

If they had gone ahead and made sigil of vampirism actually siphon health to make a real siphon build I would have been a very happy puppy

azuzephyr.7280:

If they actually made the vampiric traits worthwhile outside of zookeeper builds then no healing in deathshroud would be justifiable

If they had gone ahead and made sigil of vampirism actually siphon health to make a real siphon build I would have been a very happy puppy

If siphoning was good enough to the point where not being able to heal in death shroud was justifiable, then we end up with the problem of making those builds avoid using DS like the plague. Which is still a problem.