Guild Wars 2

After talking with friends who play Necromancers, this bug only seems to affect those of us who play Asuran Necros.

When entering Death Shroud, Life Transfer (skill 4) is sometimes not able to be used right away, despite having plenty of life force and not being on cooldown. Hitting 4 repeatedly will sometimes trigger the ability as usual and other times cause the ability to go on cooldown without ever having gone off. Another possible outcome of attempting to use Life Transfer is that it will be interrupted before completing normally.

When observing this bug there is sometimes an odd visual effect of the skill bar “flipping” like it would if you were switching weapons, only without doing so. And sometimes the square representing the F1 key (ending death shroud) will “flip” as well, temporarily looking locked and then normal again. I don’t know if this visual effect is related but it seems to happen concurrently with Life Transfer failure.

Also: this bug only started happening for me in the last week or so. The first few weeks of the game Life Transfer worked totally fine, which is why I know it’s NOT working fine now.

This doesn’t seem to happen 100% of the time, more like 50%, and I have no idea what causes Life Transfer to fail or not.

I have some more information about this bug.

When you first enter Death Shroud, sometimes the F1 icon will be a gray lock instead of the usual Leave Death Shroud icon. I believe this is directly related to the Life Transfer problem as follows. First, when the icon “flips” back to normal, the WHOLE bar is flipping with it, interrupting whatever you’re doing (almost always Life Transfer). Second, if you start LT right before the flip it won’t even go off, but it WILL be put on cooldown. Third, you can successfully use LT if and only if you wait for the flip to finish before starting the skill. Otherwise LT is unavailable or interrupted.

A friend of mine started having the exact same problems today. The only difference is that he’s playing a Sylvari Necromancer.

He didn’t seem to have any issues before that, but all of a sudden it started behaving very erratic and he also described these locks and flips and also getting knocked out of DS when he was hit.

Update:

Are you by any chance using a full set of Superior Rune of Vampirism? My friend just did a couple of tests and it seems to be related to the sixth rune (turn into mist).

So it may be that when you enter DS and flips to your life force, the rune may think you went below 10% health and turns you into mist which locks you out.

He kept getting lockouts all the time (especially when getting hit while in DS), but when he used only 5 runes from the set (by removing a piece of gear) he had no issues at all anymore and everything functioned normally again.

So it seems that the issue is not related to your race, but caused when having a full set of Superior Rune of Vampirism on your gear and turning into DS.