Guild Wars 2

Signet:

Passive:
-25% stun duration.

Active:
Convert one boon into a condition. For every boon you convert you gain stability. (10 secs, 10 stacks max).

Number of Targets: 5.
Cooldown: 90 seconds.
Cast time: 1 sec cast time.

Can work as either a ground targetting skill or can work similar like ‘Signet of the Locust’.

Well:

Base damage deals similar damage like ‘Well of Corruption’, but the damage gets a 10% increase for every condition on your foe.

Pulse: 1sec.
Duration: 6 seconds.
Number of Targets: 5.
Cooldown: 60 secs.
Cast time: 1/2 sec cast time.

A dragon who’s name starts with an S? That can only be Spyro.

I myself made a suggestion about Axe months ago https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Suggestion-Axe-rework, maybe it can give you some additional ideas.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Bluewizard.2694:

Maybe it would be more interesting to increase this to 6%, meaning that if we hit 5 foes we get a cooldown reduction of 30%, instead of the 25% we get now. This way, we get more healing over time (even in general through all shouts), can use Rise more often, and have an elite skill that will be more impact full without losing the main idea behind the shouts, and more importantly: without giving free gifts.

If we hit 5 foes currently with a traited shout, it has a 35% total cooldown reduction.

I know, but I was only talking about the additional reduction we get from hitting foes.

I agree with your suggestions of issue 1. More specifically the suggested change to Vital Persistence is a suggestion more people have made and it’s quite unfortunately that we haven’t had some form of communication from the devs to know why they dislike the suggestion or why they see no need for change.

Concerning your second issue, I’m gonna be quite honest. Never really used the trait as I play more as a power Reaper, but I can most certainly understand your way of thinking. Would have no problem with one of those changes.

However, I don’t agree with the conclusions you make concerning your third issue. Yes, I agree the healing skill could have some increased healing. Yes, I agree Rise is very important when dealing with heavy pressure. And yes, I would like to see a small decrease in cooldown from Chill to the Bone, mainly as I use the skill in WvW to get my stability. However, I dislike the idea of giving free, baseline gifts. I truly believe there are other ways to tackle the problems you describe, and I personally think that one of them would be to look at the trait Augury of Death. Currently, we get a baseline 10% reduction, and an additional 5% for every foe we hit. Maybe it would be more interesting to increase this to 6%, meaning that if we hit 5 foes we get a cooldown reduction of 30%, instead of the 25% we get now. This way, we get more healing over time (even in general through all shouts), can use Rise more often, and have an elite skill that will be more impact full without losing the main idea behind the shouts, and more importantly: without giving free gifts.

For base necro, my top 5 list of ‘jobs to do’ are:

1. Vital persistence and Shroud reduction.

Right now, while in Shroud, we lose about 4% every second. While this isn’t much of an issue in PvE, in PvP this is quite important due to the lack of stability and therefore our need for our second life bar. In order to “fix” this, I would propose to give us a general Shroud reduction of 3%, instead of 4% now, while letting Vital Persistence reduce this by 33%. This means Vital Persistence would have the same as it has today, but our Life Force would be better controllable without it.

2. Spectral armor and Spectral walk.

Don’t get me wrong, these are already two great skills. However, due to our lack of stability, I kinda feel that the cool down on these two skills are two high given the fact that we are quite dependent on stun breakers. Therefore, I would propose to reduce the base cool down on each skill by 10 seconds in order to allow us to have faster stun breakers than we have today. Accordingly, I would therefore also reduce the effect (either the lf gain or the duration) in order to get it inline with the cool down reduction.

3. Long range dps.

I was quite surprised when I noticed the buff for scepter during the last patch, most certainly given the fact that lately most topics on the forums talked about suggestions for a rework on all axe skills. However, as we are talking about base necro, I would therefore look at the bigger picture and talk more in general about long range dps as I believe not only axe and staff should fit here, but also the Death Shroud auto attack. Currently, the DS auto attack deals more damage when within 600 range of a target, which is something I always found quite odd given the fact that we have no stability, no mobility, an already decent close combat weapon called ‘Dagger’ and now even an elite spec which focuses on close combat. Therefore, I believe that the damage modifiers should be exchanged, allowing us to deal more damage with our auto attack when the target is further away.

4. Death magic

For me, this traitline should be a bit more focused about our tankiness, and a bit less the “MM traitline”. Don’t get me wrong, MM necro’s truly deserve the traits they have now, but I have the feeling this traitline offers too little for non-MM users.
Even though the traitline itself has some nice traits, like ’Corrupter’s Fervor’ or ‘Shrouded Removal’, the minor traits are quite basic compared to the ones of our other traitlines. I would therefore rework this traitline a bit in order to make it a general “tanky necro” traitline, in contrast to the “MM necro traitline” it is today.

PS. Did I already mention that I would allow the use of the additional toughness we can get from traits, for “Deathly Strength”?

5. Elites

For me, this is quite a problem for base necro. While I’m now so used of playing with “Chill to the bone”, I honestly have no idea which elite I would really use as a base necro. Probably “Plague form”, as it is our only skill that allows us to stay alive while we are getting focused or getting zerged. But as you might have guessed, it honestly indicates how poor our choices are for choosing an elite skill that matches the game type and the play type we wanna play.
Which way to go than? Well, for me there are two options. Either the current ones get a small rework, or we try to introduce new elites for our wells and signets. As I believe elites skills for both of these skill groups might be welcome, for both PvE, WvW and PvP necro’s, I would rather go for the second option first and see which way we can improve the others later on.

And yes, I know we could improve some other things as well. But as we are talking about base necro, I would first focus on these topics, in order to get base necro more in line with Reaper.

Thanks already to all those who made some remarks or suggestions. Who knows what comes out of it. ^^

guildabd.6529:

Increase range to 1500.

I personally don’t think axe range should be increased to 1500 range. Of course, it would be quite useful, however the moment it becomes 1500 range will be the moment we can forget any further improvements to axe due to the way the axe skill works. This isn’t that noticeable maybe in PvE, but in PvP or WvW people will notice that axe does direct damage in comparison to other mid/long range weapon skills who’s projectiles first need to cover a distance before hitting the target. Increasing its range would therefore make axe skills quite hard to dodge or to escape from it. I therefore think that due to it’s concept, the 900 range is enough for axe but that the problem with axe is that its skills don’t fit the role well of damage dealing skills.

OlliX.1705:

I don’t like the Unholy Feast idea, as I feel like it works against itself and our other boon-punishing skills.

Dealing more damage per boon on the target contradicts with the boon removal on the skill, as well as our theme of corrupting boons.

I think all your other ideas are good. The potential 25% damage modifier might be a bit much though.

The theme of corrupting boons is mostly useful for condi-oriented builds. This is something that isn’t really the case for axe, as it’s supposed to be used as a power weapon as opposed to condi weapons. Therefore, adding more boon conversions to the weapon would mean you would convert them, but they would hardly do any damage due the lack of condition damage. One could off course insist on the usage of offensive hybrid runes/armor sets but, as one could see, this would really limit the general usage of the weapon as non of the other attacks have any sort of damaging conditions.

I personally therefore don’t agree with the fact that this change would make the weapon skill works against our theme. We would still be in the theme of punishing people with lot’s of boons, however this time this would result in direct damage as opposed to condi damage.

To come back to your point of the 25% damage modifier, this could indeed be a bit to hard in certain situations, however keep in mind all changes as well. Previously the skill lasted for 2.25 seconds while now it will only last for 2 seconds, meaning it will do faster damage, but it will also be easier for people to dodge it due to the shorter channeling time, which decrease the overall dps.

mazut.4296:

I like the Unholy feast idea. Punishing foes with more boons, but this will get negated by protection. If the mechanic can remove protection as priority then I like this. Otherwise I prefer to corrupt 2 boons.
The retaliation idea is also great. To give 1.5s of retaliation per target, up to 7.5s. Good buff there.

The retaliation effect is already on the skill. I only copied it to prevent misunderstandings as people might think I would remove.

And I personally don’t mind if people have protection on them. Off course it will deal more damage if the boon is ripped off, but on the other hand I think one of the powers of the skill is that with the current skill you can transform any boon, from stability to resistance. I therefore don’t think a priority to protection is necessary.

In terms of your suggestion concerning two boons, I personally think this idea of the convert two boons idea is something that could be implemented either for Unholy Feast or Spiteful Spirit, as that GM trait needs some rework as well. However, as axe is supposed to be a non-condi dps weapon, I would therefore think my suggestion would fit it better than and increase of boon conversions.

For a long time, I have doubted to make any suggestion thread about axe due to the fact that I was doubting whether a developer would ever read it. But since they plan on giving scepter a huge and unnecessary buff, I thought it might be a good idea to try an axe topic in order to try to make axe a more useful weapon for power necro’s. Before you continue reading, this topic is just a suggestion topic, meaning everyone is free to jump in and give their opinion about my suggestions or to give in a suggestion them self. I’m fully aware that some “numbers” won’t as high as some would expect, however this has multiple reasons.

First of all, I really want to prevent the necro axe of becoming OP. I believe everyone has seen the recent impacts of OP stuff and has seen what happens when things get OP. As I believe axe isn’t the only thing that could use some adjustments, I therefore would introduce a new axe weapon first and see how it works, in order to see how everything works out in order to make small adjustments later.

Secondly, I also would like to prevent necro’s axe to join the “that weapon x of class y does more damage, buff us”. I believe a weapon should have it basic idea, and that the combination of traits and game play should reward players rather than giving them free buffs, one of which the suggestion about scepter auto attack is a good example.

So after this long intro, let’s start than. My main idea was to stick as best as possible with the “single target” weapon idea. However, I added some small adjustments in order to make it way more rewarding and useful in multiple situations.

Axe skills

Rendering Claws

It’s damage get’s increased by 5%. But it now will only take 3/4 second instead of 1 in order to faster apply vulnerability.

I’m fully aware that this first change won’t be what people are expecting, however don’t forget to read my trait suggestion before stopping here. I really want to keep axe auto attack single target, just like scepter auto. However, in order to make it more useful I would make a small damage increase and make it more useful for stacking vulnerability. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not saying this should be the end goal for axe auto. However, with everything in mind this could be a first step to make axe more useful for every game mode.

Ghastly Claws

It’s damage get’s increased by 5%. It’s channeling time gets reduced to two seconds. But instead of dealing damage to one target, targets in a radius of 150 of the target also receive 25% of the damage received by the main target.

This change is still focused around the “axe single target” theme, however with the adjustment of making axe more useful for team fights with a, to the best of my knowledge, unique mechanism as the 25% damage dealt to the surrounding players is only based on the actions and main damage dealt to the main character.

Let’s say for example that players, and opponents, A, B and C are standing somewhere, and B and C are standing in the 150 radius of player A. If you cast Ghastly Claws on player A, and this player decides to tank all damage, B and C will receive 25% of the damage dealt to player A, no matter whether they are blocking or not, and independently of their toughness level. If however player A decides to block, neither B or C will receive any damage.

I’m fully aware that this might quite special towards players who are used of using blocks or playing bunker builds, knowing that they might receive quite some damage if they are standing next to a glass cannon that get’s attacked. However, this is why the skill itself doesn’t get a massive damage increase on itself, and is also the reason why they receive only 25% of the damage dealt. And why the radius is only 150. However, I believe that this change would be quite useful for necro’s axe weapon, as it gives the skill a unique ability, again to the best of my knowledge, without giving up the main theme of the weapon. If you chose to pick out a glass cannon, you’ll get rewarded. However if you chose out a bunker or blocking character, you’ll get less rewarded when using this skill.

For those who are asking how far this “you’ll take damage anyway” idea goes, I would first start with only applying it for blocking characters. We can see later whether we want to add more options, or whether we want to slightly increase the dealt damage.

Unholy Feast

It’s damage get’s increased by 5%. Cripple nearby foes and turn their boons (1) into conditions (1). Gain retaliation for each foe you strike. Punish foes with boons by dealing 10% more damage for every boon on your foe.

As I believe this skill is already quite useful for necro’s, I was thinking about a way in order to make it more useful towards the type of game play we have seen previously. I was therefore tempted to increase the amount of boons you convert, however as this is a power weapon I really wanted it to keep it this way. I therefore was thinking back about the old version of Feast of Corruption skill, which allowed the skill to deal 10% more damage for every condition on a foe. This is why I want to give something similar to this axe skill, but with boons instead of conditions. That’s why this skill will now apply 10% more damage for every boon on a character, making this skill a quite powerful AoE skill towards boon spamming machines. Or at least, that’s what I hope it will become.

On a side note: I would first let the damage be applied, before converting the boon into a condition.

Axe trait

Unholy Fervor.

Reduces recharge on axe skills. Axe skills deal 1% more damage for every stack of vulnerability on your foe. Ghastly Claws generates an additional 0.2% life force for every stack of vulnerability on your foe.

This is a trait idea I, and afterwards others as well, already made once. The idea is to turn axe into a power weapon that could be used in any game mode, without making it OP in a specific one. In PvE, opponents will mostly likely have some higher number of vulnerability stacks, meaning this trait will allow axe to deal quite some additional damage. However, as this will be less the case in wvw or pvp this also means axe won’t be as Op when using this trait.

However, I hope now everyone understands why my damage increase numbers weren’t higher than 5%. And why my auto attack change wasn’t world changing. It’s because when you equip the axe trait, the axe auto attack will by itself deal more damage over time and will be quite necessary in order to buff the other axe skills. As the axe trait is also focused around the amount of vulnerability stacks, I believe this will also give necro’s more options when creating their builds.

And that’s all folks. Feel free to comment if you disagree with anything. And off course feel free to leave a comment if you like them.

I’m also hoping they make some changes towards our baseline Shroud decrease.

Josh Davis.6015:

Mysticjedi.6053:

Josh Davis.6015:

Aside from skill adjustments, another way we can adjust balance in PvP is by looking at the runes/sigils/amulets that are available for use through the customization panel.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts (with the high-level goals from the blog in-mind) on adding/removing various sigils/amulets/runes. In general, our goal for PvP is to be faster-paced with a higher-level of lethality than what we’re seeing in S1.

I know we’ve had this conversation a few times before, but it’s always important to have this discussion with the correct context in mind.

It would be nice to be able to customize our amulets instead of being stuck with static amulets. This would open more possibilities for players to make more unique builds. Allow for the amulets to be either 3 stat or 4 stat combos.

More variety in stat combos can definitely be a thing – but I don’t think manual stat allocation is in the cards currently.

How about a system where you can pick one amulet, ring and earring, in which case the amulet stands for 60% of today’s stat, while both the ring and earring stand for 20%? This way you have a system that allows people to fine tune their build, allow classes to pick up amulets they else would never be able to use, while keeping it simple for newer players.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Qugi.2653:

Use to be suggestion forum but Anet close it. They say it was too hard for dev to find suggestion in topic they have interest in. That forum also move really fast too.

That’s right, the Suggestions Forum was hard to parse. Having individual suggestions in the appropriate forum — a suggestion about Warrior balance in the Warrior forum, for instance — makes it easier to gather the input.

Could any of the developers maybe add a new notification to the website in order to indicate whether a dev or anyone else from the staff has opened a topic? I can fully understand that devs can’t respond in every topic, but without a response people have no idea whether their input is read by any staff member or whether they are just talking to their own community. A notification or visual emblem next to a topic might resolve this problem.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Please do that. It helps us immensely in cutting down on RMT spam, and, more importantly, on nailing the people who steal accounts. (It’s often a stolen account being used to advertise, so your report can help on two levels.)

Hi Gaile. As I also report gold sellers, I noticed they were still able to whisper me after I reported them. I was therefore wondering if it could be possible to implement some kind of system that would disable players/gold sellers of whispering us until we log out, after we reported them for verbal abuse, gold selling or scamming? I find it a bit weird that I would need to manually block players/gold sellers after I reported them in order to disable them of whispering me.

As I see you want to be quite tanky: ever used the Cavalier or Crusader amulet together with Decimate defenses? Still gives you power and toughness but makes your crits deal more damage.

Bhawb.7408:

MM shouldn’t run it anymore, before Reaper it was a tossup between Spite or Soul Reaping for your third line, depending on how you liked to play, but at this point Reaper (and more importantly Reaper Shroud and Rise!) just out performs it in every way.

However, I want to argue against the idea that VP is mandatory overall. What actually happens that causes nearly every build to take it is that:

1. Most trait lines are pretty bad, generally speaking. Only Spite, Soul Reaping, and Reaper are always good in every build and worth looking at. Curses is very specific to condi, Blood Magic is pretty much only used by MM, and Death Magic is fairly specific to MM and tanky shroud builds. This leads to point 2
2. You almost always take Soul Reaping. It was one of our best lines for a long time, and it still is. Wouldn’t really matter if VP was there or not, you’d still go Soul Reaping. And since you’re already in Soul Reaping, we get the final issue
3. VP has no competition. Even if it was bad, the vast majority of builds don’t care about the fear trait at all (its just barely better than totally worthless), and a lot of builds don’t use spectrals (on top of the fact that the spectral trait doesn’t work properly on SWall) because they aren’t really worth the slot.

So you end up not taking VP because its mandatory for all Necros period, but because why not. In fact, most people use VP and then constantly cite situations (like burst) that are completely irrelevant to VP’s strength. Its also a bit overloaded having both CDR on Shroud and passive shroud increase, but by no means mandatory as a trait overall; its just a strong trait in a common line that has no competition.

I mostly agree with it, although I would like to add the fact to address how important Soul Reaping is for necromancers in terms of general life force control. If you look at it from a PvP point of view, you will see that all three minor traits have a direct impact on our life force control (from generating more LF to having a larger LF pool), while most traits you will pick will either allow you generate more life force (Soul Marks, Spectral Mastery) or to have less LF drain (Vital Persistance). This is something I would like to see changed in the future by allowing us to gain life force on different ways through traits of the other traitlines, of which Blighter’s Boon in the Reaper traitline is the best example.

Minor traits:

• Barbed Precision
• Convertible Consumption
  Gain life force for every boon you convert to a condition or for every boon you remove. Life Force gain: 3%.
• Fear the Weak
  Fear deals damage (90% of the base damage it does now when having no condition on a foe). Increases critical hit chance for each condition on your foe. Critical Chance increase: 5%.

Major Traits:
1. Adept:

• Terrifying Descent
  Inflict fear on foes around you when you take falling damage or when downed. Take less falling damage. Recharge falling fear: 30 seconds. Recharge downed fear: 60 seconds.
• Plague Sending
  When your conditions meet the threshold, your next critical hit will cast Plague Signet on your target. Grant life force for each condition you transfer. Life Force gain: 2%.
• Spiteful Renewal
  Consume conditions to gain health when you strike a foe below the health threshold. Consuming conditions grants life force. Life Force gain: 2%.

2.Master

• Master of Corruption
• Path of Corruption
  Shroud skill 2 now additionally converts boons into conditions. Boons converted to conditions: 3.
• Lingering Curse
  While wielding a scepter, gain a stack of Lingering Power for each condition you inflict on a foe. Lingering Power: +10 condition damage; +30 expertise; 10 seconds; max 25 stacks.

3.Grandmaster

• Weakening Shroud
  Cast enfeeble when entering shroud. Convert one boon to one condition when entering shroud. Critical hits inflict weakness.
• Master of Terror
  Fear deals more damage for every condition on a foe. Fear damage increase for every condition: 5%.
• Chilling Darkness
  Blind foes that you chill. Blind duration: 4 seconds. Recharge: 12 seconds.

For those who are wondering what happened to Parasitic Contagion. I would merge this skill with Unholy Martyr. This would than mean that your conditions heal you while being out of Shroud, while inside of Shroud you would gain life force from getting conditions from your allies.

Starfall.6425:

Atharian.7092:

For power Reaper, what are the recommended runes? Are runes of the Scholar the only way to go or are there decent alternatives? I somewhat dislike the idea of Scholar runes as they don’t really apply to me outside Raids all that much, so I’m looking for ideas.

Strengh (or Rage and Flame Legion) I see as alternatives.
Because you already have 100% crit you basically want runes that give power and ferocity and most of all a flat damage multiplier.. and that is scholar.

If he’s using Valkyrie he might also be using Wurm runes with Furious Maintenance Oil. Gives him about 240% crit.
And if he doesn’t use Valkyrie, and don’t has the money for Strength, he could even use Ice runes. Also fits more to his question on having a gear set that also can be used outside of Raids. Although I have no exact idea of much the damage difference is between Ice and Strength.

For a hybrid pvp build, I would say the basic setup is X/warhorn – staff. Warhorn is mostly used as off hand weapon due to the fact that it gives swiftness, LF on hitting foes and has an interrupt. This is in contrast to the other off hand weapons, like dagger and focus, which also have some nice stuff but which are either replaceable due to to traits (focus vs Chill of Death) or due to their lack of LF regeneration.

In case of the mainhand, that really depends on how you wanna play. The most used weapons right now for hybrid builds will probably be dagger and scepter, where it all depends on your type of play and runes. Wanna be more focused on pure damage? Strength runes + dagger. Wanna be more focused on ranged, condi damage?Aristocracy runes and scepter. That’s something you need to see for yourself.

When playing PvP, I really like playing Reaper. Not only the specialization itself is really cool, also the traits and shouts are something that I find to be better working as initially expected. There is however one shout that I personally find a bit underwhelming: Suffer.

Suffer is a 20 second cooldown shout that transfer 1 condition to each foe you strike. While that sounds really good and interesting (potentially being able to remove 5 conditions) it does feel a but underwhelming to me when dealing with a situation when facing multiple opponents.

To explain it, I will use the simple example of a condi mesmer. No, I’m not making this suggestion just based of fighting condi mesmers, but it will just make it easier to understand. Because when fighting a condi mesmer, you will face the actual mesmer as well as its clones and illusions meaning Suffer will work on each one of them. And this is where I find the shout a bit underwhelming. Because while you’re fighting, you will get multiple conditions on you, like Torment, Confusion, Bleeding, Poison. When you than use Suffer, each target you hit will only get one condition. For me, this is a bit underwhelming when facing real condi builds as I have the feeling it doesn’t really reward me from using this shout over possible other condi transfer or consumption skills.

I would therefore suggest to make this shout a bit more rewarding by increasing the amount of conditions each targets get, based on the amount of targets you hit. To come back to my condi mesmer example: when you have confusion, torment and bleeding on you and Suffer hits 3 targets, each target will get all 3 conditions. But when you only hit 2 targets, each target will only get 2 conditions.

I know for some this might sound a bit too OP, so in order to make it, what I would find, more useful and possible balanced, I would suggest to either increase it’s initial cooldown to 25 seconds or to decrease the initial time of the applied Chill to 2 seconds. This way, the shout will still fit the idea of being rewarding when used against multiple opponents while on the other hand be more useful and rewarding in situations where you are dealing against condi build(s).

Personally I would say that all need some sort of different build, depending on the type of game play.

In terms of WvW zerging I would say wells would still do well due to the combination of AoE damage and life siphoning. To the best of my knowledge, this Well build will be close to what most zerg well necro’s are using. In case you wanna play Reaper, I’ve seen some video’s where people are switching Soul Reaping for Reaper which is something you can try and check for yourself. In the case of base necro you will be more of a backline necro, dealing damage with your wells and with Life Blast, which is why you need Unyielding Blast as it allows Life Blast to pierce up to 5 targets. In the case of Reaper you could go for Blighter’s Boon which will give you some more defensive abilities.

You will notice I used Spite and not Death Magic. In terms of WvW zerging, I would use Spite for 2 reasons. First of all in will allow you to deal more damage, which is in WvW zerging a bit the role of a well necro. And if you would play Reaper, instead of base Necro with Soul Reaping, Spite will give you more in return due to Blighter’s Boon as it will give you Might stacks, allowing you to easily gain LF or health. If you would however have problems with the conditions you are receiving, you can always consider dropping Well of Blood and using consume conditions.

In terms of PvP, I personally wouldn’t be using Wells. Wells are really powerful, don’t get me wrong, but due to the fact that wells are static when placed and other people can easily run out of them (which is different from WvW zerging) I personally would recommend a different build for PvP. As your build contained a Reaper and you said you’re searching for a ‘non dagger’ build I would recommend a build I’ve been using myself lately that uses both Reaper and Axe. I’m not going to say that it’s good against every build or for every situation, but I’m quite happy about it.

Again you will notice a few differences with your initial build. The most common are that I’m using Spite again, for reasons I mentioned earlier and in the case of PvP also for Chill of Death, but also Soul reaping. In PvP, most certainly for a power build, I would say that at this moment Soul Reaping is kinda mandatory for a power Necro/Reaper due to the need of Vital Persistance. Certainly when being in Reaper Shroud, you will need to fight at close range, meaning you will receive quite some damage. As Vital Persistance decrease your LF drain while in Reaper Shroud by 50%, this is a trait that is unfortunately quite needed in order to both allow you to use Reaper Shroud for dealing damage, as well as allowing you to take some damage.

As I haven’t been doing WvW roaming in quite some time, I would say you rather ask someone else about. I’ve there are people who disagree with what I’ve said or who have questions about what I’ve said, feel free to say so.

Blaine Tog.8304:

1. Life Blast really should be a Projectile Finisher. Probably 100% of the time, too, seeing how LF is a limited resource.

Although it’s a nice idea, I would rather see it’s cast time reduced to 3/4 seconds, with the appropriate adjustments to the damage, and let it have an auto pierce of 3 targets like most RS auto attacks. On the other hand, maybe your idea would be something nice to integrate in Unyielding Blast as this would else become quite a weak trait.

Blaine Tog.8304:

3. This is kinda a pie-in-the-sky wish, but I’d like to see a Blast finisher on Life Transfer, preferably every other pulse. It’s already quite a good skill so I don’t know that it needs this, but it would feel amazing.

That would be kinda OP. It would mean you would give a full party 25 might stacks by using 1 skill or would be able to completely heal your party when standing in a water field. I think this skill is good as it is, certainly when looking at the traits that affect this skill.

gavyne.6847:

Vital persistence baseline wouldn’t make necros op. Virtually all necros in pro tournaments have it, and they all still drop fast in any team fights. Focus reaper is still the meta.

I really don’t think making VP baseline would make necros op. It would widen build variety for sure. But with that said, I do agree it’s unlikely they would do that. This comes from long history of necros not able to get nice things, and what nice things we get, half of it is taken away (read: Blighter’s Boon for an example).

Just to be clear: I never had any intention in saying it would make certain builds OP. I’m just wondering how it would effect necro in general, talking from power necros to condi necros to more tanky necros. Just consider for example the signet necro build after a change to VP. In this case, one could consider to take Blood Magic over Soul Reaping as this way they get access to another signet trait that will allow them to corrupt more boons while on the other hand allowing them to get additional life siphon. Will this make them OP in team fights? Not at all. In fact they will still have to face the same problems they are facing today. But what about a 1vs1 situation? How will a change of VP and baseline LF decrease and a possible trait change, affect a 1vs1? What about condi-oriented minion builds that would now consider taking Curses or even Reaper for additional chill damage? All things we will have to consider and see.

Again, I’m not saying all these builds will become OP, neither will I say that these new builds will all be successful or the next pro-pvp necro build. But we have to consider the fact that making VP baseline would change quite a lot, and therefore also need to know what happens in most cases when things become too strong: nerfs. Therefore I think it would be better to first make a small change and see how it all works out. Is it not enough? Fine, then me being cautious was not necessary and we can ask to make it baseline. But if it is, we can focus on possible other changes. Because if making VP baseline would become too strong in certain situations, a nerf might bring us way back than the point we are at today.

meow one twenty.4376:

Terror – now takes off two stacks of Stability.

Don’t really agree with this change. Would transform Terror more into boons stripping condition, which would make an off hand weapon as Focus even less needful. Doesn’t mean off course terror needs some changes, but personally don’t really likes this one.

meow one twenty.4376:

Unholy Fervor – Axe skills do 1% more damage for every stack of Vulnerability on the target. (replaces flat 10% to Vulnerable foes).

I agree with this trait change. Proposed something similar in this topic.

Although I fully agree on the importance of Vital Persistence for necro’s in pvp, I’m not sure whether making it immediately baseline is the way to go. It surely would be quite useful for pure power necro’s but I’m afraid making it baseline would make more tanky necro’s a bit too strong.

I would therefore be more interested to see how a slight change to the trait would work. I would propose the general LF decrease from be lowered from 4% to 3%, while letting the trait decrease this value by another 33%. This way, using this trait will give us the same values as today but at least we have some lower decrease for every necro. This way, I think we can also better see the impact it will give on all types of necro builds.

Aktium.9506:

What if they made it so Master of Corruption also transferred 2 conditions on corruption skill use? So when you hit a corruption skill you are properly awarded and don’t get the awful negative effect and when you miss you’re stuck with a bunch of conds on you.

Or simply when you use a corruption skill you inflict the self-inflicted conditions on nearby foes as well.

I know the self- applied condi’s are a problem for quite some people, although I believe this is actually quite useful in certain situations as you can transfer these conditions allowing you to deal more damage.

However, a suggestion for people like you who dislike it as for people who want to see a buffed Parasitic Contagion. What if we had a trait that was some kind of merge between Parasitic Contagion and Shrouded Removal (from the Death magic line). My suggestion would be a trait that would still heal us for X% of applied condi damage while out of shroud, but while we are in shroud we would consume 1 condition every Y seconds gaining Z% of LF.

I’ve chosen for X, Y and Z to make it more general. However, the purpose of the trait seems quite clear I assume. While in normal state you would benefit from your applied conditions, in Shroud you would consume conditions on you meaning you either will have to chose between a condi transfer or LF regen.

Bhawb.7408:

Bluewizard.2694:

What if instead of trying to create a third horizontal traitline around Axe, and therefore more vulnerability and damage increase, we oriented this third horizontal line around consuming or transferring conditions to create a personal reward.

I don’t think it fits Spite particularly well, though its a cool idea overall. Spiteful Removal really only sits in spite because its always been there, instead of fitting the theme well. Instead I’ll use this idea for Curses, which I think does fit this line of thinking well, and could create interesting synergy between Plague Sending/Master of Corruption/reworked Parasitic Contagion.

I also thought about either proposing this for either Curses or Spite, however I’ve also seen in the past that quite some players are against the idea of adding “power necro stuff” in the Curses line. That’s why I thought it would fit this one more as it would fit with Spiteful Removal (or at least make this trait fit more in Spite) and would create a nice way of combining the Spite and Curses line (Master of Corruption for instance). However, it could also work in Curses indeed.

But as I see most people agree on an upgrade of Unholy Fervor, maybe anther suggestion for Axe. What if instead of a plain damage increase as it is now, +10% when a target has vulnerability, we would have a trait that increases damage for all Axe skills by +1% for every stack of vulnerability on the target while allowing Ghastly Claws to generate +1% more LF for every 5 stacks? I know when you think about it, a possible +25% would be kinda high but remember that this would only be the case if a target has 25 stacks of vulnerability, which mostly won’t be the case in PvP or WvW. This would mean that it would be a buff that people first need to work for, which makes it a rewarding buff, and that it would mean that Axe could be more useful in terms of damage for raids, fractals and dungeons without making it OP for PvP and WvW.

Just another idea of course. Let me all know what you think of it and what you like or dislike about it. I’ve seen quite some nice idea’s already which means the idea behind Bhawbs topics are a success.

Nice overview and I also quite agree with your general conclusions. However, I would like to add some thoughts to these.

First of all, I completely agree with Tim and spoj. I also believe that the trait should be updated to meet with the current existing PvE and PvP environment in which targets with no boons become more and more rare. Spojs’s idea would fit this well.

I also completely agree with the fact that the Axe (oriented) traits need some rework, however I feel like that the purpose of the Unholy Fervor trait is a bit redundant in the Spike traitline due to the fact that the trait focuses on weapon damage based on vulnerability even though we already have quite some traits that are focused around vulnerability.

At the start of their new trait line system, the devs stated that they wanted to build traitlines horizontally. This meant that horizontal traits had to be focused around the same theme. For example: Spiteful talisman, Chill of Death and Signets of Suffering are all the traits that are focused around removing boons on foes and getting rewarded for it. On the other hand, we have Bitter Chill, Rendering Shroud and Close to Death which are more oriented in allowing us to deal more damage.

What if instead of trying to create a third horizontal traitline around Axe, and therefore more vulnerability and damage increase, we oriented this third horizontal line around consuming or transferring conditions to create a personal reward. If you take a look at the Spiteful Renewal trait, you see a nice trait that rewards us with health by consuming a condition when hitting a foe. The example I want to use to illustrate my idea would be a master trait that would be some kind of merge between Harmonious Conduit (from the Tempest) and Bolstered Anguish (from Revenants Corruption traitline) which would mean we get a temporal damage increase effect (like Harmonious Conduit) whose actual damage increase would be based on every condition we consume or transfer (for example 2% increase per condition). This would mean we get a damage increase but only when we consume or transfer conditions, and therefore not a plain damage increase trait that everyone would take just for the damage modifier.

Bhawb.7408:

Because Vampiric Master was a really boring trait that once existed at the master tier, and did nothing but allow minions to siphon HP, so they nerfed it while rolling it into the minor trait. This was because they really didn’t have anything else to do with it, and moving it to Death Magic would have made MMs too strong. Vampiric Rituals on the other hand had every direct well trait rolled into itself, and anyone wanting to specialize in wells really wants VR anyway. So sure, if you want your well-siphons to be nerfed by about 30-40% and be a minor it would be possible to roll them into the baseline, but I don’t think it’ll help at all considering you’d have taken the un-nerfed version if you were in BM anyway.

Thanks already for the answer. I knew about the combination of all well traits, the information about the minions is new to me. I’ve only been playing the class for over a year, so must have missed that part back than.

However, I don’t really agree about your fear for a well-siphon nerf. This is off course a decision of the developer(s) which I’m fully aware off, but from my initial point of view there would be no real need for such a nerf as wells are still totally different than minions due to their static nature meaning that they would only siphon health when someone/something is standing in it. This is off course different with minions, which not only siphon health when attacking but which also last much longer than the usual 5 to 6 seconds that a well lasts.

And even at the end, it just all comes down on how such a change would occur. For example, a basic siphoning effect could be added to the Vampiric minor for wells, while the Vampiric Rituals trait could buff this to it’s current level. It is just one of many possible outcomes.

With HoT and the way minions were buffed in terms of incoming AoE damage, I was looking around all traits in order to check how I could use them in the PvE environment. While doing so, it came to my attention that whenever a minionmancer chooses the Blood Magic traitline, their minions automatically are able to siphon health. This is something I found quite useful as it allows me to take Transfusion for example as a grandmaster trait while still having this “selfish” healing ability.

As someone who normally takes wells, I was therefore wondering why necromancers who use wells need to take the grandmaster trait Vampiric Rituals to allow their wells to siphon health. My suggestion therefore would be to add this siphoning effect of wells to the Vampiric minor trait, meaning wells will siphon health the moment a necro uses the Blood magic traitline.

I’m fully aware that people will than find Vampiric Rituals a bit underrated for a grandmaster trait, however I didn’t add any proposition for this as I first want to focus on my main suggestion and see what you think about making wells automatically siphon health just like minions.

Tim.6450:

Curses has already enough trouble being a condition crit line as it is. Changing target the weak will not help it at all. Besides how will it help?+ I mean the rest of curses is not a good for PvE+ and for pvp we only reach 100 crit chance in shroud so it’s not useless there either.

That will depend how everything is in HoT. If the mobs hit harder or apply more conditions on us, the Curses traitline could be quite useful due to the condi transfer and weakness (just to give an example).

However, as I pointed out here and in other topics, for me the Curses traitline has two minor traits that offer crit chance, which for me is one too much. I would rather have one useful, condi oriented minor trait that gives us more crit and one, possible new, minor trait that gives something extra to both power and condi necro’s. Even though I’m aware that this will only be beneficial for power necro’s once the importance of Vital Persistance is lowered.

Tim.6450:

So how about instead of pointing our arrows at curses we point it at blood magic and give all our siphons a proper power scaling? Maybe vampiric presence might become a more noticable group utility.

Although I most definitely agree with this, there is one major problem. Namely that PvE traits and skills = PvP traits and skills. As long as this is the case, something like you mentioned will not be possible due to the high impact it will have in PvP as it will not only highly increase the damage of a power necro’s but also possible might draw away the attention from possible tweaks we need in terms of defense. Defensive tweaks that could be beneficial for both power and condi necro’s.

Tim.6450:

Bluewizard.2694:

Captain Unusual.9163:

Lahmia.2193:

Captain Unusual.9163:

So, the general consensus of this thread seems to be that, since condi necro is weak, we should change what few condi traits there are into more power-focused ones.

Neat.

The general consensus is that Necro needs Target the weak to be changed back. I’ve never been told to run something else as a Condi Necro in pvp or wvw. But constant “no necros” in lfg have shown us Necros need a power buff.

So, yes, you want to remove condi necros in favor of power necros. 10/10, top tier design.

Luckily not everyone feels the same way. ^^

I do.

I was referring to the fact that not everyone wants to remove condi necro’s. Sorry if that was unclear.

Captain Unusual.9163:

Lahmia.2193:

Captain Unusual.9163:

So, the general consensus of this thread seems to be that, since condi necro is weak, we should change what few condi traits there are into more power-focused ones.

Neat.

The general consensus is that Necro needs Target the weak to be changed back. I’ve never been told to run something else as a Condi Necro in pvp or wvw. But constant “no necros” in lfg have shown us Necros need a power buff.

So, yes, you want to remove condi necros in favor of power necros. 10/10, top tier design.

Luckily not everyone feels the same way. ^^

Lahmia.2193:

While we all know Necros aren’t as bad at damage (in pve) as people say, it is safe to say Necros are still one of the lowest dps classes. HoT will change this with the Reaper, but the meta seems to be Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper. With the Reaper being able to do 100% crit chance without any precision, I suggest Anet change Target the Weak back to it’s original form (+2% damage per condition on foe). This would make curses a viable traitline to contend with Soul Reaping. This would also mean Necros, who don’t want to spec Reaper, could pump out more than their current mediocre damage.

I slightly agree with you. I also believe necro’s should get access to certain damage modifiers and that the curses traitline has too many crit. traits. However, I personally have more problems with Furious Demise which is the master minor trait that gives fury when entering shroud. Because not only does this mean that we have two minor traits that give crit. chance in the same traitline, I also always doubted why necro’s need fury. I would therefore be more interesting in removing Furious Demise, and in making Target the Weak the master minor trait, keeping only the crit. chance bonus it gives now.

As for a new grandmaster minor trait, I was thinking for a long time about a damage modifier as well, but as many pointed out here, it needs to be useful for condition necro’s as well. Therefore I was more thinking about an offensive version of Corrupter’s Fervor. This means we could get both power as well as condition damage per condition inflicted on a foe, resulting in a trait that offers additional value for both power as condition necro’s, while still fitting the idea behind the traitline.

ronpierce.2760:

Bhawb.7408:

We need to see some of our might turned into damage modifiers, even a stacking damage buff would be welcomed, but we can’t keep throwing more and more might/vuln/crit chance at our traits.

I’m afraid of putting more of that stuff in spite until SR mandatory issue is resolved a bit. I’d be sad if every Reaper was tunneled into Spite/SR/Reaper. That’s my main concern.

If you are talking about a pure-DPS PvE Reaper, that will, to the best my knowledge, even be the case today. And the reason is quite simple: both Spite and SR are the only trait lines that provide damage modifiers. Spite when a target has no boons (5%) or when it’s below 50% health(20%), while SR gives a buff (+5%) when life-force is above the threshold.

In terms of Spite I would personally say that there is only one trait that I find debatable, which is “Unholy fervor” in terms of general dmg modifier vs weapon dmg modifier (as it is now). But in general I think we should question more the lack of damage modifiers in other trait lines. If you just take for example the Reaper traitline, I keep wondering why there is no offensive damage modifier against chilled foes.

But for me one of the traitlines that could be used for damage modifiers, as it originally did, but now just proves our problems concerning an overkill of crit. chance, is the curses traitline. If you just look at “Furious Demise” (Why does a necro need to give fury to itself? For me, this is not a boon belonging to the class.) and “Target the Weak” (Now +2% crit chance per condition on the target, previously +2% damage for every condition.) you could ask yourself why we need two minor traits in the same trait line that give increased crit. chance, and why we can’t have a damage modifier that would still belong to the class itself.

____________________________Spite____________________________
Unholy Fevor: remove Axe skill facts. Damage increase to vulnerable foes now applies to all skills and conditions. (5% PvP, 10% PvE)
Signets of Suffering now enables the passive effects of signets in Death Shroud as well.
___________________________Curses___________________________
Master of Corruption: Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1 and increase condition duration. (PvE)
Terror: 90% of ‘Damage with no conditions’ is now base damage. Instead ‘Terror’ now applies that Fear deals additional damage for each condition on your target.
_________________________Death Magic_________________________
Armored shroud: Add ‘Gain +400 toughness while channeling’.
_________________________Blood Magic_________________________
Quickening Thirst: Now applies for dagger and axe.
Vampiric and Vampiric Presence: Increase impact of ‘Power’ to ‘Life Siphon Damage’. (PvE)
Vampiric Rituals: Remove protection when cast to pulse protection (1 second).
Increase radius of Transfusion to 900. (PvE)
_________________________Soul Reaping_________________________
Vital Persistance: Degeneration decrease reduced to 30%. The other 20% decrease is added to Strength of the Undeath.
Foot in the Grave becomes a master trait.
Spectral Mastery becomes a grand master trait.
Spectral Mastery now adds additional benefits to Spectral skills.
- Spectral Grasp pierces (3 targets).
- Spectral Walk can now be used in mid air.
- Spectral Armor grants immunity to stuns and dazes. Possible compensation: reduce Spectral Armor base duration to 4 seconds.
- Spectral Wall now reflects projectiles.
- Litch Form now has increased movement speed (10%) and reduced casting time on its skills.
Dhuumfire has increased burning duration. (PvE)
Strength of Undeath damage modifier now applies for conditions as well.
Strength of Undeath now grants 10% increased damage while above the threshold. (PvE)

As I personally don’t believe in a combat system where PvE skills and traits should be equal to those in a PvP environment, PvP and WvW in this case, I will make a distinction between both. This means I will indicate whether certain changes are PvE or PvP only. If nothing is mentioned, the change(s) applies on both. Skills or traits that are left out is due to the fact that I hardly use them or because I have (yet) no comments on them.
___________________________Heal Skills___________________________

• Well of Blood
  Make it a water field.
• Signet of Vampirism
  Remove ICD on passive.
• Consume Conditions
  Self vulnerability duration increased. (PvE)
  ___________________________Utility Skills___________________________
• Spectral Wall
  Absords projectiles.
• Spectral Walk
  While active movement conditions have no effect on you (but they can still be stacked). Possible compensation: reduce Spectral Walk to 6 seconds.
• Spectral Armor
  Add 1 stack of stability.
• Signet of Spite
  Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1 and increase condition duration. (PvE)
• Signet of Undeath
  Increase radius to 240.
• Well of Power
  Increase radius to 300.
  Pulse 1 stack of Stability(1 sec) every second.
• Well of Suffering
  Increase radius to 300.
  Increase damage. (PvE)
  Increase Vulnerability duration. (PvE)
• Well of Darkness
  Increase radius to 300.
• Well of Corruption
  Increase radius to 300.
  Add ‘Boons converted to conditions’ description.
• Epidemic
  Self vulnerability duration increased. (PvE)
• Corrupt Boon
  Self poison duration increased. (PvE)
• Blood is Power
  Self bleeding duration increased. (PvE)
• Corrosive Poison Cloud
  Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1 and increase condition duration. (PvE)
  Self weakness duration increased. (PvE)
  __________________________Weapon Skills__________________________
• Axe Skills
  Increase damage on Axe 1 and 2 damage. Reduce cast time Axe 1.
  Make Axe 3 a blast finisher.
• Staff Skills
  ‘Mark of Blood’ has 1 additional stack of bleeding.
  Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1 and increase condition duration. (PvE)
• Dagger Skills Main-Hand
  Increase damage dagger 1. (PvE)
  Decrease casting time of dagger 2 to 3 seconds. Add 1 additional pulse.
• Dagger Skills Off-Hand
  Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1 and increase condition duration. (PvE)
• Scepter Skills
  Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1 and increase condition duration. (PvE)
  ___________________________Elite Skills___________________________
• Plague
  Increase stacks of stackable conditions by 1.
  Increase condition duration. (PvE)
• Lich Form
  Add one additional stack of stability.
  Decrease casting time of skill 2 to 3/4 seconds like staff marks. Increase its damage.
  Reduce cooldown on skill 3.
• Flesh Golem
  Improve AI. Stop letting it rush against an obstacle.
  _________________________Shroud Skills_________________________
  Life Blast: Swap damage modifiers. So now you deal more damage when range is above 450.
  Life Blast deals more damage when range is above 900. (PvE)
  Dark Path pierces (5 targets) and teleports you to its last succesfull target.
  Increase Dark Path bleeds stack by 1 and increase duarion. (PvE)

As several others, I also don’t like the idea of transforming the Tomes into other spells. I also would prefer to remove tomes for now and to reintroduce them later on with a Tome skill set.

As your plan was to reuse certain skills of these tomes and transform them into a signet or shout elite skill, I propose my personnel “elite skill” for both signet and shout. But these are, off course, just my idea’s.

Signet elite skill

Name: Signet of Perfect Inscriptions
Passive: Signets passive effects are improved.
Active: Recharges all signet skills.
Cooldown: 120 – 150 seconds

The idea is to transform the current trait Perfect Inscriptions into a skill and to enable the usage of signets as a set. Right now, most guardians (if I may generalize to the best of my knowledge) never really consider using multiple signets. Only sometimes do they use Signet of Resolve or Bane Signet, but both are used individually rather than being used in a signet build. This is something I would try to change with this elite skill, as it not only allows guardians to use a signet build, but it also allows guardians in tpvp or WvW to consider the usage of Signet of Mercy, as using the elite skill will allow the guardian to revive multiple allies. Which therefore also matches the developers idea of a guardian being supportive.

Shout elite skill

Name: Save Yourselves
Usage: Draw conditions from nearby allies to yourself. Grant multiple boons for a short duration. Breaks stun.
Cooldown: 150 seconds

My proposed elite shout skill is a promotion of the skill Save Yourselves. I believe this skill can be perfectly used as an elite skill as it actually already has multiple aspects of an “elite skill”: it gives us multiple boons and it breaks stun. However, in my upgraded version, I would propose that all boons are also granted to my allies. That’s why I increased the cooldown to compensate for the granted boons. The duration of the boons would remain the same in PvE and WvW, for PvP one might consider to slightly increase their duration.

Both suggestions of course mean that you will need to add a new shout skill and adapt an existing trait. But as this topic is mainly meant for Tomes and the proposed signet and shout elite skill, I won’t really go into detail about certain propositions as it will takes us too much off topic.

Edit: Increased the cooldown, as I realised that my original cooldown would make AH builds to powerfull.

Rune of Meditations

1) +25 precision
2) +10% fury
3) +50 precision
4) +15% fury; When using a meditation skill, you and nearby allies are healed for a small amount. (cooldown 10 sec)
5) +100 precision
6) +20% fury; Gain 150 power for 5 seconds when using a meditation skill. (cooldown 30 sec)

Guardian:

One of the strengths of the guardian, are its multifunctionality. Not only can you be a dps with a guardian, but you can also be a support guardian with heals and/or boons. However, I believe that not all of these roles are as good as they could be.

Burn baby, Burn

A guardian dps class should be a class with normal damage and burning. That’s at least the impression I get from all recent updates, which focus on giving extra burning traits to the guardian. However, I still miss some things that really bring us to this direction.

On of these things is the Zeal trait line, which gives condition duration. However, if I look at all locked traits (in case we would put 5+ trait points here) I only see symbol buffing or spawning. And this is odd for two reasons. First of all, symbols don’t give burning by themselves, so no idea what they are doing as locked traits in a trait line for condition duration. And secondly because if I look at the 2 weapons that can get a specific buff by a trait (greatsword and scepter) there is only one skill that benefits from these traits, being the 4th skill of greatsword. In fact, if I would be interested in using scepter, I’m actually wasting trait points as scepter has no advantage from symbols upgrades. Therefore my question to you is, are you considering swapping these locked symbol upgrades by useful burning traits? And by swapping I mean, put the current locked symbol traits as traits of choice for users, so that hammer guardians can still take symbol upgrades if they want.

Another thing guardians will complain about, are there off hand weapons. And they are right from my point of view. A focus is the most useful off hand weapon, shield can be useful in some occasions, but torch certainly needs some love. And I’m actually a bit surprised as well by the current torch skills. When I think of a torch, I think about something that burns. However, I don’t see this in the skills. In fact, torch hardly gives burning. Therefore my question to you: are you considering reworking the torch weapon to a real burning weapon, with possible fire field?.

One hand

Another thing I miss from main hand weapons, are the combo finishers. In fact, scepter, sword and mace have none. So my question to you is: is this something that will be added later on?.

Boons, Boons, Boons

One of the things where guardians need support from other classes, is for getting Fury. In fact, we only have one skill that can give us Fury. But there is another for guardians to get Fury: meditations. And more precise: _Focused Mind-. The only problem I see here, is the fact that it only gives fury for 4 seconds. Therefore my question to you is: are you considering buffing this duration a bit?

My final question concerning guardians, is about the supportive rule they play, and to be more precise the fact that we give boons to other players. I certainly like the shouts, but I still miss a rune set that allows me to give buffs to other layers as well. However, their are already runes who can give multiple buffs, like for example _ Superior Rune of Altruism_. But I’m still doubting about the usefulness of the rune, as it mainly depends on my healing skill. And with healing skills of about 30 seconds, I’m still doubting about it’s usefulness in for example WvW. However, I also have an elementalist, and elementalists have a healing skill with a cooldown of 15 seconds. In fact, warriors can bring their healing signet to a cooldown of 16 seconds. Therefore my question to you is: are you considering adding a healing skill for guardian with a lower cooldown, so that rune sets which give boons by using your healing skill become a valuable set for support playing guardians?.

I know it’s a bit longer than you asked :p
But I believed that a bit of “story” would be more better to explain some questions. Also I believe that some problems are better to discuss with some context.

As I mainly play with an elementalist and guardian, these will be the 2 classes I will discuss. I play mainly PvE and WvW, with both. As I already saw some main things passing through, I mainly focus on things I haven’t seen yet, but still find quite important. Therefore I will first focus on elementalist. In another message I fill focus on some parts of the guardian.

Elementalist:

Swap

The should be strength of the class should be the attunement swapping. And this is something I certainly don’t experience in PvE dungeons. In dungeons, I can just mainly stay in one attunement (in my case water), grab my lightning hammer and start doing damage (certainly because of the +20% extra damage trait from water). Now in my opinion, this is caused by the current elementalist system.

First of all, we have a certain amount of traits who give you extra damage while you are attuned to a certain type. I believe this is something that should change into traits that work over all attunements. Examples of this are already in the game for an elementalist, like for example the +5% extra damage against bleeding opponents.

But one of the major reasons why I don’t feel like swapping in dungeons, is because I hardly get an advantage. Certainly some swapping runes are useful (like the +3 stacks of might for example) and give a nice advantage, but if you don’t use them swapping attunements gives you nothing. Unless of course you put 1 or 4 trait points in arcana, giving you 2 seconds of fury and the ability to select Elemental Attunement. The only traits that give you some advantages for swapping attunements. I certainly would keep this trait, but I would propose an extra system that gives us benefit from swapping attunements.

Conjures

Another thing that, in my opinion, could be a should be strength of the class, are conjure weapons. So we have 5 conjure weapons: an axe, hammer, shield, bow and 2-H sword. I use 3 of them. Hammer and 2_h sword mainly in PvE, bow mainly in WvW. And this indicates one of the problems with the weapons. Axe and shield have no use. They are both just conjures that I never use, and I mainly don’t see when I could use them as they make me loose too much dps. I believe axe and shield need a serious rework.

Another problem I experience sometimes is when I’m making and choosing my conjures for my build. In my case this is for example in PvE, where my dps mainly depends on my lightning hammer. Cause even though I take the Conjurer trait, using the hammer first skills means I also loose all charges quite fast. And when they are all used, I can’t take my second hammer, as somebody else already took it. And this is in my opinion something that needs to be reworked.

Because even though I get the idea that you as an elementalist help others with giving them conjures, it’s not always desirable. First of all because you depends on the conjure weapon and secondly because there is no other basic conjure weapon that you can use as they are less good. Therefore I was wondering if you were considering a trait that allows elementalists to not spawn another conjure weapon, but to just use the weapon for the entire duration. This would have the advantage described above, but would also have the downside that when you get downed, there is also no spawned conjure you can take.

My final remark (for now :p) on conjures, is that they don’t really work well together with the attunement swapping. Therefore my main question is,* how are you going to make this a useful feature? And are you considering the conjures as skills you can take, instead of being a main part of the elementalist?* With this last I mean for example a necro like system, where an elementalist has a pool like the necromancer, but instead of having the 5 main skills these are the skills of the conjures , depening on each attunement (bow with water, hammer with air, etc).

So far away…

This is something others will experience as well, but I do write it here as I experience it quite often these days. So as an elementalist I can use a staff. For me, it is my main weapon in WvW and I since a while in PvE as well as I created my first legendary: The Bifrost. I’m quite proud on myself for doing this, so as you can imagine I keep on using the staff, certainly as all my other weapons are still exotic ones. But this is where I experience a downside of attacking at a distance: getting buffs. With this, I don’t mean getting buffs from shouts for example, but from my own blast finisher skills. To get boons from my own blast finishers, like for example the Arcane Wave skill, I actually need to put a field at my spot, and blast at my place, which as you can imagine, not only looks quite stupid, but gives nothing in return to party members. Therefore my question is: are you considering a system where the person that uses a blast skill from a distance, but is not standing in the field, get’s the boons as well?

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I have never tried this build, just created it with build editor.
However I think this would be something for your gs / staff combination.

You’ve got 2x 10% extra damage because of the burning that you will apply. Your gs and staff both have a symbol, which will be bigger, do more damage and you will do more damage as well because of the vulnerability that your symbols will apply.

The main thing you lose is the boon duration. However, if you want longer boon durations at boss fights, you can still swap one of your skills with Hallowed Grounds, so you receive an extra 20% duration of your boons for a short time. However I do believe that you will do more damage with this build, because of the fact that the ‘+1% damage for every boon on you’ would only give you +9% extra damage maximum (because you can only have 9 different boons), which is less compared to the +10% of applied conditions.

You could also consider doing +20 in honor, instead of the +10 honor and +10 Virtues, so you could have the 20% time reduction on 2-H weapon skills. I do believe however that you will have more use from the conscecration skills reduction, extended duration and of course the boons on your virtues.