Guild Wars 2

fishergrip.4082:

You can make any build work ok for PvE farming, but that doesn’t mean its actually good.

This ignorant and unhelpful statement needs to be abolished from use in the forums right along with all the people who spout it.

Not everyone has the same gameplay priorities as you do. PvE in this game is no more “farming” than PvP or WvW is. Different builds, traits, playstyles, and gear work better or worse in different portions of the game (and even different situations with in those portions).

This is a game with options. Stop telling people there aren’t any.

I would look to fill the holes in the group composition. Your group should have great offensive boons covered, decent defensive boons, and good condition removal. They should have vulnerability under control as well.

Now look at what you can add. In a power build you can add….vuln, boon removal, aoe daze, and a few other minor bits. But if you go for a conditions build you can add weakness, poison, chill, and regen as well as spreading your groups vuln, cripple, incidental bleeds/burns to everything around. Condition builds also have a very easy time tailoring their utilities to fit the need of the fight through easily swapping in ranged wells or corruptions.

Your bleeds probably won’t get stomped on very often and your poison never will so your damage out put should be fine. The non-damaging conditions your bring and/or spread will be more valuable than yet another “max damage” character anyway.

http://goo.gl/nK8gm

Fun AoE fire build with balanced stats. Good for farming and dungeon running. Could probably apply some pressure in WvW too. Utilities are pretty much up to you but I would advise taking at least one of the AoE burns to get the party started.

Right handed strength gives you great crit with little investment in precision. Carrion, Flame Legion runes, and Chrysocola gems give you pretty good power. Everything has condition damage on it and your weapon sigils can provide you a bit of bleed.

Solid vit and toughness plus using your active defenses (blind, block, dodge) will keep you alive for a long time.

Alright, finally got a chance to do a bit of testing (“I wish the real world would just stop hassling me” ~Matchbox Twenty).

Sadly, I was only able to complete about 60 attacks in 30 seconds (just as Rennoko did). I’m not sad that I was wrong, just sad that the tooltips are so startlingly off base.

Rennoko, whether or not your “idiot” comment was directed at me, it was out of line. It is not logically irrational to assume that the game designers have included accurate information into their own tooltips. Therefore, people are not idiots for not going out and devising a test for everything, not to mention that calling someone an idiot will ALWAYS be detrimental to the community.

So at 2 attacks per second from Dagger1 what are we left with. You can still achieve a pretty consistent 3 attacks per second rotating Locust Swarm and wells or bursts of up to 5 attacks per second for ~5 seconds by utilizing all of these at once. This is not nearly as impressive as my previous posts would have lead you to believe and I apologize for that.

I have run several different builds (power, condi, minion) over the past week that included Bloodthirst, Vampiric, and Vampiric Precision with many different weapon set ups in an effort to get a good feel for the usefulness of the traits. Some of the intent of my earlier posts was to show that certain weapon sets get alot more milage from the traits and that point is definitely still valid. When using my Axe/Focus + Dagger/Warhorn power build I find that the traits make a meaningful difference in my pve sustain and that they can even greatly aid in recovering from burst damage or missed dodges. Using any other weapon sets I did not feel that I could ever “recover” until my heal came back off cooldown. The point being: when considering ways to change Vampiric traits, make sure to take into account the very different rates of fire that our weapons have.

To maintain burning on a target you will need a secondary source of fire and/or Supreme Justice from the virtues trait line.

Sword Torch can maintain burning for a long time with no help but indefinitely with a bit of condi duration or trait help. Purging Flames is the utility skill with the highest uptime and of course Tome of Wrath can get you a good stack of burning on many targets.

I found leveling to be incredibly easy by maintaining decent armor, as mentioned above and with weapon selection. Guardian has an incredible amount of active defenses. I ran with Sword/Torch and Mace/Focus with 5-15 points in Radiance. Flashing Blade to blind the enemy or enemies first attacks. Zealot’s Flame will get them all burning while you run through an auto combo and Zealot’s Defense. If there are multiple enemies or once you have 15 points in Radiance you can then activate Virtue of Justice for another AoE blind and some burn damage. If the enemies are still up you can swap into Mace/Focus and rotate through your 4 blocks and bouncing blind all while being healed up. Keep Shelter as your heal and time your use of it to get several blocks.

I found that rotating these active defenses could keep me alive through almost anything. Slip your dodges in there when the target isn’t blinded or when they drop a locational spell.

I really hope that they change this behavior at some point. I can understand limiting the direct damage ones to the same cooldown but none of the others to be honest. Is it really too strong that I have a chance on crit bleed sigil paired with a poison on swap? Or might on swap and fire on crit.

I can also see a limiting the ones with the same effect ie. might one crit and on swap, or chill on crit and on swap.

I feel like you get one interesting sigil (earth, fire, hydromancy, etc.) and then one boring one (force, accuracy, cond duration, corruption, etc.).

Rennoko.5731:

I swear some idiot posted you could get 3 attacks per second with dagger, and then everyone just assumed thats how it works. I appreciate someone posting the actual attack rate.

I’m not sure I deserved that.

I haven’t gotten out a stopwatch. But if you know anything about hand timing track and field races, you know that a stopwatch is probably a worse solution than the tooltips for such a short timespan. Or too put it in your words “some idiot with a stopwatch timed it at X and everyone assumed it was right.”

I guarantee that the first 3 attacks go off in the first second. Was it a bad asumption (*spelled incorrectly so that the filter wouldn’t snag it) that it stay at nearly that rate? Yes. But I’m not even close to ready to believe 1.5 attacks per second either.

Tonight after work I will go and try your 30 second test and see what I get. Using the combat log to see exactly how many attacks I land. And “being generous” with the timing would be a proper reaction unless you know exactly what the wind down animation time is after casting Blood is Power.

Taril.8619:

1297 Condition Damage = 45 damage siphons, up to 85 damage with 25 Corruption stacks and 25 Might stacks.
1288 Healing Power = 51 healing from siphons

Bearing in mind that Condition based builds will not leverage Axe or Main Hand Dagger to achieve the 3 attacks per second and will tend to use Scepter (2 attacks per second) or Staff (1.25 attacks per second) making them do 90/56 DPS and 101/64 HPS rather than the really high stuff I mentioned earlier (Which is going complete max possible using those stats and still going at least 15 points into Blood Magic)

Currently Scepter with no stats other than 50% crit with achieve: 38*2 + 51 = 127 dps/hps. I guess I didn’t look thoroughly enough at your number because you have actually suggested a pretty big nerf. If you focused on the damage or healing component you could get a better result but if you tried to hybridize for max siphoning you would come out worse.

Such a tough thing to balance. Maybe a system that changed the value of the siphon based on the time it took to complete the attack could work. Then you could set a value, eg. 250dps/hps, and make it consistent for all weapons.

Taril.8619:

One thing to keep in mind is Bloodthirst doesn’t affect the damage Life Siphoning does, only the healing portion is increased.

Anyway, I was thinking about Life Siphoning and came up with the following ideas:

Damage to scale off either Power or Condition Damage (Which ever gives the highest boost will be used)

0.5 * Level + (0.03 * Power)

0.5 * Level + (0.035 * Condition Damage)

While the heal scales off Healing Power:

0.5 * Level + (0.04 * Healing Power)

This would mean that with full Power set up (Full Soldiers + Soldiers Crests on weapons + Ascended + Food + Sharpening Stone + 25 Bloodlust stacks + 25 stacks of Might + 30/0/25/15/0) it would deal up to 158 damage per proc.

With a full Condition damage set up (Full Carrion/Rabid + Rabid Crests on weapons + Ascended + Food + Tuning Crystal + 25 Corruption stacks + 25 stacks of Might + 0/30/0/15/0) it would deal up to 141 damage per proc.

With full Clerics gear (Clerics Crests on weapons + Food) it would heal up to 101 health per proc.

I’d also change the traits slightly to reflect the higher damage/healing it can do:

Vampiric being changed to a Master Major Trait requiring a Major slot and at least 20 points into the Blood Magic Trait Line.

Something like Mark of Evasion replacing Vampiric as the Master Minor Trait (Most other classes get a small effect on dodge as a Minor trait, I think a slightly lesser Mark of Blood with a 10 second cooldown would qualify)

Bloodthirst becoming “Increases the healing provided by Siphon Health by 50% when you’re under 25% health”

Vampiric Precision becoming Vampiric Embrace “10% Chance to Siphon Life when hit. 2 second cooldown”

This should mean that Life Siphoning would be a viable way to go in a build without becoming too powerful (Can only gear for either the Damage or the healing, not able to max both) as it would at best do about 350 DPS (Full PVT exotics on Dagger #1) sustained but wouldn’t heal very much, 150 HPS in the same gear (Regen in the same gear does 170 HPS) this is provided you can stay in melee long enough to keep getting the full effect of Dagger autos off, anything less dramatically reduces the DPS and HPS it provides.

Bloodthirst does affect the damage.

Although, as you stated, you couldn’t max both healing and damage, you seem to have forgotten that Cleric’s has power and Shaman’s/Apothecary’s have healing power and condition damage. If you gave a scepter/staff conditionmancer that much extra healing and damage he would be a monster. It could be a viable bunker build with a good damage out put.

Overall I think these are decent suggestions (don’t like the “chance when hit” bit personally), but you have still left all of the vampiric traits with any real power in the first 20 points. This means it can be a secondary function of nearly any build. I still maintain that almost any buff to vampiric traits must require 30 points in Blood Magic.

http://goo.gl/GgAWS

You give up Target the Weak and Lingering Curses. Trade offs to be sure. But I suggested it for lulz anyway.

Still wondering if Death’s Embrace even effects condition damage though. Most of % damage increases don’t.

I hope this hasn’t been covered already and apologize if it has. Has any tested the Spite I trait Death’s Embrace in conjunction with a fear build? With the the Soul Reaping I trait Fear of Death on top of our downed state fear. That 50% boost would be incredible. Of course its gimmicky. But imagine rolling off 4 ticks of fear and over 8k damage on someone just when they think they’ve won.

emikochan.8504:

…kids with greatswords doing as much damage as adults, makes no sense.

Asura with greatswords doing as much damage as Norn, makes no sense.

Sierra.6352:

Oh for the love of everything good and nice. This is exactly what Anet didn’t want in their game.
That people had to pull up their calculators before a fight, to figure out what would be the most effecient way to build their characters, instead of just jumping into battle and rely on their skills to pay the bills.

Ah well, at least we don’t have silly addons like GearScore or damage meters, like you had in WoW.

You are right in spirit but so completely wrong in logic. A-Net does not want people to be forced into min/max spec’s and gear like WoW players but; they combat this by making all stats relevant and making large tradeoffs for completely ignoring stats or stacking a stat to excess.

If they didn’t want people to be able to calculate the effectiveness of their gear/spec choices they would not have made the numbers visible. This is the only way to combat ‘calculators’. You would be playing a game with no health bars, no stats page, no combat log, no flashy numbers flying up when you hit something, etc.

Gryph.8237:

How about a short handed scythe, or sickel. That would be more necromancer like, and the curved scythe like attack would mimick the curved blade at the end of a mini scythe or sickel.

What does “necromancer like” mean? Do you mean like the necromancers you’ve seen in other games or movies or books? Why does this game have to be the same?

To me, the necromantic aesthetic is largely based around symbols of death and decay. Things like a headsman’s axe fit well but I’ve never seen a necro with an axe before. Also, I would almost guarantee that the spear is the weapon responsible for the most human and animal death in all of human history. Seems like the spear should be a strong symbol of death on that basis.

Daecollo.9578:

Andele.1306:

So you want the underwater spear for land combat?

I WOULD LOVE A SPEAR on land…

It seems that there is no MMO with spears.

LoTRO Wardens (others can use them but wardens are based on spears and javalins)
FF14 Lancers
Ragnarok Online (lol)
Maple Story

I do agree that the most widely used weapon in ancient combat has been largely ignored in MMO’s and most other type of game. Spears are not very flashy and whats worse, their attack animations are VERY limited with out looking silly. Spears are only for thrusting, stabbing, and throwing. Not much to work with there.

wiazabi.2549:

And thats what is so annoying about necro, our class mechanic. We dont get to have short cooldown because of DS, we dont get to have good burst because of DS, we dont get to cast fast cause of DS.

Everytime something about necro feels lacking it also makes sense from a balance point of view because DS.

Other classes do not lack in these things cause their class mechanic doesnt force upon them a 2nd hp bar, its a terrible terrible way to design at class and its a complete mess to balance it. ANET doesnt even seem to wanna touch it anymore because of DS and how easily it can become OP.

How ofen have you started casting epidemic and either the mob dies before cast finish or your target gets cleansed.
Consume conditions same deal start casting and poof teammate just cleared em. ( underwater speed of it feels so much more responsive )

I understand this mentality. If the class mechanic is an answer to all these situations, how are you worse off?

The slow cast times I think have nothing to do with DS.

darkace.8925:

As it stands now:
– Attack – 2653
– Defense – 2502
– Health – 17,885

- Critical Chance – 10%
– Critical Damage – 4%
– Condition Damage – 319
– Healing – 328

Bearing in mind I mostly play open world PvE (usually solo or duo) with occasional dungeon runs, on what attribute(s) would you guys recommend I focus my attention? I’ve already got a full set of Soldier’s exotic armor, so that leaves my weapons, trinkets, and runes for possible means of upgrading. Again, thanks to everyone for your counsel.

Cayl Bourne.8073:

If you are looking for secondary stats the first thing you should look at is your primary stat….I know that sounds stupid. With Soldier’s armor and Zeal traits you will have very high power from the get go.

Now look at the secondary stats you already have covered. You have vitality from your Solder’s armor and 20 points in Honor. You also have toughness on your armor.

Your weapon choices are very defensive and have lower damage output.

All things considered you have your defenses covered and an abundance of power. If I were you I would go for Ruby Orbs because they will have the largest multiplicative effect on your high power. If you would like more fire damage you can trait Supreme Justice and run Rabid Crests or Coral gemstones.

Thanks for your reply.

I’ve got Absolute Resolution filling that slot at the moment, but I’ve considered swapping to Supreme Justice. The hangup is the mace’s slow attack speed, which doesn’t make the most of Virtue of Justice’s passive. I usually just leave Justice on passive against trash mobs (which die quick enough) and pop it against veterans or higher to gain a bit of a damage burst.

Obviously my Critical Hits are paltry when they do proc (which isn’t often), so I was considering beefing my Precision a bit. Are you recommending Ruby over Emerald or Coral? And should I abandon any notion of Sapphire?

Rubies would be the largest damage increase you could get.

Sapphire would an another defensive/supportive (aoe heals) choice for you so I would shy away from them unless you are looking to group alot.

Emeralds would give you more precision than Rubies allowing a higher crit rate but without the crit damage to back it up. A good choice.

Coral is a good choice if you augment your fire application a little bit. They offer alot of crit to boost your high power and the condition damage is a nice bit of consistent damage. If you were to use a Torch or a utility that causes burning you could get some good aoe punch out of Coral.

As you said mace attacks are quite slow but since you have 30% condition duration, if you run another source of burning (as mentioned above) you can stack a decent duration. Mace 2 also hits 5 times since you run Writ of Persistence.

Gleaning what I can from your posts you seem to have good patience and prefer consistency and stability to speed and flash. Burning damage is about as consistent as it gets. Sword and Torch are great for maintaining a decent burn on the target.

Terrordoll.4652:

What is the actual argument about anymore? That a necro needs better “vampiric” traits because he doesn’t do enough melee damage/have enough melee survivability?

What are the actual parameters? Is this only true for “vampiric” specced necros? All dagger specs? I feel like a PTV D/F MM might disagree. Or what about a chilling well spec?

It seems like a circular argument to “point counter point” different builds and instances where we might not excel. You’ll always find point of failure.

Melee necros are viable but maybe not universally so. Going through and highlighting all those places and using them to call the spec trash is ignoring the successful cases. How many builds are solid in all instances? Would you call those builds balanced?

I feel like you’d get much more traction with the devs using Cayl’s general approach:

We want a Vampire build, where life steals for an integral part of the spec, not a frosting as I feel they are now. There is enough synergy there between the available traits and skills that nearly every necro has made that connection. All we want is for it to be a more of a encompassing mechanic in the build. If that means more effective than so be it. The consistent volume of posts on this forum addressing this issue should be indication enough that its something desired by great deal of players and therefore worth the effort to look into.

I think I might be in love with you.

I personally have always been and will always be in love with life steal style mechanics. I played shadowpriest for years in WoW and Disciple of Kaine (possibly my favorite class ever) in Warhammer Online. If there is a life stealing mechanic in your game you can be sure I will try to specialize in it. I’ve been doing it long enough to know that it runs along a razors edge of balance though. Especially if it scales off of one stat for both damage and healing.

To go back to the original point of the post: I would love to see an improvement in our options for Siphoning Health from our enemies, but I do think a direct numbers increase on our current options would be problematic at best largely because the 15-20 points required for them are too small an investment for that kind of power.

My off the cuff suggestion would be to bake the current Bloodlust trait into the base values for Siphons. This would allow people to continue to commit 15-20 points as a PART of their build without it being a focus. Then buff/change the GrandMaster Blood Magic vampiric trait to increase the size of the Siphons by 100% or make them heal allies as well or even some combination of the two (ie 30% stronger and heal up to 5 nearby allies). Another thought for the GrandMaster trait would be to make the Siphon effect stack up to 3-5 stacks (ie. 40 dmg/heal on the first hit, 80 on the second, 120 on the third, etc.) and drop off if the target is not hit for 2-5 seconds.

The 30 point traits can be much stronger and playstyle defining because they limit how deep you can get into other trees so much more.

Daecollo.9578:

Have fun meleeing anything hard, in Fractals Necromancers and most players are usually standing away from the mob in PvE as well. (Yes, in the average CoF run, Dagger/X is pretty powerful, but that content is so easy I can run pretty much anything and be about the same.)

Daggers may hit fast, but they are one of our weakest weapon sets for damage. (Plus, trying to balance an entire mechanic around one weapon set is a pretty dumb idea as well.)

Life Siphon does not critical, and it ignores armor. (as i’ve said many many times.)

" If my necro hits a target 4 times in a second, critting twice, then the traits deal 240 damage and heal me for 240 health (~40 dmg/heal each). This means their total contribution to the fight is 480 health per second that I can maintain contact with the target."

That is impossible, Life Siphons don’t critical and they ignore armor, like condition damage does, infact my bleeds tick for 124 every second per bleed, so basicly the lifestealing damage would be almost as much as a bleed stack if you did it like such.

But also, YES it is kind of funny if you actually use Dagger/X, but a Dagger/X necromancer is very weak compared to others, I absolutely trash them in both PvE/PvP.

Dagger and Axe are both very good weapons for producing high numbers of hits. I’ve said this before.

I have NEVER said that Siphon Health mechanics crit. I’ve even told you before that I’ve never said that. If you take the Vampiric Precision trait you gain a 51 damage/healing siphon when you crit on top of the 38 damage/heal siphon you get for connecting with the attack.

Dagger with high power/crit/crit damage gear is the highest “perfect world” damage a necro can attain. As far as I know, the same is true for every class in the game. The highest direct damage Weapon1 that a class has + Berzerker gear = highest dps. The reason for this is that it is a 3 stat synergy. Each stat (power/precision/crit damage) multiplies the value of the other 2. This damage also scales with vulnerability which easily outweighs the damage reduction of armor in most group circumstances.

Conditions only have two stats, condition damage and condition duration. They do not scale with vulnerability but are not mitigated by armor. You cannot spend every stat point you have making your conditions do more damage like you can with direct damage. The advantage of conditions is that you do not have to maintain contact with the target to continue to do damage at that they are more consistent.

If you are looking for secondary stats the first thing you should look at is your primary stat….I know that sounds stupid. With Soldier’s armor and Zeal traits you will have very high power from the get go.

Now look at the secondary stats you already have covered. You have vitality from your Solder’s armor and 20 points in Honor. You also have toughness on your armor.

Your weapon choices are very defensive and have lower damage output.

All things considered you have your defenses covered and an abundance of power. If I were you I would go for Ruby Orbs because they will have the largest multiplicative effect on your high power. If you would like more fire damage you can trait Supreme Justice and run Rabid Crests or Coral gemstones.

wiazabi.2549:

And yeah i dont get it either even shortest cd breaker is 48sec with trait. while others get even shorter as standard and most of the time have greater benefits from em.

I fully understand that it may not be as good as a stun breaker but; DS is on a 10 second CD and can be used while stunned. Once in DS you have access to Doom on a 20 second CD and can be used while stunned. If you are looking for ways to deal with stuns, Necro’s do have quite a few in traits, utilities, and elites

I try to keep all my arguments as generic as possible with regards to the type of play. There are many ways to play this game and the “real world”, as you say it, is not pvp to many people. Each person should be able to take the information you offer and apply it to the way they play the game on their own. Otherwise the discussion will always degrade into a “in my experience in this specific situation insert trait/skill here is worthless/overpowered” type of argument.

If you want my opinion, Siphon Health mechanics are very powerful and dependable in open world pve and dungeon running. In pvp, they have high POTENTIAL benefits especially in 1v1 situations but will tend to be quite weak in 10v10.

PvP (and any real world competition) has always and will always be about trying to apply your strengths properly and avoid situations that expose your weaknesses. If you can control how/when/where the game is played you can tilt the scale towards your own strengths.

You are right in stating that Burning is the condition that you put on the target just to have another source of damage. It is the same for anyone who can apply it. No body concentrates on burning because it stacks in duration and can be easily maintained. Even if you can maintain burning on a target 100% of the time you will get little benefit from concentrating on condition damage. The maximum effect you can get out of condition damage with burning alone is 25% of your condition damage per second to a single target or 125% of your condition damage per second across 5 targets.

The way I see it, Guardians have strong builds that include any or all of the stats except for condition damage. Being left out of the bleed train is why Guardians do not have any condition damage specs. As far as I know every other class can maintain ~10 stacks of bleeding on a single target giving them 50% of their condition damage to the target per second on top of maintaining poison (10%) or burning (25%) or both (ranger/engineer)

Do Omnomberry pies and Sigil deal damage or just heal?

I’m completely at a loss as to why Elementalist healing builds keep being brought up and compared. They are complete apples and oranges. Currently the Siphon Health healing component is most comparable to the Regen boon or Theif’s Signet of Spite. Both of these can be better sources of healing but they both do 0 damage.

Necro Siphon Health mechanics are completely unique in that they do equal parts damage and healing. Any time you are trying to math out their potential power you MUST account for both. If my necro hits a target 4 times in a second, critting twice, then the traits deal 240 damage and heal me for 240 health (~40 dmg/heal each). This means their total contribution to the fight is 480 health per second that I can maintain contact with the target.

That 480 health per second costs me only 20 points in Blood Magic but it doesn’t stop there because I also gain 2000 health, 200 healing power, and a source of the Regen boon for those same 20 points. That seems like a very efficient use of trait points to me.

I have been running a Vampiric build on my necro ever since I had enough points and have always like the effect. However, prior to joining this discussion, I always thought they needing a pretty strong buff before they would become anything more than a bit of character flavor that I enjoyed. After mathing out their potential at their current power as well as buffed power, I have come to the conclusion that the Blood Magic Siphon Health traits have very high potential power. I would like to see them buffed to the point where they could be a viable focus of a build but that would require that they have a MUCH higher opportunity cost than they currently have.

Daecollo.9578:

Life Stealing does not critical…

Wow….

Critting produces an extra source of Siphon Health when traited for Vampiric Pecision. All my calculations were based on a 50% crit rate producing 50% more individual Siphons.

Daecollo.9578:

But by going Axe or Dagger, you cut the necromancer’s own damage by so much, it may or may not be worth it, and your not taking into account your enemys dodges/buffs as well, YES IF YOUR CONSTANTLY hitting your enemy, you will get that healing, but where in pvp/pve situation where you are just constantly hitting your enemy? NONE.

If you compare that to the elementalist spec regen boon… its 5000 healing every 20 seconds, and thats just one out of 2 of the regenerations they can recieve, on top of there healing for 2-3k when they roll, all there condition cures and there other heals, and there “6” healing ability.

Not only this, Elementalist has vigor/protection as well, which Necromancer does not, necromancers have NOTHING to help there dodges, they are punching bags with no immunity buttons, in a game where a well placed dodge can stop your entire health bar from going under.

I never said it was a bunker build. All I did was math out a little of the potential DAMAGE and HEALING of taking 20 points in the “defensively oriented” Blood Magic tree.

Since it is only a 20 point commitment you can easily fit it into just about any build that you like. Any build with 50% crit chance will be capable of these numbers but a build with 0% crit could still put out 2/3 of that and would only have to commit 15 trait points. That is to say, Axe and Dagger do not do low damage in any build with power and do very high damage in a ’Zerker type of build.

Daecollo.9578:

With such long cool-downs and having to channel them, and them being slow channels, it doesn’t really matter if they have a high rate or not.

-Dagger 1 attacks over 3 times per second.
-Axe 2 is on a 6.5 or 8 second CD and attacks over 3.5 times per second.
-Dagger 2 is on a 12 second CD and attacks at 2.6 times per second with healing already built in.
-Even the widely hated for being horrendously slow Axe 1 hits at over 2.6 times per second.

Assuming a 50% crit rate and 100 Siphon Health per hit, you can multiply any of these numbers by 150 to find out how much unmitigated damage they do AND how much healing they provide.

Or how about a 20 second period where you spend 10 seconds in each weapon.
Dagger: Dagger2 x 9 + Dagger1 x 19.5 = 28.5 attacks for 4275 damage/healing
Axe: Axe2 x 16 + Axe1 x 7.33 = 23.33 attacks for 3500 damage/healing
Grand Total: 7775 damage and healing in 20 seconds.

Most #6 heal skills do less healing than this on a longer cooldown and do no damage.

Siphon Health traits have INCREDIBLE potential and I think Rennoko was on the right track by saying that if they healed us while in DS we would be on our way to a really strong attrition build.

BTW: Siphons do about 40 damage per hit/crit right now so the 20 seconds total is 3110 damage/healing. Not too shaby.

Sorem.9157:

Not having to hit somebody is a big deal actually, whenever its necessary to burst down that guy that hits like a truck and you cant do it because retaliation is too strong. Plus, we aren’t just talking about guardians here, since other classes can have retaliation aswell as we can give it to them

Yes I understand that it would take balancing (just like EVERYTHING else). That is not the point. It would have to be powerful enough to dissuade attackers but not so powerful that you absolutely couldn’t be attacked. Furthermore “whenever it’s necessary to burst down…” sounds like a situation where you should be doing some boon stripping anyway. You know, for protection and aegis.

Specifics were not the intention of the original post though. Is there interest in a more condition damage based Guardian? Or opinions that it wouldn’t fit well with the lore?

Daecollo.9578:

And giving it a “crap” coefficient, doesn’t help the problem. (its far too weak.)

No matter what stat it scales with it would have to be a “crap” coefficient. The 5% coefficient that bleeds get would mean +50 damage at 1000 of whatever stat. +50 would put you close to (or over if affected by Bloodthirst) the 100 damage/heal per Siphon Health tick. As I showed in my previous post this would put you at a steady 500 dmg/heal per second with spikes up in the 1k range. Add in some sigils and consumables and you are kitten near unkillable.

As long as we have weapons that attack at such a high rate it will be very difficult to buff Siphon Health mechanics.

Retaliation is easily countered in pvp. Your enemy does not have to hit you… They can easily hit your friend instead. Or strip your boon. The balance would obviously be in the numbers. As it is currently people build Power/Vit/Tough and retaliation scales with power (albeit only slightly).

They way I see it a tanky retaliation player can be ignored or at least saved for last. It could be too strong on a Power/Prec/Cond spec’d glass cannon though because you would be guaranteed to win any “race to the bottom” type scenario.

I love dots.

I’m interested in seeing if there is a significant portion of the guardian community that would be interested in having better condition damage options for the guardian profession.

We have some pretty decent options for Burning our targets but have NO other forms of condition damage. Every other class has options for maintaining at least 2 different damaging conditions.

A solution that could slide neatly into our current kit is making Retaliation scale with condition damage. I think this would fit nicely into the Guardian persona as well as requiring little to no change to traits and skills. The problem that I see with this solution is that A-Net has already stated that they would like make Retaliation into a “counter a flurry of attacks” mechanic rather than the permanent status that we can currently maintain.

A wild suggestion style solution would be to implement one handed and two handed axes into our kit. These weapons could have bleed and crippling options and would fit our aesthetic quite well imo.

TLDR: Are you interested in having the option to build for condition damage?

Hopefully back on topic…

I agree with the OP that the “Siphon Health” mechanic is far more similar to a condition than it is to anything else. As stated, it ignores armor and comes in relatively small chunks.

To make it scale off Healing Power could cause balance issues because if you can gain a significant source of damage by using a defensive stat you eliminate the sacrifice of going for defenses.

If you make it scale off of Power then you are offering armor penetrating damage to a power build as well as a significant defensive boost.

If you make the damage scale with one stat and the healing with a separate one you create a strange disconnect in the mechanic of siphoning life.

If based on condition damage it would create a unique to Necromancer attrition “condition” that could be countered by poison, blocks/blinds and stuns (the necro stops attacking).

The OP’s numbers were WAY too high though. I’ve run a Siphon Health build with Axe/Focus and Dagger/Warhorn and the number of attacks per second that you can achieve is incredible. Dagger 1, Dagger 2 and Axe 2 each hit over 3 times per second and then you get to add in Wells and Locust Swarm. If you could with MAX gear and traits achieve about 100 damage/healing per Siphon Health source you could still achieve over 800 damage and healing per second single target (3 hits Dagger1, 1 Well, 1 Locust Swarm with 2 crits and one extra Siphon from a well).

After doing the math…I realize why the Siphon Health build felt so good even at the current numbers. I would still like to trade in my Power/Crit/CritDam gear for Crit/Tough/Cond and trade big crits for bigger Siphon Health but the balancing act looks tough. Good luck A-Net!