Guild Wars 2

Something to keep in mind, Sand Savant’s tooltip says “A greater shade counts as three shades for related traits.” Which means it might only affect Sand Soul and Blood as Sand, and not count as three shades for the damage and torment procs.

This is something else we need to test.

You might have missed that you and your sand shades are supposed to pulse damage and apply torment every time you cast a ‘shade’ ability. The shade abilities are all the shroud replacement abilities, so e.g. when you use Sand Cascade to apply barrier to your teammates, you’re also doing damage to nearby enemies.

There’s a lot of questions still to resolve about scourge. I can see it being good or bad depending on how certain traits behave (e.g. Dhuumfire), and how useful barrier turns out to be. We’ll know more after the preview weekend.

#1 is probably what Anet will do eventually. They’re getting culling turned off which is another annoying technical limitation, so I figure they’re working on things like this, even if they take forever to do.

They’ve got a few other options too. They could change skills around and make bleeds more of a big thing. Double the scaling damage on bleeds, and halve the rate at which they’re applied (e.g. if a skill puts two stacks now, just put one stack with double the damage). That would require going through a *lot* of skills though.

There’s also the idea of merging bleeds; this is more of a behind the scenes thing, where the damage is clumped into single ticks so they might not have to track every everything about the bleed stacks the entire time. All the different durations might make that impractical though.