Guild Wars 2

People aren’t quite reading my post, so I’ll try it again:

Why am I buying Superior Siege with a soul bound currency? I get there needing to be some type of drain, but this sounds like it’d be a better drain for Memories of Battle, unless you’re waiting on the next WvW tournament for that.

briggah.7910:

Well it is called character progression not account progression.. Look at it like this.. PVE’ers have to play each profession to unlock the elites.. They can’t use one toon and farm items to unlock them for other toons..

I agree with this, so long as the currency is only used for a character bound purpose. But now that we can use the currency for superior siege it feels backwards.

They were being used in WvW to skip over walls and jump into keeps and towers.

I know it’s early (haven’t even had a reset yet), but I felt it couldn’t hurt to get some early impressions on this specific topic.

Personally, I think it’s genius.

Think about it this way. In the old system, people complained that it was too easy to upgrade buildings overnight. To the point where some people clamored for the need for there to be a person to press a button to start an upgrade. A “human element,” as it was often called. But the real issue is that if your server is the last one on for the night, you upgrade to T3 long before anyone is awake on the other servers.

Now, that happens much more rarely. With random roamers playing overnight, plus the small groups of people that play in the day hours (like me, at times), they can keep a structure from upgrading to T3. Possibly throughout the entire day. Even camps are now easier to flip on average for roamers, as they’ll rarely be above T1 even.

It’s… it’s beautiful, really. They did a number of favors with this change. There should even be fewer Stonemist Airships flying around.

To summarize, camps are easier to flip, it takes longer to upgrade things overnight, less Stonemist Airship defense, and if you really want to speed up upgrades you can use Tactics to speed up or increase delivery but it requires a human to refresh.

This is the one thing I don’t get. If every character had separate WvW XP bars, then it’d make sense for Heroic Proofs to be Soulbound. But now that I have Masteries, the only point to Heroic Proofs is for superior siege. It’s annoying if I log off on a character for the night, anticipating that he’s going to get enough Heroic Proofs for something, only to log on the next day, feel like playing a different character, accidentally level up the WXP bar, and now that characters has a number of Heroic Proofs that isn’t enough for the superior siege I was saving up for.

Too many things in WvW are character bound instead of account bound in the first place, but this is the biggest annoyance for me.

The next patch after the one today will be 2 weeks later. After that, for consideration of Leagues and the Pro League, no major patch until the end of those things in late April/early March.

Yashuoa.9527:

ronpierce.2760:

Yashuoa.9527:

Can we also get amulets that give:

Amulet 1.
Power.
Healing power.
Precision.
and something else except vit or no 4th stat.

and

Amulet 2.
Condition dmg.
Healing power.
A 3rd stat that is no vit or precision.
A 4th that is no vit or precision (or just only 3 stats).

?

I like Amulet 2, we could give it Toughness and call it something that has to do with settling down, since it’d be pretty tanky… Something basic, really, like Settlers.
+1

Yeah.

There is no condition dmg + healing power amulet yet with the removal of Settlers.
It was probably removed, because toughness was the largest in that amulet.
However in this one, thoughness can be the smallest stat.

The second amulet could be 3 stats.

Than a 3rd amulet could be.

Condition dmg 1050.
Healing power 1050.
Toughness 560.
Vit 560.

Condition Damage and Healing Power? How about something like…

Sage’s Amulet
1050 Power
1050 Condition Damage
560 Healing Power
560 Vitality

I ran the numbers on a lot of skills and honestly, 560 Healing Power does a lot more than people give it credit for (relative to how much Healing Power does in general). For example, 560 Healing Power brings Regeneration up from 130 per second to 200 per second.

Voramoz.6790:

One other thing. The new King of Fires. Are you kidding me!? Crit? Crit has nothing to do with condi! Garbage trait.

Even the devs cannot see that they are trying to pull zerker in 3 different directions: crit, condi, stability. How can they not see this? Zerker is the definition of clunk, and the new king of fires trait makes matters worse. Did they not think about sundering leap finisher creating fire shield? So now that gets detonated? Bottom line: Berserker is in a place where it require Power, AND Condition Damage, AND Precision (therefore ferocity), AND lacks sustain.

What the kittening kitten?! Good news Warrior Fans! We will be sidelining Warrior for season two! It’s as if from the Berserker reveal to now everything Zerker is thought of with a huge downside or “you could be a god IF you had power, condi, AND crit, and that’s one of the limitations we came up with.” WELL NO KIDDING!!! EVERY CLASS COULD BE A GOD IF THEY HAD POWER, CONDI , AND CRIT!

Uh, who says condition damage users don’t use precision? The Arms line alone is an example of combining the two. You can say that there wasn’t a build as successful before, but then you could also say that this trait is made to help make that type of build work.

How do you know that? They are only balancing around that if a Thief with Prepardness is by and far the apex build. If they balance accordingly, it doesn’t have to be.

Wait, you want to increase the diversity of Shadow Arts by taking out one of the diversity traits of Shadow Arts, Venomous Aura? What you want is more traits like Venomous Aura that provides alternatives to pure stealth styles but still complement using stealth.

Sure, OP, the changes wouldn’t be overpowered or anything but… it’s power creep. And what need is Preparedness baseline if we do more damage over time in our auto-attacks, which puts less pressure on our initiative use? And you’re right, we could use more initiative gain in other trait lines. They’re even doing that next patch with one of the Acro grandmasters. They also have alternative ways to buff Steal in the game as well in every trait line (Improv, Mug, Stealth, Sword Equilibrium). Steal doesn’t need a baseline cooldown nerf.

Unfortunately with this game, we can’t go by “it wouldn’t hurt,” just to buff it. Because when the nerf train comes it’s just going to hurt even worse and the class may fundamentally change in other ways.

emkelly.2371:

Ephrum.3910
Question for y’all…how do you interpret the king of fires change?
A) changing the entire skill so it no longer gives the burn duration
B) change the on crit effect only

Look, this was never needed. warriors have loads of ways to get might, and sure the condition damage was nice, but way already had a way for rage skills to burn our enemies. in last blaze.

Listen, its not that the change is bad, its that it is a solution to something that was never a problem.

It makes me wonder if they’re going to change Last Blaze too.

Smoke.9273:

For those wondering about time-period they would roll this out, didn’t Grouch already asnwer that on first page?

Josh Davis.6015:

Pro League S1 Finals will use the Winter 2016 balance update, not the current.

When it comes to business, it’s generally accepted around the world that Winter/whatever season starts on the first full month of that season. If you go from the solstice/equinox, that means January is the first full month of Winter, April for Spring, July for Summer, and October for Autumn. This is what quarterly reports and etc. are usually measured by, and also the months aimed for all of these balance patches to hit considering the first of these quarterly patches happened in October.

Or, you can not get bogged down in semantics.

misterdevious.6482:

DeWolfe.2174:

Forum bug!! Nuuuuuuuuuuuuuu……….

Being one of the head “schmucks” (shakes fist @ you) I’d like manual upgrading and more building choices. Expressing a WP was far more risky and fun than this insta WP. Watching a timer click down or a Yak counter for auto upgrades is equally dull.

Here’s a cute lil video of a scout that I thought of. This basically doesn’t exist in the current design. Escorting Yaks for linear upgrading paths wouldn’t bring joy to players like this. https://youtu.be/dlfUTwQ5sdg

WvW was not, is not, and shouldn’t be just about fighting. Worlds need a diversity of roles to make it inclusive and interesting.

The “selfless few” are the people who do the things that need doing for little reward or at a negative cost to themselves. They aren’t schmucks.

Tiered upgrades removed frustrations and strategic choices. Free upgrades removed the burden of cost that fell too heavily on these selfless few… but also removed the need to prioritize. Automatic upgrades that didn’t need yaks removed the need for responsibility and vigilance. Structure upgrades require nothing now, and there is nothing the enemy can do to prevent them. All the strategic choices got beefed up and moved up to the guild upgrade category.

When I see a suggestion that a “human hand” should be required to start the next structure upgrade, I assume that person isn’t volunteering his own hand 24/7. He’s assuming some “schmuck” will do it. Without the need to prioritize… without the ability to make strategic choices… without burden of cost… without the risk of frustration… the one word left to describe running around the map to trigger the next upgrade… is responsibility. How do you describe a responsibility that is pointless, boring, unrewarding and unfulfilling? That’s busy work: work assigned for the sake of looking or keeping busy. The selfless few would do it if it needed to be done, but it is really beneath them.

Exactly. Those that want there to be some button someone has to run over and press either want to bring back busy work or somehow think that there won’t be someone who’s on in the middle of the night doing the upgrades anyway.

We have sentries and tower radars specifically to reduce the busy work so that people can get to the fighting. That’s what so many people care about, right?

Making the upgrades depend on yaks instead of automatic is a great compromise, because now getting and denying upgrades depends on fighting.

Arutha.9874:

There is only one reason you really Have to log in every day and that is if you already got 6 division crosses.

First group of 11 is blocked by daily, because everyone can make it past Amber.
Second group of 11 is blocked by daily or reaching Ruby which ever comes first, not everyone can reach Ruby with only 90 games played if they truely do minimum.
Third group of 11 is definitely blocked by league crosses, because no casual who is going away for holidays is going to make it to Legend 2.

Conclusion: You don’t need to play more than 30 days this season so you can go away on extended holiday with no issue, have a nice one. :-)

Exactly. I’m taking this completely casually and only wish to get to the third tier of achievements before this season ends. I’m going to need the Amber reset in the next two seasons to have any chance at getting the legendary backpiece this year.

It sounds more like something you’d put as a grandmaster trait rather than a whole game-wide change.

If you want something condition-like that scales off power, you can use Retaliation.

It sounds more like something you’d put as a grandmaster trait rather than a whole game-wide change.

If you want something condition-like that scales off power, you can use Retaliation.

Personally, not especially. They went over every stat combo currently in PvE. Just like Dire stats, or (disappointingly) Zealot, they decided not to bring it over. Zealot is likely related to the fact that we have Druid, and there’s always the chance they will reconsider it after we’ve had a PvP season with Druid to see how things shake out.

Commander was likely a no go because it’s similar in ways to Dire.

The Wanderer issue makes me want to track it down in PvE myself to look for it. The PvP team, based on their previous actions, aren’t looking to have amulet descriptions split between modes. So something will likely happen. That said, I prefer the PvP Wanderer.

Reading about the Action Camera has me legit excited. One thing though; it’s going to be even more annoying than it is now for people with altered keybinds to use the treb when one of the buttons to turn is on the left mouse button.

Suggestion, change the skill bars for trebuchets so that Skill #1 is to Fire, and Skills 2 and 3 are to turn left and right respectively.

Almost anything with Precision primary.

ArthurDent.9538:

It is tough to pay attention to everything going on, so you just have to prioritize. If you know that there is a zerk warrior on the other team, you make sure to keep and eye on him. You will miss things from other players that you would notice in a 1v1, but ultimately, you should be doing much better than if you spam randomly. At the very least make sure you are spamming decent rotations, such as might stacking or burst rotations on the focused target.

This. I keep track of one or two opponents while glancing between my condi bar and my teammates’ status and watching for any big AoEs appearing under me. You don’t keep track of everything but if you’re going to down someone or look for who’s ripe for a focus target, you need to keep some of your wits about you.

In PvP, while using Furious (Warrior Arms Grandmaster) each stack of Furious Surge increases condition damage and healing power.

I gotta go with Charlie and nearlight on this one. Eles have a trait to more easily stack burn because they have the hardest time of any profession making a viable condition build.

Don’t forget, more premades/teams in queue, the more likely premades/teams will be matched with each other, and the less likely solo players will be matched against premades/teams.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

misterdevious.6482:

So… what you’re saying is… You want a no ICD way to deal significant Condition Damage to enemies that hit you really fast?

Radiant Retaliation says hi.

Radiant retaliation is broken and has been since it was created.

Even if it did work it would need a massive increase in scaling to actually be worth taking (like more then 2x what power gives since base power is 1k)

I agree with you with what Radiant Retaliation means, but I also agree with the guy you quoted with its role being with dealing with those multi hit attacks.

My two cents, Shield #4 should also be a knockdown to combo with future knockdown traits, or some extra effect. Possibly have the trait destroy/block projectiles too.

Shield #5 should count as a “block” whenever it absorbs a projectile to combo with block traits, preferably as baseline, but I would be cool with it if the trait became, “All Shield skills block projectiles,” instead. Or you can even have them block as a baseline, and the trait becomes, “All Shield skills block and reflect projectiles.” It might be too late to test those and figure out a respectable cooldown for them, but I’d love to try them with the current buffed cooldowns first. It is a Master tier trait.

From my point of view, Torch is the offensive offand, Focus is the defense against melee offhand, and Shield is the defense against ranged offhand.

For now I’m going to add the idea by radioAspen that was rewritten by Rising Dusk to the OP. If there are any other nominations followed by enough agreements they’ll ge up there too.

Okay, unlike many others I actually like the cool flavor of making Consume Conditions a Corruption. And the fact that you can lower it to a 20 second cooldown is amazing. But others don’t feel that way. It was recently pointed out to me that most most skill mastery traits provide at least two positive benefits right now. I countered with the fact that a 33% reduction is big enough to be considered a double perk, but the guy also had a point with the fact that Corruptions hurt you, and Master of Corruptions aims to hurt you more. As it is, being such a trade off trait makes it feel more like an Adept trait. Plus, as it currently stands it has to compete with two very, very powerful Master traits. So let’s buff it the trait. Here are three possible versions of the trait:

Master of Corruptions A: 20% cooldown reduction, corruptions no longer place a condition on you.

This is the bog standard boring answer. I want to avoid this. I like what Robert Gee has been doing with cooldown reduction traits on Necro and Mesmer and I want to encourage it.

Master of Corruptions B: 33% reduction, gain an extra condition, whenever you self inflict a condition gain 3% life force.

Condi Necros tend to be starved for life force, so this becomes a decent life force generator for them at a strength level (maybe +/- 1%) to compete with the other Master Curses traits. This trait will then combo well with Plague Signet and therefore indirectly with the Grandmaster Spite trait Signets of Suffering, as well as combo with the Grandmaster Blood Magic trait Unholy Martyr. This also fits within the theme of Necromancers taking pain to make themselves stronger.

Master of Corruptions C: 33% reduction, gain an extra condition, whenever you transfer a condition to another player gain 1% life force.

Similar to B, but I altered the text to say transfer so that includes moving conditions from yourself to enemies, as well as moving them from enemies to other enemies. Something like Epidemic becomes a major life force generator. Corruptions currently encourage you to use condi transfers to remove the self-inflicted conditions, so this gives you a bonus for doing that. And like before, it works with Plague Signet and Unholy Martyr. I placed it at 1% because I’m worried about the many ways we have of moving conditions around when you combine the different transfer subsets together.

There, that’s my attempt at being constructive. Any other thoughts or ideas to put forth?

Oh, and one more thought. For the love of god could we get a buff to Corrosive Poison Cloud? Does anybody even use it?

Edit: I complete forgot about the new Curses Adept trait: Plague Sending. It auto casts Plague Signet. Yeah.

Additions:

Master of Corruptions D :

Master of Corruption: Corruption skills recharge 33% faster, apply an extra condition to you, and apply resistance to you for 4 seconds.

Necromancers are the masters of conditions, but don’t have much in the way of access to the boon that makes one immune to conditions. It was mentioned before that it was being added to the Reaper elite, but the base profession deserves it in some form as well. This idea also gives more counterplay to Corruptions if the boon is stripped or converted.

I’m only making this thread because it’s not clarified in the notes while some other skills are. The biggest pain of the current version of the trait, or at least the last time I used it years ago, is the fact that it’ll constantly put you in combat. Whether in open world PvE (gotta dodge that Hyena cripple… dodged it! And now I’m in combat anyway…), in dungeons, in WvW, and sometimes in PvP as well when rotating.

It probably is already considered but I want to make absolute sure since you’re making Mark of Evasion an always on minor trait.

They declared that they’re going to normalize the scaling between modes, so that they are no longer split.

Makes me wonder about Retaliation.

If it was seriously fixed a year ago (and if it was a bug for two years, it’s fine to think it was a feature) then I was away from Warrior for much longer than I thought.

Anyone else notice from the patch last week that Stronger Bowstrings had a stealth nerf? Along with its 20% range increase, it also made the basic attack Dual Shot a 100% projectile finisher, but now it’s a regular 20% projectile finisher, making the trait really really weak.

This has been bugging me even more after playing Heroes of the Storm, and it’s in other games too.

Pings. Pings with sound and icons. You ping the map, sound happens, people know to check the map to see what you pinged. You don’t even need detailed notifications, just give me a map ping sound for whenever I’m in the same party (PvE), squad (WvW), and most importantly, same team in sPvP. If you’re worried about abuse, make sure that the sound can only play once every 3 or 5 seconds per player pinging.

Downed Notification. If a teammate or enemy goes down, I want a sound notification. It doesn’t have to be obnoxious. It could be a voice over line. I know in Heroes that whenever someone dies it just gives a small ping sound, and the sound plays at a different note depending on if its a teammate or enemy that died. It’s subtle, but really effective. Give me a sound for when someone is downed, and another sound for when someone dies. It hopefully will alert people to when their teammates just died at far so they should turn away from far or take a different and not get into a 1v3.

If people are going to get more awareness for rotations, they need more awareness for what’s happening around the map. And currently there’s just the bare minimum, which is why voice is so powerful and so requested.

I’ve been thinking about how in sPvP, the best thing to do with a downed body is get it off point and let it bleed out. Not burn down its HP, and not stomp it ASAP. It’s great from a strategic point of view, but one of those somewhat counter intuitive, sometimes feel bad (for the victim) things that I’m not sure about keeping in the game.

If you’re all for it, then just say so. No problem.

If you’re against, my suggestion in a nutshell is to have downed state health decrease at a faster rate, and to counteract this change have it increase a little faster from revives and the downed #4 skill.

Also, I’d like some notification when a player goes down. Some kind of voice clip perhaps. One annoyance is that there’s very low feedback to the rest of the players when one person gets picked off on the side, no matter which side of the conflict it’s happening to.

Zefrost.3425:

Every sigil should strive to be like Sigil of Impact – 10% more damage to disabled foes.
This is one of the most balanced sigils in the game since it requires you to actually do something to get a reward. Funny thing is that it’s not a bad sigil even now being overshadowed by the broken ones.

So therefore, balancing the broken sigils will improve this game a hell of a lot. Would prefer to see changes like this:

Sigil of Doom – Poison further decreases heal potency by 7%.
Sigil of Air – Activates when a single strike does 25% of an opponents max health. (5scd)

Just some examples…

This is actually the best set of examples I’ve seen to changing the random proc sigils.

In the OP’s initial calculation, he accidentally equated 100 seconds = 1 minute for swiftness.

I’m sure this was mentioned in the live stream somewhere, but basically all traits that cast a skill will work exactly the same way they do now; having the trait is like having a second copy of that skill on your bar, and that copy will have its own separate internal cooldown.

There is the high possibility of there being exceptions to this rule, however.

Team Deathmatch would be cool if we had in-game voice chat to quickly coordinate builds, setup front and back lines, and call out for peels. But we don’t get that. At least Conquest is manageable as after the initial clash most fights are 3v3 at most. But having a 5v5 with people you’ve never met when there’s that much damage to deal with, just no.

Plus when I queued, I queued for Conquest. For the same reason people don’t want Stronghold to be in the same queue as Conquest, I don’t want Team Deathmatch to be in the same queue as Conquest.

And furthermore, sometimes I’m just popping in to do my daily, and one of those dailies often needs a capture point to be completed. If Courtyard was just designed as a King of the Hill, that would be one less thing I had against it.

The Warrior trait, Stronger Bowstrings, used to give 20% more range for the Longbow and make the auto-attack from the Longbow a 100% projectile finisher. As of the patch, the auto-attack no longer has the 100% projectile finisher quality.

I guess that’s my problem. I’d like things get more interesting earlier on. At launch and in the initial betas, the game was hard, and you needed everything you could get to overcome challenges. Now the challenge is lowered, and most of the build defining (and more interesting to me) traits are gated to level 60 and 80.

MaXi.3642:

game isn’t supposed to be played the same way while leveling as it is in end game PvE or PvP, if you don’t like leveling and improvements over time, don’t play RPGs…

it looks like many people are just so sybaritic from all the QOL of GW2 that they would rather be L80 right after the tutorial, how sad…

you know what? go farm tomes of experience and don’t ruin leveling experience to those who like it…

PS: you probably skipped the fact that improvements must be slow and constant, if you give whole specialization at level 20 and say “hey man, you need another 20 levels until you get something new”, many people will just quit, because for many people the feeling that you get something new and improve with each level is part of the fun in RPGs… think about it

Hey, that’s what Hero Points and the new tracks for skills and such are for. In fact, you still have to put points in just to get that specialization to grandmaster, I’m just asking for the option to get there faster. The same points you can get quickly from a combination of leveling and exploring the open world. In fact… you’d get more rewarded over time with this method than the current.

Current method? I level and feel unrewarded, and bored. It takes multiple hours to get more trait points. I pretty much do it just for certain build practice and the few times I feel like exploring, but then eventually I feel like doing that same exploring on a max level character that I can experiment more with.

Yeah, the suggestions were under the assumption they may not give us a free skill and instead try to have a UI tutorial where they force you to put a point in trait line.

Last night I posted this on my guild’s forums:

Okay, pet peeve that I hope to hell they address in Heart of Thorns.

You know what’s fun about your class? Traits. You know what traits are fun? Grandmaster traits. Up until you get Grandmaster traits, you don’t really have much build defining or interesting synergy. It reminds me that ANet has stats, and back when the Marionette came down they talked about how the majority of players, the casuals, almost never touch their traits. Like, literally just leave those trait spots blank and don’t bother picking any.

And I know why. It’s because while leveling, traits are near useless. They’re minor perks. Some classes have powerful traits at the Master level, like Mesmer with Deceptive Evasion. Most have the interesting traits at the Grandmaster level. You don’t unlock Master and Grandmaster until level 60 and 80 respectively. By then, people will have forgotten that traits exist and will not bother.

In the Specialization system, people must be allowed to trait a Grandmaster trait as soon as humanly possible. You should unlock the first specialization line by level 20, and can crank that all the way to Grandmaster as long as you amass the Hero points. Second specialization comes at 40, third comes at 60, and at 80 you can then switch one of those regular specializations for an elite.

Doing anything other than this means that I will reconsider leveling my upcoming Revenant by any means that don’t include mass usage of Tomes of Knowledge.

A guildmate mentioned to me that from what we know of the system, it should actually work the way I’m hoping. I’m just hoping to lower the level requirements to get the really good traits in players’ faces as soon as possible.

Level 1-10: Weapon Skills
Level 10: Downed State and Healing Skill (give them a free one)
Level 11-20: Utility/Elite Skills (give them a free one of each)
Level 20: Equip One Specialization Line
Level 40: Equip Two Specializations at once
Level 60: Equip Three Specialization Line
Level 80: Mastery System/Elite Specializations (if expansion is owned).

The second you unlock your First Specialization line, if you have enough points, you should immediately be able to slot all the way to Grandmaster.

In fact, because I’m worried for the good people that play PvP/WvW and won’t have extra Skill/Hero Point Challenges done from the PvE world, how about instead of needing to do that you give enough freebies from each Skill line that they have a whole bar of skills to start with, then investigate for more. This has the chance of new players not learning how to buy new utility skills (like we have now with them not looking at traits), but I’m betting that players are more likely going to investigate skills as that’s something connected more directly to button presses than traits/specializations.

The above reasons (especially fun factor and trying to not contribute to the meta getting stale), but there’s also the fact that by not running meta I get both a slight surprise advantage and the ability to tweak my build to counter meta.

Rather than baseline, I’d be fine with it being a minor trait in Discipline or Defense.

But the MM weakness currently is the cleave that comes from fighting multiple opponents. Absurdly so in fact.

Okay, two options. First, have the shout create a new minion, like the conclusion others have come to.

Second option: the minions release scale with the number of enemies hit

Scenario 1, depending on the number of enemies hit you get…
1) Jagged Horror
2) Bone Minion
3) Blood or Shadow Fiend
4) Bone Fiend
5) Flesh Golem

So you only get a single Flesh Golem if you hit five enemies with the shout, along with a full set of the others.

Scenario 2:
1) Jagged Horror
2) Jagged Horror
3) Bone Minion
4) Bone Minion
5) Bone Fiend or Flesh Golem

Trying to not step on the toes of the other utilities as much, here’s a toned down version of the same idea.

Considering the tease of Vampiric Aura, and how there’s a possibility that leaps and blasts through Dark Fields will provide it I’ve been thinking. Vampiric effects currently do a set amount of bonus damage+healing, then scale with Power and Healing Power affecting either side of the equation separately.

So, why not have Guardians continue their duality with Necromancers? Have Retaliation be reworked to block a certain amount of damage and then reflect that back onto your foe. The damage reflected can be amplified by power and the damage blocked can be increased by your Toughness.

This helps Guardians (a new mitigation skill that makes Retaliation more useful than an extra bit of damage if you fail to block an attack with your low base health pool), Warriors (Spiked Armor in the Toughness line would actually be something that ties really well with both the trait line and everything Warrior), and Necromancers (With the new Spite grandmaster trait and couple of other Retaliation modifiers, it would tie into that “hit me” style Necromancers have that doesn’t actually work right now).
Retaliation is a pretty lackluster boon right now, especially since it needed to be nerfed shortly after launch. This turns it into a new mitigation boon that makes sense for classes with low/no access to Protection, while tying strongly into Guardians, Light Fields, and Light Auras.

(We don’t have to increase Retaliation damage for this. Just keep it at the same it’s at right now, or possibly even lower it since it will be doing double duty).

That’s an interesting way to approach it.

Wait, so you think buffing Retaliation will lower its advantage for small groups and raise its advantage to large groups? It’s because it can be used to counteract ranged/AoE pressure that I figured the extra damage mitigation would help.

I’d disagree with your idea for stacking it, however. Having each stack block one attack would make it too similar to Aegis, at which point I’d rather scrap my idea or plain combine Retaliation with Aegis and have the damage reflected/mitigated be percentage based rather than a pure function of your own stats.

Edit: How’s this, why don’t we make the mitigation an extra quality of Light Aura. Currently Light Aura gives you Retaliation and also gives foes Vulnerability. Remove the Vulnerability, and have it mitigate damage instead. Keep Light Aura only available through Leaps and it’s much more cordoned off.

Necros want to be hit… right. I’ve been thinking lately how to make that actually a thing. Best I can think of is baking traits into Death Magic. Here’s one idea:

Trait: Retaliatory Force
Gain Life Force while hit under the effects of Retaliation.

Any other ideas?

Having Stability on a 2-second channel ult is just not as useful. It’s better to keep Stability/Stun Break from Foot in the Grave and combine it with Reaper Shroud #3. Traited, you can have a stun break available every 7 seconds after you leave Death Shroud.

And we need Resistance.