Guild Wars 2

Since the mechanic of Siphoned Power is considered interesting and worth keeping, how about reversing the threshold? Instead of having it activate below 25% health have it activate only when above 75% or possibly higher for balance.

It seems like the current implementation is attempting to bring a reward for high risk aspect to the class but the reward is too small for the current risk. It’s also not very interesting from a players perspective because it’s too obvious as to when pop death shroud. It basically encourages death shroud usage as a simple damage sponge when low on health.

With the health pool reversed the risk is mitigated a bit but the core of the mechanic becomes much more interesting.

The trait would be similar to runes of the scholar with the additional criteria of needing to take damage. The ideal of the mechanic would be for a player to keep their health high while attempting to build a large death shroud pool. The more death shroud built up the more might stacks the player can potentially gain.

I think this plays really well into the concept of the necromancer being a attrition based class by offering a large burst of damage only after a given amount of time of skillful survival and well timed ability usage. If this proves to be effective then healing power/life drain abilities become a means to sustaining/providing burst damage.

Something that may or may not be a problem is death shroud already being maxed before combat. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to just immediately pop death shroud and gain the burst damage. However, there are plenty of other abilities that gain this sort of advantage and stacks of might are easily countered via boon removal or well timed dodging so I don’t see it as a instant win condition either. Another counter would be for many classes to just run away or stealth for a bit. Then we would be faced with either putting death shroud on cool down or allowing it to drain and attempting to CC the opponent before they get away.