Guild Wars 2

The passive benefits of having all 3 shades up are huge, especially the damage reduction, but they take ages to summon. It’s literally faster to spike the enemy down than to summon 3 shades. The big shade in theory removes the clunkiness of having to summon 3 to take full benefit of your minor traits, but the other 2 GM traits arejust so much better.

I felt a pang of nostalgia for the Olden Days, so I decided to watch some videos of old tournaments, and found these: https://www.twitch.tv/mistleague/videos/all
However, looking through that list, it seems the grand final of the league is missing. I remember watching it streamed live back when it happened, pretty sure it took place at PAX, and, if I’m not mistaken, I think it was the first tournament with a cash prize, right?

I also vaguely remember that there were some connectivity issues – something about members of one team got DDOSed? But that doesn’t make sense, because I think it was a LAN! How would the attackers find the targets’ IP addresses if they’re in a new location at a LAN?

Was it not a LAN? Am I thinking of a different tournament? Can anyone confirm any of these details, or is my memory playing tricks on me? Does anyone know where a video of that final can be found? Does it exist anywhere online? I looked on the guildwars2 Twitch channel as well and it’s not there either.

Any help from someone with a better memory or stronger google-fu than mine would be appreciated!

Yep, I’m definitely talking about it not transferring any conditions at all. I know it’s not meant to work through obstructions, and I know about the recent change to make it not work on targets behind you. I’m talking about it failing over open ground at a target in range and not blocking. I think I might start filming my matches just to save this when it happens (which is normally once, twice a game at most), and compile them into a long “Anet Halp!” youtube video.

Pretty much everything I want to say has already been said, but I’ll reiterate the points I thought were important:
1. side exits from bases are pointless. Barely closer to side nodes than front exit, WAY further to mid node. Ideally, gates should be moved, but since that would mean a complete redesign of the map, the more practical solution might be to seal up the side gate
2. Buffs are unbalanced, Grenth much stronger
3. Lack of terrain on mid-node makes it very hard to kite and LOS. Even if you stand on the ledges, there’s nowhere you can really kite to if a porting class like thief or guardian jumps you while on there, because unless you yourself can teleport too there’s no way to get over the barrier to side node.
4. Classes with teleports have a huge advantage in their ability to get from side nodes to mid much faster, whether to +1 a fight or to kite if they’re being damaged.
5. All the wooden hoardings make the map a little bland-looking and lacking in personality, like it’s half-finished and still under construction.

I’m regularly getting instances of conditions not being transferred, even if I have clear, unobstructed line of sight and easily within range of my target. It’s very frustrating and it puts me on tilt, and I just wanted to find out if it’s also happening to other people or if ANet just hates me personally.

Points for Capture
Capturing an objective awards immediate score.
If the objective is upgraded it is worth additional score.

This alone should improve things immensely!

May I also suggest an additional bonus score for capturing objectives from the server leading the score? This would incentivise the two bottom teams to gang up on the leader rather than to turn on each other for easy points, as I’ve often seen happening.

The problem with DS since launch is that its main autoattack was useless for condition. They tried to fix that when they reworked Dhuumfire, but, like everything else, it works better in Reaper’s Shroud because RS1 attacks at TWICE the speed! They absolutely should halve life blast’s casting time, and reduce its damage proportionately. I think a dev wandered in here once and said they were considering it, wouldn’t hurt to remind them.

DS2 used to be ground-targeted in early beta, but they changed it because they thought Necro was too tough. But the damage in pvp now is literally 3x more than it was in betas, so having something that can be used as an escape and provide some extra mobility is pretty much compulsory.

They could make those 2 changes and core necro STILL wouldn’t be better than Reaper, but at least it would be in a similar league.

I haven’t done the math on it yet, but I’m curious: if they hadn’t nerfed duration of ice field and number of whirl finishers on Reaper’s Shroud 4&5, would we be able to stack bleeds to do more damage than we could with chill before?

I feel like the problems with unranked are problems with the behaviour of people in unranked, not with the match format itself… A better report/reputation system would go a very long way towards solving those problems, and I think that’s where ANet should focus their efforts.

How about introducing a “low priority queue” for people who’ve been the subject of too many reports within a certain period of time? That would allow you to segregate the more problematic members of the community and put them in a kind of ghetto where they’d only get to play with each other (they would only get matched up with normal priority queue teams if the matchmaking system has been forced to broaden its parameters due to lack of good matchups or too long spent in queue), without forcing ANet to have GMs going through every report manually.

There would have to be safeguards of course. Low priority status would wear off after a time (and be extended if you got more reports). Nobody would get put in the low priority queue unless they’ve received multiple reports. If they’ve received reports from people both on their team and on the opposing team, those reports should be weighted more heavily, as there’s clearly a strong consensus that this person was ruining the fun from everyone, and ditto if they’ve received reports from multiple matches. Reports originating from people in the low priority queue themselves should get lower weighting, as reporting someone for no good cause could be used in retaliation for someone reporting them. Finally, a single strike should land you in the lower priority queue for only about half an hour or so assuming you don’t receive further reports,, and people shouldn’t be aware of having been put in it.

I don’t expect this to work as well in GW2 as it does in games like lol or dota2, where there’s millions of people queueing for a match, so the low-priority queue is more effectively segregated, but it’ll help a bit. Nor should it replace the current reporting system (I assume you still investigate people who get reported a lot), it would just be an automated way to make people who behave badly stand in the corner for a bit. They still get to chat with the other people standing in the corner, but they’re not ruining matches for the rest of us.

Saiyan.1704:

It’s a terrible, passive, trait mechanic that shouldn’t exist. You can’t justify it.

It really is terrible design. Might as well be playing rock paper scissors.

Hehe, good to know that ESLmoney went to good use!

I enjoyed that! You guys sound good btw, did you buy new microphones?

The reason they locked us into HotM while in queue was so they could implement the “match ready” button. They said they wouldn’t want people to not be able to click “ready” because the queue popped while they were in a cutscene or a map loading screen, so we had to be locked in.

Obviously I don’t have any data on whether the “match ready” pop-up was really helpful in reducing AFK players in ranked/unranked arenas. But the devs must know these stats, and if the “match ready” pop-up is doing its job, I would like it to stay.

However, I would be happy for the time allowed for us to click “ready” were increased to 30" or even 45" (up from 10"), if it would allow people to ready up for their match even if the dialogue box pops up while they’re in a loading screen. Even on a slow computer that should be enough for people to load into their map and click “ready”. Unless they’re loading a massive map and the pop-up comes right after they start loading, but that should be a very rare occurrence. The only things that take longer than 45" to finish are cutscenes, and it shouldn’t be hard for them to code the “match ready” dialogue to pop up during cutscenes.

I used to roam in WvW while queueing, and I’ve barely done ANY wvw at all since the match ready dialogue came in.

As title, and this has never happened before – if I’m not mistaken the game used to wait until you changed instance before it would disconnect you to patch itself, so I’m wondering if this is an intentional change or if something’s broken.

As title, and this has never happened before – if I’m not mistaken the game used to wait until you changed instance before it would disconnect you to patch itself, so I’m wondering if this is an intentional change or if something’s broken.

Robert Gee.9246:

I’m fairly confident that boons will still apply their effects to necromancers even if this trait is not equipped.

Except Regeneration doesn’t heal you while in Shroud… Not to mention any non-boon healing allies put out while you’re in shroud…

The problem with the change you made is that the necromancer’s only frequent boon self-application is Reaper’s Might (spite adept minor), which ONLY WORKS IN SHROUD! This means Blighter’s Boon is now significantly worse at building up life force. If you already have enough LF to stay in Shroud for awhile it’ll give you a decent amount of healing, but it’s no longer much use for getting you to the point where you can enter Shroud to begin with.

The only way to make BB generate LF now is to combine it with Chilling Victory and go with GS, which might be OK in WvW zerg fights and big pve events, but it’s not very useful in pvp due to its lack of range and mobility. Plus, not being able to pick Decimate Defences because you need that slot for CV severely limits build variety, pushing people back to Celestial amulet to get decent crit chance. Decimate Defences opened up a huge number of other amulets as viable options. If you want to be tanky you could take Soldiers instead of Celestial. If you wanted to go glass cannon you could pick Valkyrie over Marauder/Berserker. And if you wanted to go condi you could pick Carrion over Rabid. It was a choice that opened up possibilities and build variety, but now if you choose BB at GM level, you basically HAVE to take CV at master.

The thing I loved about BB up until this change was that it solved a fundamental design flaw with necromancer, which was that it’s a snowball profession: up until you have sufficient life force, you’re basically as harmful as a snowball, and you melt just as easily. Once you’ve built up a sufficient amount, you become an avalanche, and very hard to stop. This is really bad design, as it frustrates both the player, who feels impotent at the start of a fight and needs to hang around the edges being useless, hoping you don’t get jumped because you have no damage mitigation and no escapes, and for the necromancer’s opponents, who blow all their cooldowns to get the necro low only to watch them pop into a full shroud, and they have to do all that damage over again.

BB solved this problem by allowing you to build up life force quickly at the start of a fight, but with yesterday’s change it’s become significantly worse at LF generation, although it’ll still provide decent healing for you while you’re actually IN shroud. This makes it a “win more” trait: if you’ve already got enough LF, equipping this makes you even harder to kill. If you don’t have enough LF, equipping this now does pretty much nothing! Sure you might get a few sigil procs and Strength rune procs off it as well, but Reaper’s Might is still the only consistent boon self-application necros have and it’s gated behind Shroud – meaning BB is a practically a blank trait slot until you’ve built up life force through other means!

I strongly think an ICD would have been a better way to balance this. If you think that wouldn’t be enough, and that pre-buffing would still mean necromancers get to the fight with too much LF, you could also change it to only work while in combat. Making it only proc off self-application is a very limiting change that closes off build variation and exacerbates the design problems with Death Shroud, namely its preventing the necromancer from benefiting from ally healing and its frustrating snowball gameplay.

Bhawb.7408:

Oh, and I completely forgot to mention this.

Shivers of Dread is completely worthless to far too many builds. If you don’t bring staff, rely on RNG corruptions, or a very select set of skills, you have an entire set of minor traits that give, in total: +20% chill duration, 10% reduced damage from Chilled enemies, 3s AoE fear every 28s. That’s awful, like, approaching Death Magic minors level of awful.

Yeah I agree with that. Those traits were clearly meant to accompany the GS with its good chill uptime, and maybe nobody would be complaining about them if GS wasn’t so bad. Plus the way they went all Isaiah’s Balance on Chilling Darkness means there’s no easy way to inflict frequent chill WITHOUT GS. So maybe all those minor traits should’ve been combined into a single major that you could go for if you do bring GS? Or, altenatively, they could move some of the chill OFF the GS and make it baseline (1" chill on critical hits, 5" cooldown) on a minor trait, to make those other minors useful?

On the subject of “Suffer!”, I second that it’s seriously underwhelming. I think the base power of all these shouts is a bit hosed by their “gets more powerful as it hits more targets” design. This sort of design can work ok with defensive skills like Suffer (although offensive skills are very difficult to balance like that), but the base power level needs to be such that using it is meaningful even in a 1v1 fight. Transferring 1 condi and inflicting 3" chill every 30" isn’t something worth a utility slot. I understand that in a group fight this skill can give the necro a full cleanse and inflict a frightening amount of chill and damage on the enemy team, but is it really good balance when the same skill is godmode in 20v20 and trash in 1v1?

Frankly, I like the idea of this kind of balancing. I just think it’s extremely difficult to do, especially with skills like Suffer, which have both a defensive and an offensive component.

The most obvious way to make this skill balanced is to adjust its recharge per enemy hit. For defensive skills it’s a very obvious route to take: the skill takes condis off you – the more enemies around, the more condis get inflicted on you – the more enemies around, the faster this skill takes condis off you! However, you can’t go down that road, because the trait already does that. (Which is also why the skill’s base recharge is so abysmally long for its effect – if you drop it too much then the trait will make it totally spammable.)

So assuming the recharge stays the same, the only way to make this skill balanced for 1v1 without making it completely broken in group fights is to spread out its effects away from the necromancer. In other words, instead of transferring more condis off the reaper, make it transfer condis off allies for each additional enemy hit. Raise the base number of condis to 2, and suddenly you’ve boosted its defensive utility in 1v1 by 100% without making the reaper themselves any more powerful at all in group fights. Add a stunbreak, which will be much more valuable 1v1 than in group fights, where you might get stunned again instantly, and suddenly this is, well, still worse than Plague Signet in 1v1, but not that much worse that you’d be able to ignore how good it’ll be in a 3v3!

Bhawb.7408:

manveruppd.7601:

Any chance Death’s Charge could be targeted, like Fiery Whirl or Whirlwind Attack?

This would only be good if it only happened without a target, while keeping the current targeted functionality.

I know the way it currently works makes it more “sticky”, as a gap closer it works well. But I would rather have the option to also use it as an escape, even if it means targeting an enemy will be a bit fiddlier and it’ll occasionally miss.

Holy carp it’s like the old GW1 MM is back!

Any chance Death’s Charge could be targeted, like Fiery Whirl or Whirlwind Attack?

Some nice fights there, especially in the second vid! thanks!

Dromina.5023:

line casting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJncPGDJ9Ho

Thanks. It’s even worse than I thought! :o

I don’t do much pve so I don’t know what linecasting is. But from watching the video, I’m guessing it involves restricting your field of view using obstacles when using skills that throw “random” missiles within an area, like Meteor Shower or Ice Bow 4, or guardian’s scepter 2. That way, all the missiles fall in the narrow area that you can see between the obstacles instead of all over the skill’s aoe, and you get more hits on your target.

Did I get it right?

And, if yes, I’m guessing linecasting doesn’t do anything when you’re using skills that hit the entire of their aoe, like Wells, correct?

I have wondered myself whether the Signets of Suffering necro might be better off running Soldiers. You’ll have less damage outside DS (if my maths is right: the extra crit chance from Celestial just about edges out the extra power), but I think you’ll have slightly better damage in DS if you took Pack runes: with decent fury uptime and Deathly Perception, your crit chance will be about 75%, and the extra power will make up for the lower ferocity and crit chance.
I really don’t think that the lack of healing power would hurt survivability that much. Life Siphon scales amazingly well with it, but the signets not so much. Plus it’s true that the condition damage from corruptions is not a big concern.
BTW are you folks sure that transferred conditions use the condition damage stat of the person who originally applied it? I was sure it used your own.

Krysard.1364:

I don’t understand. You mean the mist form from vamp rune procs like it should? Because in the video it looked like it dropped you into normal mode instead of into mist. I could see the mist form icon on your status bar, but all your skill slots were enabled, whereas they’re locked out when you’re in mist form.

Thats exact, and thats the bug[/quote]

OK, I got it now, thanks. So the 6th rune bonus isn’t proccing Mist Form, but instead simply drops you out of DS. That’s definitely is a bug. It’s normal for transformations to overwrite each other, but in this case the rune transformation isn’t proccing at all.

Jelzouki.4128:

What don’t you understand???

You said

still in vamp but out of deathshroud yes

which confused me. “Still in vamp” implied that Mist Form was working properly, whereas it looked like you were dropped out of DS but not into Mist Form in the video. I thought maybe you were in Mist Form very briefly and I missed it in the video. That’s why I was confused, that’s all. I get what you’re talking about now, and you’re right that it’s a bug.

Jelzouki.4128:

manveruppd.7601:

Tell me if I got this right: from what I can tell from the video, if vamp runes proc while in DS, instead of turning you into mist, they just force you out of DS into “normal” mode. Correct?

still in vamp but out of deathshroud yes

I don’t understand. You mean the mist form from vamp rune procs like it should? Because in the video it looked like it dropped you into normal mode instead of into mist. I could see the mist form icon on your status bar, but all your skill slots were enabled, whereas they’re locked out when you’re in mist form.

Someone’s been getting beaten by condi mesmers too much lately? :p

Confusion TOTALLY makes sense on a necromancer!

EDIT: oh, and slow as well :p I think it would be a great way for attrition builds like conditionmancers to stay alive without having to invest in too much tanky gear. Since Chill and Cripple have been indirectly nerfed by the changes to movement skills, it’s harder to keep melee attackers off you. Making them hit you slower would partially make up for that.

Tell me if I got this right: from what I can tell from the video, if vamp runes proc while in DS, instead of turning you into mist, they just force you out of DS into “normal” mode. Correct?

Zenith.7301:

The distinction between grandmaster/master/adept is also an irrelevant one now that you’re committed to an entire line, it doesn’t matter where the traits fall in if you’re going to take that combination regardless.

This is a good thing to remember: the only reason to have the most powerful traits in a line all be in the GM tier is to prevent people from taking more than one. A lot of us moaned that Terror was not worth a GM slot when the specialisation changes were previewed, and that came back to bite us in the behind, since being unable to take both Terror and Path of Corruption made terrormancer a total joke.

I’m sure damage multipliers are additive in this game (eg. 5% + 6% = 11% )

OMG! I didn’t believe they had really fixed it but it’s true, they’re more responsive than ever! Well done to whoever is the coding genius that managed it!

Banning the tanky amulets is standard practice in 1v1 tournaments, it’s not just cause necros. Otherwise fights can go on literally forever: you can end up in a situation where neither player can put out enough damage to kill the other unless one falls asleep on their keyboard.
And seriously, why would you want any elite OTHER than Golem for 1v1?

It’s a good change but it won’t make a huge difference in real life: it’s only in edge-case scenarios where you can hit a target while out of range of them or with no line of sight. Like if you dropped a mark and ran off, and they trigger it. Still a good change though, as those occasions do happen, albeit rarely.

I’m more concerned about the fact that some of my transfers have been failing apparently for no reason since the June 23 patch. No “obstructed”, “evaded”, or “missed” message, clear line of sight, in range, yet sometimes I’ll hit Plague Signet and it will do nothing. I thought maybe the problem was blind: that now that conditions to be transferred are chosen randomly instead of blind being prioritised, PS will miss if blind isn’t one of the conditions randomly transferred. But in that case surely I’d have gotten a “missed!” messagel, right? Sometimes it will instead corrupt boons on the target without removing any conditions off me, which is just COMPLETELY bizarre, because it’s clearly hitting and proccing Signets of Suffering, just not moving conditions off me!

Sadly I haven’t been able to reliably reproduce this bug and figure out when it happens, but I swear it does. At some point when I have the time I’ll record some games and post clips of it happening.

I like these ideas, I always wanted Corruptions to have greater risk and greater reward too. I guess that’s the direction they tried to take it in with Master of Corruption and its huge 33% duration reduction, but it was completely the wrong way to go about it. And then they started panicking about how OP some of these skills would have been when traited, so they nerfed their base versions. (Utterly mistifying of course: if Consume Conditions had stayed at its old 25" recharge, when traited with MoC it would go down to 18", which is barely any worse than the 20" it goes down to now. It was a stupid and unwarranted nerf.)

I disagree that Consume Conditions should have its Corruption tag taken away. There were much better ways to make it a corruption than the ones they went for. I can think of 2 just off the top of my head:
1. They could have made it give you its conditions at the START of the cast rather than the end, so that they’re consumed by the heal. You could lower the base heal to make up for it. And if the self-applied condition is vulnerability then it’s still a decent trade-off, as you’re getting more damage while actually casting it. This would’ve been my favourite option.
2. You could keep the self-applied conditions at the end, but make them longer duration and fewer stacks, so that they could synergise with all your transfers. 3 stacks vuln 10" for instance.

I also love Bhawb’s ideas about skills like Blood is Power and CPC being sort of like “upkeep” skills, but I’m not sure how they would work with DS. If you would need to be able to switch them on and off manually to stop you from sacrificing yourself to death, you would need to turn them into toggle skills. But when you’re in Shroud, you lose your utility slots, so you’d lose the ability to turn them off! If that’s just sacrificing health directly that’s not a huge problem, as it could come out of life force instead (although it would be annying if it dropped you out of DS before you could cast your Doom or Dark Path or whatever), but if it’s pulsing self-applied conditions it’s a problem, as they would carry over when you exited and overwhelm your defences. I wonder if it were possible to keep access to the toggle skills while in shroud – can they selectively re-enable utility slots while in transformations?

Hmm… hard to say without trying it, but I think that would actually make it pretty decent! Core terrormancer atm has just a tiny little bit too low damage to be OK (due to us losing Path of Corruption on the same tier as terror), but an extra 200 chill damage, if we can maintain decent uptime for it, might just push it up to being decent!

I don’t think anyone was complaining about necromancer balance dude, just about this bug in particular

It’s not an opinion that 3 is not a statistically significant sample.

Reaper terrormancer will definitely be a thing! Just a question though: is the build calculator accurate about damage? Deathly Chill seems REALLY weak!

“Spawn one Salty Horror per enemy hit. Lose all life force, stability, and ability to receive healing while Salty Horrors are alive. Salty Horrors spam the official game forums about how underpowered they are until killed.”

Nyth.3492:

The only thing that makes me slightly salty is that there is clearly more passion put into the berzerker traits.

It totally felt like that to me too, everyone on the panel seemed so excited, even Hugh Norfolk, who wasn’t even involved in the design, and was apparently hanging around simply because warrior is his main and he was hyped about it! :p If only we had half that passion directed at core necro!

OMG sample size of 3! Matchmaking MUST be broken! Ignore the THOUSANDS of successful even matchups that happen every day!

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

manveruppd.7601:

Has this been tested? Is the bug reliably repeatable?

Yes to both, unfortunately.

This makes me a sad panda

Trevor Boyer.6524:

@ manveruppd

I already told you once:
I did not play solo arena back then, I only played team arena.

But since you are trying to hit me in the credentials, here is a screen shot of my match records as of 8/22/2015:

OK, apologies, seems gw2score.com doesn’t have a record of all games, probably because there were a couple of resets and it only registers the latest incarnation of the pre-Dec 16 ladder.

Still, my other points stand: you have actual developer confirmation that the matchmaking doesn’t work the way you think it does. Whatever your perception of your experiences is, it can be put down to confirmation bias.

There was a brief period, between them adding the stunbreak and before the June 23 patch when FitG was really strong. I went back to terrormancer, with FitG instead of Reaper’s Protection (I had been running power before the stability patch), and it felt so much more fluid and mobile than before, it was incredible! However, losing the boon duration from Death Magic after June 23 hurt it a lot more than I thought it would! Before June 23, that stab was enough to secure a stomp. Afterwards, it wasn’t, because it expired during the stomp!

Trevor Boyer.6524:

@ manveruppd.7601

Three things for you:

• Literally nothing that you’ve said is anywhere even near relevant to what the discussion in this thread is actually about.
• I was never on the solo que leaderboards because back then I only ever played in a team while queing for team arena. Go figure.
• It would do you good to read a thread before posting a wall of text.

TBH I found your response a little condescending, but I’ll try to be helpful and constructive in return:
1. I did read THE WHOLE thread, and though you didn’t complain about premades in your OP, many other people did. I wasn’t just replying to you.
2. You have less than 500 games on team arena so I don’t know what you’re talking about?
3. Frankly I didn’t even feel the need to engage with the argument in your OP, because a dev came in and told you outright that the way you think the matchmaking system works isn’t the way it actually works. That’s why my response was more directed at other posters in here. Yet you ignored that and continued moaning about the same thing, so I’m wondering whether there’s any point to me typing this.
Nope.

You guys have no conception of the number of terrible premades that are out there. Casual PvE guilds doing 1 night a week pvp events. Groups of 3 beginners led by 2 experienced pvpers trying to teach them the ropes. Groups formed in Heart of the Mists with no voice comms and no experience of playing together, just teaming up to ensure a balanced comp. Parties where only 3/5 are on teamspeak. Partial premades, only 2 or 3/5 (you can’t tell them apart: you try to invite one of the enemy team to party, you can’t you assume all 5 ofthem are in a party, but it could be just 2).

Moreover, watch some top players streaming. Do you ever see them queueing up with their full team? Hardly ever! Sometimes you see them duo-ing, or rarely a 3, but most of the time they’re solo. Why is that? Because the really good teams, when they’re all playing together, they do scrims against each other, they don’t queue up! Because there’s so few teams at their level, joining the normal queue would just be a series of blowouts for them, and wouldn’t help them practice. So when these guys are playing in a premade, the top 1-2% of the pvp population is automatically removed from the queue. Someone who is queueing solo and has a high MMR should therefore have an advantage in those circumstances, because the only premades he’ll encounter will be people who are much worse players!

I honestly think that the party size parameter combined with the MMR inflation for premades in the matchmaking are enough to ensure fair matches, even when it’s 5 soloers against a premade. Maybe the MMR inflation could be adjusted upwards a tiny touch, but I think it’s almost perfect. I know there’s a lot of complaints on here, but I think the majority of complaints are misguided: people mistaking a losing streak for unfair matchmaking when it’s in fact just the fact that they’ve been getting better opponents to make up for their previous winning streak, people thinking they’re fighting lots of premades when actually they’re not, and sometimes people just being arrogant and refusing to contemplate that they lost because they played badly. Evan jumping in with stats to shoot down every argument time and time again proves this.

Thanks for responding Robert, I agree that overloading DS1 is a concern, and that 1 transfer per autoattack would be overpowered (it would have to have an ICD, or be tied to a different skill than the autoattack). But consider this: Necromancers only have THREE self-cleanses (Consume Conditions, Well of Power, and Shrouded Removal) – every other cleanse is a transfer, which requires a target, requires LOS, and requires the target not to dodge or block. And, while in Shroud, necromancers only have access to one cleanse (Shrouded removal, on a single condition on entry), and one transfer (Plague Sending, which is passive, and you can’t control when it procs). Although you have a lot of options while outside Shroud, when you’re in it, all you can really do is let the condis tick. Given that, wouldn’t an additional on-demand transfer tied to a Shroud skill – not a freebie, one that you would have to invest a trait to get – be a fair exchange for a trait slot?

Robert Gee.9246:

On the topic of increasing the cast speed of Life Blast: I think we would need to lower the damage multiplier if we wanted to increase the cast speed. The damage per second on that skill at its current cast time is already about as high as we are comfortable with. It’s a tricky skill to balance because we’d need to also look at adjusting all the traits that affect it.

I think everyone agrees that the damage coefficient would go down proportionately. Nobody will complain if you make it roughly the same speed as Reaper’s Shroud 1 and halve its damage.

The traits affecting Life Blast are precisely why you need to reduce LB’s cast time: Reaper’s Shroud autoattack is nearly twice as fast, and thereby gains twice the benefit from all traits affecting shroud skill 1. I know that Reaper’s Shroud 1 has the handicap of being melee range, but I would have thought that having higher DPS, baseline life force generation, as well as baseline 3-target cleave would be enough to balance for that! If the untraited baseline skills are balanced, they should remain balanced when you start adding traits, and right now that’s not the case, because RS1 gets better and better the more you invest in it, due to its faster attack speed and the traits having no internal cooldown. The only way to fix that is to make them the same attack speed, and to balance out RS1’s melee-range disadvantage through damage.

As you introduce more elite specialisations, more variations on Death Shroud, and more traits affecting Shroud Skill 1, this will become a massive balancing headache for you guys, unless you ensure that Shroud Skill 1 is equivalent across all specialisations in at least 1 thing: make that thing attack speed.

I don’t normally do this – I know that comparing skills or traits from different professions one-to-one is a pointless exercise, because different professions have different strengths and weaknesses. But in this particular instance I couldn’t resist.

Compare Eternal Champion from the warrior’s Berserker specialisation, revealed earlier today:

Eternal Champion: Get pulsing stability in Berserk mode. Gain stability also when you break a stun. Make it harder for you to get restunned.

(source: http://dulfy.net/2015/08/21/gw2-berserker-warrior-elite-specialization-livestream-notes/#Traits )

with this:

Foot in the Grave: Gain stability and break stuns when you enter shroud.

(source: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Foot_in_the_Grave )

The power differential is just, well, mind-boggling.

MithranArkanere.8957:

There’s skills that will remove particular conditions, but when they are generic, what you want to remove first is what will get you killed even if you remove immobilize and run away.

Well, that depends on what you’re playing, and what you’re opponent is playing. That’s why thieves, with their low health pools, have so many specific cleanses that target damaging conditions, and people actually take them. OTOH, as a necro, I’m really more worried about the immobilise, because I can get burst down fast if I can’t dodge. So I think the way forwards is to add specialisation to existing cleanses, eg turning a “remove 2 conditions” cleanse into “remove X and one other condition”.