Guild Wars 2

280 base, 653 healing per pulse with 932 healing power(0 traits, no hp amulett vs cleric amulett). So the 0.4 coefficient is still in place, since 0.4 * 932 =372.8

Base heal on activation hasn’t changed. Scaling is also the same. 5240 with 0 HP vs 6172 with 932 HP.

Yay, WoB was too OP and really needed that nerf… /s
Also not a tooltip error, checked with svanir.

They could simply put some critters in the base.

“Positioning” might not be the answer to all concerns. Sure, there certainly is the possibility to position yourself really badly but on the other hand this game also has lots of gap closer and teleport abilities to completely negate some benefits of positioning.

On another note, the build diminishes some of the biggest weaknesses of the necromancer: Fighting drawn out fights by enhancing terror burst capabilities (rune and reapers prot have rather “lengthy” cooldowns) and to a low extend giving some form of innate “self peeling” capability, while combining it with some mobility.

Still, necro relies on condi burst to be a threat, even after dhuumfire nerf and since there won’t be any significant changes to utilities and traits, it seems like the build will stay for some time.

Condi is in a decent shape and has unique features with corruption and terror mechanics but minions are broken and power is gimmicky due to overall necro problems (class mechanic shutting down traits & sigils, lack of stab, lack of mobility).

But my biggest gripe with necro in pvp is that it feels like they put a caster class out of some old school mmo into gw2.
No cleave, no mobility, projectile or simple “on target” mechanics everywhere, long cast times and boring drop down AoE.
It just feels out of place between all the movement and cleavin AoE carnage, especially since the defense is simply stat based (tough, vit push survivability – everywhere else it is invul, dodge, teleport).

I like the class a lot but the implementation is really archaic…

How about:

Dark armor: Gain Stability and retal when a channeling skill is interrupted. 3 sec duration, 20 sec cooldown.

and

SotL: leave the passive as it is, active: Leap to your target, stealing life from it and nearby enemies. Way more like a “locust” and would give some mobility (finally).

Nice breakdown.
Buuut if you factor in taking bloodthirst you only need around 750 healing power to surpass CC+2.
Also you didn’t factor in the damage mitigating aspect – which is screwed on one hand since necro signets and healing abilities don’t work with the class mechanic and on the other hand probably over the top if you assume that you get 1 hit in per sec, never ever enter DS and are never full health.
It is the same as with every other vampiric ability on the necro. When the stars align and everything is just setup perfectly it gets decent to really noticeable and under normal circumstances its simply trash.

It might become better if they made the passive only proc every 3 sec and triple the amount healed. Still CC will always be king since it removes conditions.

Bhawb.7408:

The issue with any kind of more damage focused MMs is that you become a bit too reliant on your first all in, which isn’t necessarily reliable. That said, I am going to try Valk MM and see if I can’t make a more damage focused necro work for fun (although I wouldn’t expect it to do as well).

Back in the days there was only zerker (or barb) but since they added knights in pvp i think it is a decent option. Not that good of a point holder as pure soldiers but definately more fun.

Dunno why you would go valks though. Crit chance is probably really low or is it simply for the healing power?

Shadow fiend is good for its fast attacks profiting more from vampiric master than flesh wurm. It also has decent dmg and hp.

Wurm is a must for me on any necro build. The teleport is kinda unreliable and has lots of issues with terrain, shortening the port distance, but it is a stunbreaker on 40(32) sec cd with 10% lf buildup. Since it teleports it also is our strongest stunbreaker in most situations, creating a melee gap / breaking line of sight. Also more map manuverability. Cast is a bit long though.

Does anyone experiment with offensive MM (zerker/knight)? Less survivability, more potential to “burst”.
Edit: What i enjoy about knights is, that coupled with a/f and d/w it has a reliable “mini-burst” with putrid explo and axe2&focus4 on a decent ~16 sec cd. It is the kind of bruserish gameplay that i kind of miss with other necro builds and especially soldier MM just feels sluggish in comparison.

you keep mixing condi and wells. i do not think it means what you think it means

Bhawb.7408:

Sigil wise pretty much any duration increases (on conditions like chill/cripple), damage increases (force/accuracy), and on-swaps.

Not sure if this sigil is new or not but might be an alternative: Sigil of Ice

It is on hit, so no crit chance required.

Like i have stated in the rune thread, pack is awesome for MM.
Fury should set minion crit chance to around 24% (4% base as the occasional crit from minions without fury suggests) which greatly impacts sustained damage through flesh golem and burst potential through bone minion putrid explosion.
I did some quick testing yesterday with a ranger buddy (warhorn and extra fury duration runes + boon dur traits on him) and tested fleshy on a heavy mist golem.
In 3 cycles i got:
16 hits – 0 crit
15 hits – 3 crit
14 hits – 4 or 5 crit (not sure anymore)

Tests were done b/c i was unsure if they changed something about minion crits. Didn’t notice them too much with pack.

For crit damage, they seem to be 150%. Flesh golem for example did a 2,5k hit against heavy golem (2.6k armor i think) with improved minion damage and on the 3rd hit of his chain and i had a bone minion putrid crit for around 3.2k against a lord warrior npc (around 2k+ noncrit).

Also i kinda like knight amulett for a more offensive MM with wurm and warhorn for some mobility. Is worse 1v1 against some builds though.

ronpierce.2760:

Actually, 6 seconds total without being interrupted (never happens) and 7.5 if you run Bloodfiend :P The downtime for MM and vulnerability frame is huge. xD Plus they have no stability/protection/evades, and DS only tends to save about 5-8 seconds for an MM under heavy fire.

Buuuut it takes longer then 20 sec for flesh golem to be ready again so it is most likely the 3 utility minions that can be recast.
And yeah, the point i tried to make is what you also stated, the typical MM is really worthless without minions and it is a question of: “Did you bring the right class or build to the game?” which is a problem with every class stack (multiple guards/wars scream for boon removal, multi engi/condi nec scream for con removal, etc.)

Good build. Also played similar stuff before the patch.
Still my main concern with hybrids is teamfight potential. For AoE-ing stuff down powermancer or condi builds with epidemic are simply better, although i don’t have much experience with condi.

@flow Maybe healing power isn’t the most usefull of attributes for necro but everything else on celestial is great.
DS and staff (used by nearly every build) profit from power stats(pow,prec,fero) and condi and the class mechanic is pretty much face tanking which is more potent by adding in defensive stats, so in my book nec is a candidate for celes.

Class stacking anything is a royal pain in the butt, just think about 3+ guards…

But as it is with anything outcomping is often the dealbreaker for most matchups.
And if you encounter 2+ MM you need some AoE’s in your team.
Even if this might not be a direct solution you should consider getting a powermancer or dd ele as an alt. Imho those builds really make short work out of minions.

Also keep in mind MM without minions is dead weight for 20 sec and needs to resummon for ~5 sec total.

Just played a bit with what seems to be the new thing on ele/engi, celestial + strength + battle sig with a power trait layout/leeto trait setup and it worked pretty good.
Gonna do some team queues later on and will see if it is decent enough against people who run more optimized builds then what you typically encounter in hotjoin.
But so far dhuumfire with SR is pretty fun.

Tribal was obtainable in pvp until the patch. Since you don’t get chests in the same way anymore, i think you cannot get the armor right now.
I heard someone mention that Anet plans to reintroduce the set at a later point in time.

Unfortunately clerics sucks for the most part. You give up way too much damage and zerker is still your best bet.
But if you really want to utilize (already existing?!) clerics gear then mix it with zerk, especially since you say you want to contribute decently in pve.
As an alternative you could try to emulate that playstyle by grabbing Close to death from 30 in spite and getting some stuff out of blood magic (esp. transfusion) which is still decent without much healing power (you get some from the 15/3 pt minor in spite and from blood magic). The new 30pt soul reaping might be worthwhile but i would suggest either testing it yourself or wait for more results from other people testing it.

For wvw, try it out. If you run around with the “pug-zergs” you can use pretty much anything you like and whatever fits your playstyle.

Traveler for my zerker well. The movement speed is too important to not have, imho.

Apart from that the minion masters around us, especially pvp enthusiasts, should really consider rune of the pack after the lyssa nerf.
25% procc chance on aoe fury is really strong with flesh golem and putrid explosion.

What will a rank req change? People that never played tourneys/ the point cap game have obviously no clue how spvp works and by putting a rank req to do tourneys that won’t change.

Hotjoin and custom arenas are no learning place, all people learn in there is how to zerg. Now you want to have a barrier of entry so people have to zerg longer?
They won’t learn how conquest is played by having them zerg longer. The only way they will learn the game mode is by having them play it.
Atleast as long as there is no better system in place than hotjoin/tourneys to teach people.

The current situation is certainly not ideal but having a req only to meet rank 10/30/ w/e players that still have no clue about conq won’t help a lot….

There are a lot of new players in pvp now and a lot of them will play with starting builds.
So you get to fight thieves with soldier amuletts and similar tanky traits.

That is why you seem to deal less dmg in pvp. (would be my guess)

30/10/0/0/30 is still strong. I used it yesterday for some time and did in one occasion pretty much 2 shot some gc staff ele with 5k followed by 6k lich auto and spinal shivers procc. (probably some might involved)

Don’t know about viability but vampiric builds can be looked at again.
Cavaliers amulett adds tough/pow/critchance (tough is more efficient for “healing” types and prec is a requirement to a lot of proccs) to pvp and runes of the vampire will get some kind of overhaul. Also sigils of leeching and blood can be used together.

Where is the weakness stacking? Perma weakness is atleast something uniq the necro can bring to the table and nobody has mentioned it.
There also is a guide on it over on guru.

I am in favour of adding leaps or additional pulls.
Necro has decent access to cripple and chill but in this game the movement impairing effects of these conditions feel extreeeeeemely limited in usefulness.
Most bosses get significantly reduced durations and in pvp the effects get somewhat circumvented by dodge rolling granting maximum out of combat movement speed in addition to multiple gap closers and or teleport abilities on most classes.
Also spectral grasp might need some direct damage added. Spectral wall has some offensive potential in condi builds but spectral grasp seems like such a waste of a slot on a class that needs utility skills to get a decent burst going.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Tried your build in spvp and i switched it out for CC, iow went back to my basic zerker build and ditched the siphons, i can honestly say you have to know how to play and have huge balls to run full zerker siphon in spvp as a necro.

I noticed all the evades /stealth and other target reset mechanics making me waste all possible healing i would get from hitting something.. the animation and huge red dot doesn’t help either.

I am struggling to get this signet to be of any use..

Fleshwurm helps a lot if you overextend/are in a bad spot but thats true no matter what heal you pick.
Also the heal is somewhat mostly used for sustain(passive is close to healing sig) and offensive, nuke down target especially guard/war. In terms of healing the active is more of a last resort, the bulk of the healing comes from the passive.

Burst heavy speccs, d/p thief especially, really give a tough fight. I had most success with going balls out dagger auto’ing them. Casts, pretty much anything except axe2, lose you the matchup b/c of too little pressure and easily avoidable. This is about making them disengage/Shadow refuge which gives time to move away/set up wurm.

Been soloqueing until now with it and do think its pretty decent. Expected the worst and am kinda impressed.
30/0/0/25/15, zerker with valk gem, 5/6vamp +1 divinity, d/d a/f with blood/force. WoS, FW, PS, golem. Just went full kitten with the life stealing vibe. Got some good 1v1s going vs hambow, shattermes, mediguards, spirit ranger, dhummnec and some bunkerish d/d ele and some builds i forgot. Never felt “outclassed” and didn’t miss CC much.
Also marking + Spinal Shivers + Chill of Death really hit some guards pretty hard.
I like.
Btw: with 470 HP signet heals on hit for ~370 thats pretty close to HS.

Had my first soloq game with the trollbuild, was actually a decent game. Dunno if carried by team but the signet felt ok.
Also it seems like marking can’t be dodged but not 100% sure and i was once healdenied either by beeing blinded and or headshot and it went to full cd.

Bhawb.7408:

Warriors got a flipping duel to show off their skill, all we got was to watch Karl get his butt kicked by a golem […]

This is such a fantastic description! It lightens my mood.

I would still like it most if they would make it similar to ele dagger earth3. keep the 1 sec cast time, cut the immob down to 2 sec, reduce cd to 15 sec, add gapcloser as an on hit. I still would be ok with 600 range. Just some more potential to stick to a target and a faster recharge would be nice since dagger relies so much on AA and DS buildup with dagger relies on AA…

Reevz.2617:

but you could just go asura like everyone else, and yeah travel time should definately be added to their skills. you can enjoy your low counterplay bullkitten though keep playing necromancer

Oh god, how can devs stand to even reply to the people who frequent this subforum?

If asura “fixes” animations by not letting them be visible, why do you complain about lacking counterplay in the first place? Your whole argument about no counterplay only holds true for staff marks/doom which is only a source of damage in CONDI builds. Namely SD/staff dhuumfire.
Dhuumfire necros don’t use dagger MAINHAND.
So the whole threat is about POWER NECRO, who allows for counterplay since everything he does has either 1+ second casttime or 1+ second casttime +projectile for Life Blast.
So i don’t know what you want to tell me with “enjoy your low counterplay bullkitten” besides that you can’t read or are, for some reason, unable to use basic abilities of this game and get trashed each time you encounter a POWER NECRO…

Also
@nicknamenick:
Your comparison is somewhat flawed. Your numbers seem to be from incorrect tooltips.

Dagger AA chain is 2 second cast time in total. The tooltips on this one suck since day1.

Dagger 2 deals 900 basedamage total, not 9 times 900. To get a better picture, with a full zerker build and zerker trait layout you can expect to deal something between 4-6k dmg in a 3.5 sec timeframe with this skill (6k for low to zero toughness targets). Additionally this will heal for about 1.8k hp. One interrupt will stop it, one dodge will negate around 30% of the dmg and healing.

@Thread: I wouldn’t as much as cry for a nerf for warrior longbow. It is a weapon that got only recently popular through the much hated hambow, but it certainly is a strong weapon.
However necro dagger on the other hand is pretty rubbish apart from braindead pve bossfights. By direct comparison it is closest to longbow 4 since the cd and immob duration of both of those skills are identical.
But in terms of cast time and tertiary effects i think bow4 is vastly superior.
Also the comparisons seem to not acknowledge that this skill is on a melee weapon with no gap closer(dark path is still horribly flawed and mostly used as a stable source of bleeds for Condi builds while doom bursting) which makes it harder to compare to guard scep or ele dag3(which also got an afterhit gapcloser).

Reevz.2617:

1/2 second cast is too fast for something that isn’t a projectile, but then again hardly anything on necro has travel time making the class overall lack counter-play. pin down is kittened though, so is hammer 4.

This is about power necro… Look at power necros set and be disappoint, son.
2 channeled skills which are easy to recognize and dodge, short range auto attacks, 1 sec casttimes and obvious and unique animations on dagger3/axe3, focus offhand is so slow in projectile speed (skill 4) and casttimes (skill 5) that it is nearly never used and DS 1 casts for about a second.
There is no problem with “travel times” on power necro, they are only problematic on scep/staff.

OtakuDFifty.2965:

-snip-

While you, arguing from a PvE standpoint, have a viable perspective and it is certainly right that this skill is better than nothing and might potentially be a better grp support then WoB, it certainly is terrible outside of scenarios where you would want a healing support necro. And those scenarios are by far the majority. Also in regards to grp healing through life leech. Take a look at the thief. Seriously. Before the introduction of the new healing venom you could already go for a build that applies 16 charges leeching venoms coupled with 8 stacks might to your entire party through the course of 36 seconds. Every charge would heal each individual party member by around 300 hp and add 400 leaching damage.
It is not like the necro carries great utilities for groups like reflects, tons of boons, might stacking, quickness so i, as a necro player, wouldn’t pick a necro for offensive support and instead run with simple max dmg to atleast minimise the crippling effect i put on a grp by running with them and this signet cripples my survivability by giving me way less healing then other options.

DiogoSilva.7089:

I think people don’t realize the potencial of necro’s new heal. If I ever see a necro in my party use it, my fresh air burst is suddenly going to be much more deadly, and I’ll still get health back out of it. And in any situation where a bunker is holding, say, two players, if the necro uses it, the bunker is going to get bursted real hard.

Think of any 2v3 or 3v3 scenario at the middle point of any map. A necro uses the signet on the guardian. Everyone bursts the guardian down within those five seconds for 4-6k extra damage.

Of course, it can be counter-played, blocked, evaded, etc. But in several scenarios, this skill can potencially flip points to your team.

280 points of leeching dmg every second (1 sec icd) for 5 sec max,on full berserker and with 35sec cd makes your fresh air over the top? Please never consider a venom share thief or your mind will explode

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I dont understand why the Signet had to be when you take damage. It should have been when you DEAL damage.

Would’ve been a cool design that encourages active use. Get passive healing by beeing hit and the ability to activate it and burst+burstheal someone by using your cd-limited multihit skills(dagger2, axe2) and give up the passive healing. If it gave flat healing per hit it would be way harder to find an interesting active effect that would be used and not simply let the signet work its passive magic.
Edit: Look at healing sig as an example of a passive effect that is too good to ever use the active.

Kahrgan.7401:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Simply – Its pathetic. Even with over 1,000 Healing Power i was getting like 40-50 heals from the Siphon traits. I would say dont bother with it.

Because healing power doesn’t affect siphons.. lol

Life leech scales with power for the damaging part and healing power for the healing part.
Pre bloodthirst you get a 0.004 scaling, meaning for 1500 additional healing power/power you deal 6 additional damage /heal 6 additional points per hit. (This might be a bit outdated but no significant improvements have been made)

Serious answer: First, never consider Magi, better run around naked as that is probably as effective.
Life stealing has a scaling but it is so small that it doesn’t profit enough for the heavy loss in dmg. If you want to go the healing power route then a net gain in support capabilites through HP comes from traits like transfusion, Well of Blood and regen(Mark of Blood). Vampiric has nothing to do with it and won’t enhance your performance in any noticeable way.
You should also be aware that clerics gimps your dmg by a large amount and depending on the content you want to do with your necro i would strongly advise you against getting a cleric set (fractals, dungeon farming, small scale pvp environments). Settlers is somewhat better since you kind of only need one stat for condi builds to become effective, so you might want to look into that too.
Also noteworthy: there was a pretty good guide around some time ago about a knight vampiric build for wvw. It achieved decent sustain through bufffood and vampiric precision coupled with high crit and multi target skills like wh5 and plague.

Not so serious answer: Wait for 10th dec and roll a guard.

Pets don’t procc it. The tooltip explicitly states that it is only affected by players.
Also the numbers are really garbage. Like demonstrated in the stream it is really hard to get the 5 proccs out of it, even with fast weapon skills like dagger auto. So you end up mostly triggering 4 charges thanks to the icd. Now you get an additional 1.2k dmg every 28 seconds and have to cast it for 1.25seconds. In a team environment that is 6k additional dmg + some healing every 29 seconds (casttime) in which you also can’t dps..
From a dps standpoint it isn’t worth it and if 2k grpheal every 28 seconds and a really bad selfheal are ok for you in a supportive build then why not.

No worries guys, with the addition of tomes bought from glory we can level 3 other necros to throw them in the mystic forge and have a chance of getting a life leeching, vampiric tank with tons of wells on weapon skills, aka a guard.

Necros got Deathshroud, so a 5k heal (4k init +1,2leech) +800 dmg every 35(28) sec is totally fine…
Seriously who the kitten came up with this numbers? Even the damaging part of it is so pathetic.

Imho bandaid fix: Reduce the cd to 20 sec and decrease cast time to 0.5 and healing on activation by 25% (to 3k). While still not great this might atleast find some use.
Oh and also put the lifeleech (dmg part) on passive back in.

And a question: what was that about John beeing “honest”? Did he write something in the stream?

Second part of the preview is up and it definately has a 1sec icd on the active part(at around 58:30 http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/485426386 ).
Ugh… atleast you could argue that our other heals are in no danger of beeing obsolete, since the new heal is like it is…

Are you sure about no ICD on active? When he hit the golems with dagger auto the 284 leech only popped up occasionally and not on every hit. Going to check that…

So, 1 sec icd on passive and active, around 300 health siphoned on passive aswell as active. Also the heal works with a stack like mechanic and applies 25 stacks on enemy and has 35 sec recharge. While it heals for around 4k initially this just seems like utter rubbish compared to every other new healing skill…
They just put icd on icd on icd. I had high hopes but man this was sooooo disappointing.

At this point we got some numbers from a datamined tooltip but it is still unclear how it actually operates.
Just wait an hour and we will likely know the details.

Bhawb.7408:

Bellamy.9860:

Maybe the passive proccs per skill used? That way it would only heal/leech once if you are attacked by a channel.
This sounds like a balancing/effect trigger nightmare…

No thanks, I want my 8k healing dagger 2, pls.

Should’ve probably made that clearer, i meant the signets passive, leech life whenever you are hit, might only work per skill activation against the signet wearer. So it would be like a reverse ele signet heal, which only heals per cast and not per hit.
Or it will be somewhat of a hard counter to multihit abilities (your example about necro mirror).
Also, 8k dagger2 heal (Edit:+10k damage)? Yes pls.

If you want another option for smallscale pvp try bone bombing. 30/0/30/0/0 ten points as you like to spend. Grab minion dmg, CtD, minion cd and death nova and some power weapons and gear you feel comfortable with(yours seems ok).
Except bone minions utils are up to you.
Putrid Explosion is about 2k dmg per minion on 16 sec CD, unblockable, poisons, blast finishes and bone minions are way harder to keep track off and avoid than wells.

Maybe the passive proccs per skill used? That way it would only heal/leech once if you are attacked by a channel.
This sounds like a balancing/effect trigger nightmare…

I think the signet will be great as long as they make the mark ublockable and undodgable so that only the lifestealing hits can be avoided. Since they also reduce the amount of vigor uptime across the board this will help a lot with getting evadespammed once someone is marked.
Also if the effect of the mark has no icd or some strange stack-mechanic and is instead a time limited debuff then power builds might profit with the access to multihit abilities more than a diremancer.

What weapons do you really like?
Dagger OH for reasons already stated. A great choice even in power builds.

Staff. Except for the auto attack, which could need a small boost in projectile and casting speed it is a well rounded weapon that brings a lot of utility and AoE.

Axe- contrary to popular opinion i think the current axe is better designed then dagger. While the auto attack is low damage and a bit lacking the other skills more than make up for it. Great life force regen and decent dmg on skill 2, good utility and AoE on 3. Axe mastery is a great trait too and lies on our way to one of the best power traits (except that mastery kind of feels necessary).
Also i don’t have issues with the range beeing to small since i think of it more as an extended range melee weapon which grants more dmg uptime on non static encounters.

What weapons do you almost like, or like conceptually, but feel they have issues performing as well as they should?

Dagger MH- My main issues are that #2 has too long casttime, #3 has too long cast time and cd or lacks secondary effects. Imo the immob on #3 could be reduced to 2 sec, cd to 15 and some kind of gapclosing after-hit skill added but thats probably just me…
Also i think the design is pretty strange because dagger lacks a “burst” skill. Most other professions go in melee to use their cd’s and as a necro you go in melee to auto attack and generate enough life force to use your cds and shroud auto attack(auto… again).
In PvE the weapon is good but not enjoyable.

Vampiric signet would be welcome since i really enjoy the life leeching archetype.
Maybe it also could reward aggression and use of the active component by letting it leech a mediocre amount per hit or per( per sec?) as the passive and enhancing the next n attacks with a stronger siphon? That way it could be utilized as a dmg boost(and health boost) that comes with the cost of disabling the passive on hit health. This would add some risk/reward mechanic in either trying to finish something off quicker or keeping the sustain.

I think it would be cool to give commanders more tools to, you know, command their respective squad.
There could be color coded location markers that could be set and only be visible by the squadmates.
Markers could be assigned to specific parties
and markers could be selected to fulfill specific tasks.

EG: commander gets colour coded team symbols, like a party window only for groups in his squad, some small number tells him how many people are in each party and he could set markers like attack this place, defend that place or push through the enemy zerg from my location to that point. Those markers could be unassigned and visible to the whole squad or colorcoded to a specific grp.
Imho this would improve pve commanders usefulness in big group events and might have some benefits to wvw commanding and telling people without TS what to do.
Dunno, just some thoughts

ManaCraft.5630:

…and this is precisely the reason why I almost never engage in discussions about specific suggestions on these forums. It’s only a matter of time before someone unwilling to give an argument anything beyond the least favorable interpretation comes along and ruins the party.

On the other hand, if your objection is that a speed boost based on life force cannot be designed in any conceivable way to be reliable enough that it is worth taking, I flat out disagree.

Since you seem to be offended i offer my apologies. I simply do not see, how another implementation of a speed buff is needed for necros. We already got SoL, or wh+spec, gimmicky dagger trait etc. Speed of shadows in its current implementation(and also your suggestion) doesn’t add anything unique, otherwise not achievable to the class but is simply an option of achieving higher movement speed through special conditions. It is not really about your idea and in general more about another %speed boost.
Also, and this is mainly why i dislike it, the game modes in which both versions seem to be useable the most(pve and wvw) are pretty generous in giving out swiftness so in most cases it is obsolete.