Would you agree that there is a point at which we, as Necros, can stack too much Vitality? Where that point is is arbitrary, just that there’s a point at which it does become poor/incorrect play and “thinking stupidly”.
I’ll also agree that this isn’t a problem most of the time, especially for those of us who are skilled (Necro) players. But I keep coming back to spending trait points in Blood Magic. I’m sure those of us who build for DPS would love to get dagger/siphoning/well traits without feeling like they’re losing out so much on precious power/precision/crit damage in a profession whose forums are filled with threads on how Necro feels weak unless you’re running a Zerker or Hybrid with little added survivability. What I’m proposing, yes, would raise our base DPS and lower our base survivability before we trait and gear. But after we do those things, and get our Vitality to any point before it becomes excessive in the context of our individual build, we would have attributes worth of gear/traits to spend elsewhere.
On the first point, I would agree that for certain builds, you don’t want tons of vitality because you need other stats. However I don’t think there is a point at which vitality becomes “too much”, so long as it is appropriate for your build.
I think its merely a difference in opinion. I don’t think Necromancers are supposed to have the highest DPS (especially burst), and I don’t agree that ours is lacking. Epidemic is the condition version of 100b (and technically has the highest damage ceiling of any ability in the game, although obviously the conditions to make it happen are exceptional), we have high sustained DPS via daggers, decent “bursts” using terror chains or wells, and minions have high 1v1 damage. Are we close to thief or warrior burst? Of course not, that’s their thing, its what they are good at. We are good at conditions.
We’re in a fine place right now on the DPS front overall, not to say we could use some fixes or slight buffs on that front, but I don’t think the way to do it is by nerfing our base HP to get more base DPS.
We have (arguably) the best dedicated heals in the game (consume conditions and WoB), life siphoning, and regen. Regen comes from staff/focus 4 (one of which can be traited for very good LF gain, the other comes with it built in), and life siphoning works best with our highest LF generating weapon; daggers.
So, @Bhawb (and Anchoku and anyone else): A nerf to our base HP is from a standpoint of balancing our profession more. Yes, it would nerf DS since LF pool size is tied to our HP/vitality. But, as it stands, stacking Vitality just becomes too much. Like that guy who posted his 40K HP screenshot – what playstyle does that use? Last-man-standing Necros – while there is a certain novelty in being able to live when the rest of your party wipes – are relatively selfish “support” builds outside Well of Blood. And when you have that much health, I doubt you’re running any precision/crit damage, and maybe not even conditions. AND straight power (like in the Juggermancer and similar builds) with no crit chance (and therefore no on-crit effects) isn’t very wise for our profession given its power scaling. Anyway, back to the point: nerfing our base HP would warrant buffing our attacks and/or scaling for attacks/conditions. This way, we could incorporate Vitality into builds via traits or gear while avoiding overkill. Yes, more Vitality will always be a good thing, but personally, I’d rather have less HP that’s efficient than more raw HP.
Even with a nerf to our base HP, adding Vitality would still be a huge boon to our total eHP. Without adding Vitality to a build after such a nerf, yes, DS wouldn’t be able to soak nearly as much damage. But the current line of thought if you’re trying to squeeze DPS out of your Necro is “I’m a Necro, I have the highest base HP AND DS, I don’t need to add another drop of Vitality.” But seeing as how the devs tied DS to Vitality, and because of how beneficial it is, it seems silly not to invest in any. That’s the whole point of this thread – that our base HP + mechanic creates imbalance.
If base HP is nerfed, for example, we could get siphoning/well traits without feeling like we’re blowing trait points (in terms of attributes) in Blood Magic. This would be because we don’t have that giant pool to begin with, and would have reason to build in Vitality besides how it interacts with DS.
Stacking Vitality isn’t wrong, if you personally feel it doesn’t bring enough to a team then fine, that can be said of a great many things in this game; but that doesn’t warrant nerfing our HP just because some people use it stupidly.
So, nerf our base HP (which highly nerfs our overall survivability) so we can buff damage, so we just offset it by gearing defensively? That is no different than where we are now, where we can gear offensively because of high natural defense, except that now our base damage is now high, and base survivability low; which completely goes against the profession design.
The point you are trying to make seems to simply be that because of our high HP, people think incorrectly (in your opinion), so get rid of our high HP and people will think “correctly”. Why the heck would I ever want to change the class to make it easier for people who are already playing the class wrong? If they are choosing to do stupid things, let them figure it out themselves, don’t change the class as a whole because they can’t handle it. Your entire argument seems to be based simply around the fact that given high HP, you feel people use it wrong. That isn’t a good enough reason to nerf our HP.
Just the effect that burn has isn’t in line with the conditions necromancers apply, which are all very long duration, whereas burn is more of a burst condition.
All I really want for changes are…
… a Spectral bunker build that sacrifices damage output for durability and healing to make the Necromancer the ultimate punching bag (perhaps as intended by the dev’s,)
… our own special condition that other jobs do not have, even if the condition does virtually no damage,
… and an effective Signet build.
Vitality-based spectral bunker builds exist already, they are just rare because no one sees the Necromancer as a bunker class, even if it works.
It would be nice (it is what fear was supposed to be).
Signet builds don’t work very well in general; passive effects will never be strong enough for Necromancers (who are so dependent on utility skills), and their actives don’t provide enough cohesive benefit to warrant a build. They need some fixes, but will always likely remain niche utilities to fit into other builds.
I don’t see a problem with DS functionality or skills. In fact, I’m surprised by how many people complain about having a gap-closer (however reliable), an interrupt, and a strong AoE attack…
Let’s try to stay away from DS redesign in this thread though. I’m more concerned with how people feel about a nerf to our base health pool because of the strong, positive effect Vitality has on our mechanic, and considering it generally isn’t beneficial to stay in DS for more than a few moments anyway (to get skills off/soak damage). Such a nerf would allow us to make our regular HP (not DS) more effective, and allow for spreading more attributes into areas that improve DPS.
What would you suggest we get as a base increase with our base HP nerfed though?
And even if you are using DS for only a few seconds, higher eHP in DS is still stronger, because it means you are able to take far more damage on your DS bar without it bleeding over into your true HP.
I don’t follow you. Vitality isn’t even remotely bad on a Necromancer because of our Death Shroud mechanic. In other classes, you want to build toughness and vitality at the same time, since more toughness increases you eHP (especially since it makes each bit of healing more effective), while vitality just increases that base HP.
For Necromancers, it is much less obvious what you want to build between the two of them, because of the added variables of Death Shroud and Life Force gain. Higher toughness will make your already high eHP even higher, but since Vitality scales so strongly, and because LF gain is based off %, your eHP gain through LF gain is very comparable with both vitality and toughness (I’d even say vitality does much better than toughness in high LF generating builds).
That is why having high Vitality is just fine, you don’t lose any DPS because you are just going to use vitality instead of toughness. Also, Blood Magic will actually increase DPS (slightly), via siphon effects. For Necromancers, vitality vs toughness is more dependent on your build, the higher your LF generation and the higher your SR, the more effective vitality becomes.
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It does have a positive benefit, you get 4 extra skills, all of which are quite useful, and a second HP bar equivalent to roughly 60% of your HP, up to 78% with 30 SR. That means with a full LF bar, you have eHP of 28.6k HP, with base HP; that person with 40k HP has eHP of 64k. More HP and extra skills will never be a negative thing, just like other profession mechanics, it is just up to you to use them to their maximum effectiveness (don’t sit in death shroud, use it right as a burst comes and leave it right after, or use it for its gap closer/interrupt and leave).
Also, like Kyskythyn said, LF gain is % based. A 1% LF gain with base Death Shroud (about 11k eHP) is only 1.1k eHP. With 30k HP (easily attainable, even in PvP), and 30SR, 1% LF is 2.3k eHP.
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Yes, LF degen is 4% (3% traited) whether you have base 18k HP or have 40k. Its why staying in DS more than a few seconds is bad.
Ritual of Protection is nice, but having little to no healing power drops the healing on WoB by half, and drops the allied healing from 6-7k to just over 1k. Its certainly another way to do things, but you are sacrificing nearly all of your team healing.
Life Force in general doesn’t need buffing, but condition builds need a LF gain buff.
The Death Shroud traits Death Siver, Speed of Shadows, and Vital Persistence need to change. Staying in Death Shroud for long periods is the worst way to use Death Shroud (they nerfed that playstyle back in closed beta), and our traits need to reflect that. No one ever takes those traits because they are terrible; who is going to waste all of their LF to run a little faster, or for a stack of vulnerability.
It doesn’t scale with a lot of things, but has quite strong scaling with Well of Blood, which can be traited down to 32 seconds, plus you can pick up a trait that drops a second Well of Blood on its own separate CD whenever you pick someone up. With perma regen via Staff 2, and some other sources of healing via siphon/transfusion, you can get a lot of persistent healing on a necro, it just doesn’t have the burst heals that others do.
In PvE you should be using another OH, in PvP there is good reason to use a dagger offhand.
Yep, I’d get them all.
Healing power is actually very strong on a necromancer, but as said, gear doesn’t exist with Hp/V/T. It would be very strong, and if you find some way to pull it off great, because it would be a very strong build with a staff/wells.
I think the only bad thing about Death Shroud is the amount of traits they left in the game that encourage staying inside DS. Staying in DS (longer than a few seconds) is one of the worst ways to actually use the skill, and as such those abilities are pretty bad. It would be a lot better if they changed them to have similar effects without needing to stay in DS.
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Is there actually any gear with this stat combination?
We haven’t reached that point in the game yet, nor does GW2 require much min/maxing in its PvE content (at least yet). Only if you are looking at very specific things like speed runs will most people actually kick you out of a group. You might have to deal with people complaining, but I haven’t ever actually been removed from a group for being a necro yet. This might not be the case in high level fractals though.
Those classes listed are great at bunkering solely because of their ability to stack boons. If you drop their boons, and properly time condition stacking, they can drop. Necromancer on the other hand relies on Death Shroud to mitigate big hits and a lot of small heals plus abundant condition removal/flipping to heal up the smaller stuff. It is significantly harder to Necro bunker than it is the others, which means few people will do it, it doesn’t actually mean its worse.
The test Rennoko made at that time was that even with 70-90% fear duration, you could make it tick twice if another condition was on it, because fear doesn’t seems to tick each second of his own duration, instead ticking when the game’ timer for conditions as a whole ticks.
All conditions work that way. When conditions are applied, the person’s “ticker” starts, and anything at all added on afterwards still uses that initial time period. Which means if you apply a 1 second bleed, with 10% extra duration (so a 1.1 second bleed), it is still possible to have it tick twice, assuming you applied it from 0.9 seconds right up until the tick. Of course, this would be extremely rare, but if you have about 70% condition duration it is pretty common to have that second tick on things like Terror, which already should have conditions pre-applied for the bonus damage.
I have been informed that our fans in Germany cannot see our old Dungeon videos due to some copyright issues with the songs we have. I will be looking at ways to change that.
Perhaps there is a Necro musician who is looking for a way to get his name out? haha!
I will see what I can do to replace the videos with songs that won’t get nailed.
I’d suggest looking for unlicensed music, or finding companies/artists that are easy to get permission from. A lot of people use music in their videos, the key is finding music that you can use just by giving the artist credit in your description, which makes things much easier than having to email tons of people for permission all the time.
Now that we’re almost a year since BWE#1, is the GW2 Necro more like the GW1 Derv???
I didn’t play tons of Dervish, so I can’t say for sure, but from what I remember a lot of the dervish’s uniqueness came from the application and then forced removal of enchantments (GW1 equivalent of boons) to deal more damage, control, defense, etc. That kind of play style is very different to Necromancers.
WvW wouldn’t be a big issue, if you are really trying to force a gate down quickly, you aren’t doing it with auto attacks, you are doing it with siege. If you are planning to auto attack a gate down, you’ll need a ton of people, in which case they’ll end up hitting the condition cap, which wouldn’t result in tons more damage. Basically, in the scheme of things, attacks are pretty meaningless when it comes to breaking doors down, so them doing a bit more damage wouldn’t mean much (I would imagine its possible to just have this work in PvE as well, if it really is an issue).
Lol, I mean at the very least make Jagged Horror considered a “minion”.
Uh… it is? It is affected by all minion traits, to my knowledge, and has the same AI.
I suggest looking at galleries of the armor sets for each race, as it is the only real difference you will find between them. I love the human armor, so I have only one sylvari right now that I am thinking of deleting for a human.
Fear on the other hand, sure it’s unique, but it’s dumb as a sack of hammers.
It’s a boring condition, and maybe if there were more sources at the Necromancers disposal then maybe I wouldn’t have as much of a issue with it, but being both dull and in short supply, it ultimately has little to no impact on the profession as a whole.
There are builds made completely around Fear, that do very well in PvP scenarios. To write it off simply because you don’t like it, is silly.
Maestra De Muerte
NA
Isle of Janthir
Yes
xFire/Camstudio, maybe Fraps soon – can edit
Saturday/Sunday, Thursday/Friday after 3pm PST
Is head size tied to height as well as its own setting? I feel like I should know this given all those alts but eh.
My comparison is mainly based on dead enemies on the floor and staring at the jagged horror as it fails its way into battle, so it’s possible I was looking at something larger than actual human characters (can they be as big as risen are now, or do those like… expand when wet?).
I don’t know, and its certainly possible that it was only looked similar because of the comparative view points. I’d assume that it would be tied though, otherwise heads would look a bit… childish for small characters, and kinda small for big ones.
I’d go for cute skins as much as I’d go for more undead looking ones. Call me weird, but having a bunch of fluffy bunnies killing people (and exploding) seems just as fun.
Themes were very well carried over. Playstyles range based on what build you used to run. Elementalists play very differently because of the new resourceless system, and the sheer amount of skills they have. Mesmers only have confusion for the shutdown style they used to have, and with clones their “illusion” type gameplay is totally different. Thematically in line, but from a playstyle standpoint they are quite different. The more “basic” classes like Warrior and Ranger are very similar to my knowledge.
I wouldn’t say they are non-related, thematically speaking they are still very similar. The key themes (blood, sacrifice, wells, minions, death, life force, corruption, etc.) all remain.
The separation comes in when you actually look at game mechanics, which of course had to change significantly. Hexes were removed, signets were changed, life stealing is different, corpse skills are gone, life force works differently, etc. In certain areas it can have a similar play style, in others it is completely different. This isn’t a Necromancer exclusive issue, a lot of the classes changed in playstyle. I agree completely, a GW1 necro could have the GW2 one because they play very differently, just like I imagine quite some GW1 mesmers hate the new mesmer playstyle.
Quotes getting too big!
CHIPS, I didn’t play much GW1, so I have to ask…how similar is it for other classes? There are probably lots of things that GW1 warrior, mesmers, thieves, etc can’t do in GW2 also, right?
It depends on what you did in GW1 in each class, but most of them are in very similar situations. I think Warriors have one of the easiest transitions, because hitting stuff with big pieces of metal is fairly similar all around.
I summon swarms of locusts to make myself run faster. Nobody seems to mind. I suck the life force out of everything around me periodically just to boost my own “Spirit Armor” (yes, even bunnies). Nobody cares. I spread poison and bleeding wounds far and wide and turn the ground I walk on into a toxic waste just to make my enemies tired. Everyone’s fine with that.
But I use one baby skull to make a pet, and suddenly everyone goes to pieces?! And they call me the sick-o?!
I lol’d. And people say they don’t feel Necromancers fit the “dark caster” archetype.
I dunno, the skulls look more down-scaled than infant to me. Sort of like how charr cubs are just regular charr but shrunken and with different voices.
Actually, I just logged in (I had to), and looked at the comparative skull sizes. Compared to my human female character, who is the minimum height possible, they are pretty similar, the rats aren’t actually all that small, including the skulls, which appear much closer to adult size when you look at it.
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Kind of a morbid topic. But anyway, like you said, its a social stigma, of OUR society, not theirs. There are a lot of cultures that have absolutely no problem using actual live children in combat, why would we assume Tyria to be any different? Especially the Charr, who murdered plenty of innocent children during their war with the Humans (who I’m sure murdered plenty of Charr children). Its war, war is no place for cultured people.
This is probably a strange concept to most people, but why would them being human corpses suddenly be bad? In the first game, we killed people then blatantly mutilated their corpses to create minions to kill their comrades. People keep saying they wanted to play the dark caster, don’t shy away from the actual dark parts of it :P
I will simply things:
DS transform: If you do not like how DS works and its skills, it is simply extra hp for you. Boring.
Fear: Necro is not the only class that can fear. Nor is the necro the only class that can interrupt and CC. Many other professions can do these better. Not unique.
Life Siphoning: Vampiric Gaze from GW1 (a very underpowered skill btw) can stealing around 10% of the enemy health every 8 seconds. Can the GW2 necro do this kind of damage by life stealing alone? Not even close. Very weak.
Condition Control: As fancy as this sounds, this is just another method to deal damage. And with the Epidemic nerf condition control is, for wvw at least, pretty much non-existent now. Not unique and very weak.
His points remain valid.
DS is still the only transform skill with its own HP bar.
Fear is still only accessible by 3 professions (hence limited, similar to stealth), and Necromancers are the only ones that have multiple ways to access it on low CD and with the ability to make fear do damage. That makes Necro fear quite unique.
Touch Necromancers could also steal more HP on lower CD, but it wasn’t a great build, just fun when you didn’t run into interrupts. Still, life stealing is quite unique to necromancers in GW2.
Still his point remains, we have more condition control. Its like saying a mesmer’s shatter isn’t “unique” because its just another way to deal damage, or that a warriors burst skill is just another way to deal damage.
His points were all valid, Necromancers do have unique mechanics by Yoh’s own definition (accessed by few classes, with one class having a stronger version). By that definition, everything listed was correct.
I’ve always wondered, where I got the tiny humanoid skulls from for the bone minions/jagged horrors (I honestly can think of a single creature that’d have that shape skull at that size…)
Because people die, and there is no age limit. I imagine in “reality” Zhaitan (or any other of the deadly creatures) doesn’t exactly hold back because you aren’t an adult.
I’ve tried it before, yes it is “possible”, but it isn’t very good, and wouldn’t be any better with minions getting HP out of combat (you need to come back and grab loot bags anyway, might as well resummon them at the same time). You are much better off just leveling the normal ways.
@Yoh, based on your own posts, I don’t think this is the place to talk about Death Shroud in the context of balance. If you want to simply say you feel that Death Shroud isn’t fun, its perfectly on topic, but per your own wishes this thread is about Necromancer’s theme and how enjoyable they are or are not to play.
The problem with LF based skills, which have been suggested numerous times, is multiple-fold, although I like the idea of multiple “shrouds” that have different tool sets.
1) How do you balance them such that they are useful to low LF generating builds, while not being too strong for builds that have very high LF generation?
2) How do you incorporate them with traits? Would they be separate traits, untraited, or slapped on top of the current DS traits, and what would they entail?
3) How do you add things that can’t be too abused? For example, using DS 2/3 for gap closers/interrupts take 0 LF to actually use if you are very fast with them (someone correct me if I am wrong).
4) If you are adding in new shrouds, how do you balance out the new access to abilities, seeing as 3 new shrouds (per your example) is 12 new abilities, that is an entire extra skill bar.
Those are just issues I can think of right now. Not that it isn’t a bad idea, or that we shouldn’t get new shrouds (the idea has far less flaws than ones that are just new skills on F1-4), but it would be a huge undertaking to do all this, and have it actually make a positive contribution on the game.
Open field zergs in WvW, any kind of wall defense, and certain dungeon’s/bosses.
Open field zergs don’t do well for minions because there is usually a no man’s land that spans from the front of one zerg to the front of the other, filled with tons of AoE. There just isn’t a good way to use a full minion build in those situations because of how much AoE there will be.
Any wall defense doesn’t work because they can’t get off the wall. Unlike zergs, where minions can possibly be forced to kinda work, they just flat out don’t work here.
Certain fractals, certain dungeons, and certain bosses aren’t friendly to minions. These are going to be bosses/dungeon paths with tons of AoE such that minions die constantly, or with special mechanics that minions are useless for (or even screw up entirely).
Every other part of the game, they can be used, although it isn’t guaranteed it will be easy or the best.
“OH god! Kill it or we’re gonna get wrecked!” It just doesn’t happen. Thats a sign that this class is not up to par with the others.
Necromancers are the first targets of many tPvP teams because of exactly that, and because most Necro builds are glassy (and so die easily). If you leave a decent necro alone in a team fight, they are going to kill everyone.
People keep forgetting something: the 25 stack cap is because it is far too resource demanding for them to track more conditions. They had to put a cap somewhere, otherwise the servers would be on fire 24/7 trying to handle the condition tracking. It is a technical limitation, and it works quite fine in all non-pug parts of the game.
The nerf/fix reduced reliability significantly though, and that is the problem. While I believe it was a good fix for consistency’s sake, reducing the reliability on an already semi-reliable skill isn’t good.
I quite like SR traits, actually, it gives you a lot of potential LF gain, and assorted defense, and 5s CD DS can give some very beneficial effects (fury, condition removal, AoE weakness/bleeds). Its just a different build, I don’t focus only on ret, but on stacking a number of boons overall with the extra DS effects.
I do wish there was some way to have the old MM ways where you could be a minion build; and that was what you did, manage minions, but I have a feeling it is unlikely to happen.
Ok, show me a build that can roam in WvW or kill people with impunity in tPvP without the support of another class.
Its not that difficult to get a 1v1 Necromancer build, especially considering how strongly we can counter boon-heavy builds, which are big in the current meta. You just don’t see it often because there aren’t a ton of people playing Necro in tPvP that are going to try different builds, most of them are running team-fight builds because everyone knows that Necromancers are very strong there.
I run a few 1v1 builds in tPvP, and with the exception of people who are just plain better than me I can hold my own the entire game.
The problem I face as a necromancer is 2 fold. 1.) We cannot win attrition fights. Guardians, elementalists, thieves, engineers, and rangers, they all attrition way better. Its not even a contest. This is why in tPvP if you want a bunker to hold a point, you get an ele, guardian, ranger or engineer to do it. 2.) Damage output. People always bring up the dagger main hand, but it has no gap closers, it doesn’t bring any survivability to offset our lack mobility, and it pales in comparison to other classes main DPS weapons.
Saying a necromancers does well in sPvP/tPvP means nothing when you’ve got 4 other people carrying you.
1) Except that that depends on your build. All of those classes have a large amount of their attrition based on boons, which we can strip often, and in many cases by flipping into conditions to cause more issues. People don’t use necromancers as bunkers because very few necromancers go out of their way to try new builds, they just know that condition necromancers do really well, and use them. Or they’ll run a minion build, which has issues bunkering in a team fight with the current amount of AoE.
2) We have gap closers to use, its up to you to land them. They aren’t quite as easy as other classes, but far from difficult.
In almost every game, high DPS (which is what Necromancers are played as in tPvP mostly) is always supported by the team, because they are going to go fully damage, with very little investment in survivability. It isn’t that the DPS character couldn’t go more defensive and not need the support, its that they are needed to go full DPS, and so other members of the team specialize into things to support the character who is doing the damage that is winning the fights. This is common in many games, you are having most of the team just set up situations where your highest DPS characters can get their DPS off safely and reliably.
Reducing cast time merely brings Epidemic reliability closer to what it used to be, which wasn’t OP, while still keeping the counterplay they introduced with the ability to avoid getting hit by it.
Heavy armor =/= tank, light armor =/= glass cannon. The only true difference between light and heavy armor is 301 armor, not insignificant but far from defining heavy as tank and light as DPS.
Want to kill a guardian? Bring corrupt boon for the bigger boon stacks, interrupt his heals with Doom, and he’ll die. They don’t have a strong PvP spec that can deal enough damage to pressure people while still being tanky, and their non-tanky specs just aren’t good.
Warriors, except people who are insanely good with them, are absolute trash in PvP. If you are dying to one, its on you.
Elementalists depend on your spec. I can usually beat them, but 1v1 its about a 5 minute fight, and neither one of us really want to do that all game. You need to bring boon removal, learn their skill rotation, learn their attunement rotation, and then learn how to counter bigger abilities (like transferring off earth dagger 5 for a decent bleed damage burst).
BM rangers are again, based on your spec, same with Mesmers. You just need to learn whether you need to kill the ranger first, kill the pet first, or if your spec can even fight them well. Mesmers are more an issue of finding the real one, which becomes easy with experience (and the right name settings).
TL;DR Necromancers are okay in sPvP, there are just specific ways to deal with each class.
Hehe, “kitteno”.
Frankly, there is no reason to increase the CD just to warrant decreased cast time (come on guys, you don’t bargain away CD right away, you have to hardball this).
Seriously though, it shouldn’t need to have increased CD. A reduced cast time would simply bring it’s reliability more in line with what it used to be; it still retains counterplay but at a more realistic level for the caster.