Guild Wars 2

OtakuDFifty.2965:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Given WoB out-heals SoV in just two seconds, I can safely say which I would bring there.

In short, no. There is no situation where this skill is better. If you really want the extra damage, you run Blood Fiend and fire a life blast. If you want group heal, you run Well of Blood.

20/25 stacks of SoV will do roughly 5000 armor-ignoring damage to one target. A Necro decked out in Clerics and Monk runes will NOT match that damage with a Blood Fiend and LB. Blood Fiend does, what, 200-300 damage every 3 seconds? That is NOT matching SoV.

Want extra damage, run Blood Fiend, want group heal, run WoB… Why not both?

Because you can be far more effective by picking one? 2k heal is…nice, but it requires a lot from your allies as well. If I were low on health, I would be playing defensively until I could heal. I wouldn’t go attacking for a piddly 400 hp regained when a single hit will kill me. I might, however, stand in a healing area, since I can continue to play defensively and still get the heal I need.

The Life Blast you could cast instead still deals the majority of the damage of the signet active (yes, even in full Cleric’s armor), but is more reliable and doesn’t preclude using a healing skill that’s actually good.

Plus, over the course of the cast+cooldown, Blood Fiend alone provides ~3600 damage without you having to cast it instead in a fight. Yes, this is assuming it will survive, but it sits at 900 range from those mobs and registers very low on the threat assessment in addition to having roughly equal health to Flesh Golem. It isn’t likely to die in most PvE content. Even in PvP, it does you more good because it is less likely to be dodge/blocked/blinded whatever and will eat a lot of damage instead of you if they decide to kill it.

Given WoB out-heals SoV in just two seconds, I can safely say which I would bring there.

In short, no. There is no situation where this skill is better. If you really want the extra damage, you run Blood Fiend and fire a life blast. If you want group heal, you run Well of Blood.

OtakuDFifty.2965:

I’m really depressed by the amount of players that desperately need a strong healing skill just to survive. Like they’ll automatically die if they don’t get that extra 1000 health.

1k health has decided fights for me multiple times, but that’s really not relevant to this. What is relevant is that there is no situation where we don’t already have a better skill that does the job better. no matter what you want from Signet of Vampirism, we already have a skill that does it better.

That “fat blue aura” isn’t very visible, especially in the middle of combat.

Max healing from the Dev livestream was 400/proc. We’ve already calculated that Well of Blood will likely out-heal it in just three pulses (and the first pulse is instant on cast). Don’t forget that Well of Blood is the best Healing Power scaling of any skill in the entire game (4.4x HP for allies, 5.4xHP for self).

The enemies know to DPS healing areas. However, it is very difficult to tell if a well is a Well of Blood or a Well of Suffering. How you react to the two is very different.

If there was no ICD on the active, I would say to try it and you might be able to surprise us. However, there is, so I can guarantee you that you don’t want to run it in WvW.

What’s your server anyway?

martyrius.8957:

but, life transfer. and the active will not only provide regen/ heal with water runes for the team but a very large healing burst if ur team hits target. im very excited. its about how you play now. afterall, a support necro that stays alive is better than a dead support necro goodluck out there guys i hope my build really gets out there. itl be a pleasure seeing support necros dominate

I don’t follow. How will Well of Blood not just do better? Or did you forget that Signet of Vampirism HAS AN ICD ON THE ACTIVE?

Yeah. Whatever Signet of Vampirism heals is a maximum of once per second for each ally. That’s the maximum and Well of Blood heals almost that much per ally per second without them having to do anything at all and no worries about them missing the cooldown on the dot.

Visually, GW2 necro beats GW1. Granted, much of this is due to the greatly increased graphics engine of the game, but you just feel much more like a necromancer when you actually see the life energy flying from your victims into you.

Kahrgan.7401:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Kahrgan.7401:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

tattoohead.3217:

If the new healing skill has no ICD on its active then combining that with dagger #2 will be really cool.

They already announced (and demonstrated in the dev livestream) that both the passive and active have ICD’s.

According to the livestream, and it’s tooltip, the active buff has 25 stacks.

Yup. 25 stacks, and a 1 second ICD per attacker as well. Given the aftercast on the signet, you yourself can only consume for 4 stacks unless you already popped Locust Swarm (since that hits once/second) or they’re standing an a well (again, precast).

Which is a good thing it has an ICD… It would be very OP if it did not.

It needed an ICD or a stack limit. Not both. Both turned it from useful in niche situations (if an ICD, then big world events or focus-fired tower/keep lords. If stacks, then smaller group support) to being terrible across the board.

tattoohead.3217:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

tattoohead.3217:

If the new healing skill has no ICD on its active then combining that with dagger #2 will be really cool.

They already announced (and demonstrated in the dev livestream) that both the passive and active have ICD’s.

Ahh i missed that… well that’s complete rubbish.

May be cool for an MM if your pets can trigger the healing/extra dps.

Alas, only players can proc it. Not even for MM is it worth anything.

A smart player would. Unfortunately, by running that signet, you remove that possibility from yourself. Stick with Well of Blood. Much stronger healing for the group that even works if for whatever reason they can’t hit a particular target (and in WvW, that’s extremely common).

Kahrgan.7401:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

tattoohead.3217:

If the new healing skill has no ICD on its active then combining that with dagger #2 will be really cool.

They already announced (and demonstrated in the dev livestream) that both the passive and active have ICD’s.

According to the livestream, and it’s tooltip, the active buff has 25 stacks.

Yup. 25 stacks, and a 1 second ICD per attacker as well. Given the aftercast on the signet, you yourself can only consume for 4 stacks unless you already popped Locust Swarm (since that hits once/second) or they’re standing an a well (again, precast).

C Hanson.4056:

ill quote this guy again when every PvE build starts running vamp signet.

And that will happen-until people do a bit of math and realize a single life blast is a better damage contribution and lets you use an actual healing skill.

Signet of Vampirism: Maximum of 5k damage, 1-1/4 second cast, 35 second recharge

Life Blast: Maximum of 8k damage (actually much more with consumeables and WvW buffs), 1 second cast, no recharge. Can be traited to hit multiple targets.

It should also be noted that as a Siphon, the damage does not increase from Vulnerability or traits (other than theoretically Bloodthirst).

Kiriakulos.1690:

Information is worth money and the fewer people who know the more valuable it is, so I’m sorry but I’m not sharing.

Translation: By making mystic forge recipes and selling them on the trading post.

C Hanson.4056:

for PvE the new heal is going to be amazing (for team dps more than support).

People keep saying this, but I can easily prove that it will not. You get more sustain and damage out of running Blood Fiend with a single life blast for the amount of damage the signet does and its casting time.

Saturn.6591:

How do you know it will cost 25 skillpoints? Did they say that in the stream?

Yeah, they said all of the new healing skills this patch will cost 25 skill points. I wouldn’t even spend 3 to unlock what they previewed if I were leveling.

tattoohead.3217:

Kiriakulos.1690:

Turning them into more gold, around 26 gold I think.

Hmm… how?

Also people seem to be way too upset about this new healing skill, it looks cool to me. Shoot we already have the best heal in the game so im not going to cry too hard. The other new heals do look cool but most of them are situatonal just like this one.

and back to the quote srsly how?!?!

We wouldn’t be complaining if it was situationaly good. The problem is that even in the situations where Signet of Vampirism is at its best, we already have something else that works even better. On top of that, even in those situations, it’s not actually good.

Math is awesome. It doesn’t take much to calculate (and thus, prove) that the previewed skill is simply worse than what we already have, even in its ideal situation.

For PvE, it will take redesgined content to make the necro’s strengths actually matter.

They did say that damage-cancellation abilities of other sources also negate the reduced healing.

On the other hand, this stance is perfect to run with Frenzy.

I’ve already got everything for my legendary save the precursor so I guess…

Maybe my Ascended staff or trident? I like my Giver’s Focus, so I can’t upgrade that from exotic and I’m only a level 500 Artificier.

Katran.9186:

Bhawb.7408:

Since the preview, a total of 2 people have expressed a positive opinion of the healing skill, and both of those 2 are PvE players

Just imagine how much damage this signet can provide.

6k damage absolute maximum (assuming power build). Running Blood Fiend and firing off a life blast will result in more damage in the same time frame.

Sobiech.9613:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

There’s a couple of new bits about the Winter Wonderland jumping puzzle this year that you may find refreshing. The largest improvement is that you no longer have to wait until all of the players complete the puzzle in-between your attempts.

Refreshing is a good thing. Most people were much happier with this puzzle than with the Clocktower. Thanks!!

To be fair, the Clocktower was intended to be a PITA jumping puzzle.

Stand The Wall.6987:

the new necro heal skill looks extremely powerful from a wvw point of view.

You misspelled Guardian or Warrior there. There is no “c” in either one, for example.

Burjis.3087:

I totally laugh at the dhuumfire and jagged horror jokes but necromancers aren’t in as dire a situation as this thread somehow suggests.

Indeed. All we’re getting is a crappy new skill that nobody that can perform even simple math will ever bother using. We aren’t getting monstrous nerfs.

If you want more damage, you do better with Blood Fiend and using that 1-1/4 seconds to do something else. A necro can add more damage than 5k with a different skill in the same amount of time, and doing that doesn’t require the aid of 5 other people all hitting the same target for a full five seconds.

They nerfed the skill to which there is no possible situation where we don’t have a better healing skill already. “Different” does not enable new specs. “Situationally good” can. Unfortunately, Signet of Vampirism as was previewed only falls into the former category and is never a better choice. Ergo, it cannot produce any new specs or strategies that are worth anything. Any specs that use it and are good are good despite the skill, not because of it.

Nike.2631:

So, first off, its a signet. It goes in your #6 slot and it’ll proc the new Runes of Resistance set.

The passive effect is every time some someone hits you, you syphon them. Its like perma-retaliation with evil sprinkled on top.

The active effect is you clap 25 stack of “Kill this guy right HERE” on the target, and each time they are hit by anyone, one of those stacks goes away and they attacker syphons them once. After getting syphoned 25 times, the mark over their head goes away.

There’s still some very important questions about timing: does the passive have an internal cooldown? How long until the 25 stacks of ‘it literally sucks to be you’ expire if they aren’t used up?

But mostly it sounds like an insane amount of fun .

Few things you forgot:

1. It doesn’t siphon when someone hits you, it only heals you. And it only does that once per second maximum (1 second ICD).

2. The cast time is long at 1-1/4 seconds.

3. The active portion does lousy damage, even if all 25 stacks get consumed (which usually takes at least 6 people). Only ~5k damage dealt from all stacks being consumed. This is further worsened by the fact each attacker also has a 1 second ICD for consuming stacks of the mark.

4. A 5 second window (mark duration) is not long at all.

5. A 35 second cooldown means it suffers terribly if you don’t make max use of it. Even if you do manage to somehow get the maximum heal yourself, it’s only 5.2 k, which is the base heal for Consume Conditions.

TLDR: the new skill is outdone in every situation by something we already have. Do yourself a favor and don’t bother with Runes of Resistance on a necro, trying to justify it with this terrible skill.

Even without Necrosis, Discordway was still a popular build for PvP. Necros who built for burst could do some serious burst.

Actually, necros who built for any particular role could do pretty well. Hex removal was terrible, but that was about it.

Ghostwolf.9863:

Necros are hard to fight, they are no doubt one of the stronger classes in short fights,
but usually they have the horrible sustain sided with horrible mobility.

To win, you have to kite them and wait til they blow most cooldowns, by playing evasive and performing some small bursts from time to time their life force pool will drop to nil, when life force is empty you just have that huge health pool to fight through, also necromancers lack stability Daze-lock builds can be effective if used right, also a good use blinds can be effective as always.

Dodge + Steal/Infiltrators Signet allows you to gap close in quickly destroying the runes they place at their feet.

Also I found that going all in on offense in D/D can kill them before they even have time to react.

And from what I saw and remembered they wont nerf necros much, they’ll reduce the amounts of bleeds they can apply through burst.

As a main necro, I can tell you right now that this is the way to do it. Despite supposedly being the “attrition” profession, necros excel in short fights and suck horribly in long ones.

Necro in GW1 actually had obscene burst ability, especially in PvE. Discord+Necrosis was immense amounts of armor-ignoring damage with low energy costs and very short (2 second) cooldowns.

Not exactly. The devs would only look at the stats UI to double-check values, not as a significant part of their job. What purpose could there be to memorize that layout when spending just a couple seconds to find what you want will do?

I don’t spend a lot of time looking at the stats UI, so I always look for individual items as well on there. I wouldn’t go attacking the devs over that.

What the necro needs to really function as an attrition class is a way to stop people from running away. Realistically, this means adding a couple immobilizes (to counter the numerous dashes) and improvements to Dark Path and Spectral Grasp to make them more reliable. We already have pretty good access to poison and weakness to limit healing and dodging, though a bit more weakness wouldn’t hurt.

We also need shorter cooldowns and cast times on a few key skills (not all of them). Corrosive Poison Cloud, for example, could easily have both parts lowered by about 25% (3/4 second cast time, 30 second recharge). Spinal Shivers could use a 1/4 second shaved off of its cast time as well. Well of Darkness could stand to have 5-10 seconds shaved off of its cooldown. This makes it harder for opponents who are able to disengage to come back in while we are still on cooldown.

I feel necro is close to being in the right spot, but a couple of things need to be tweaked to make us the masters of attrition we are meant to be, namely more/more reliable snares/torment to prevent our targets from just running away.

And even in PvE, it’s outdone by Blood Fiend…

And yeah, the debuff is 5 seconds.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Bhawb.7408:

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Mostly due to the fact most of our skills SUCK and its pretty much our only defensive option. Cant really count Death Shroud as its melts away SO fast.

Spectral Armor into DS completely kills bursts.

How so?
I thought that none of the spectral skills worked inside DeathShroud and combine that with the fact that the damage reduction that is meant to be on during Death Shroud doesnt actually work…

…How long has it been since you played necro? That was one of the big changes in the Dhuumfire patch: Spectral Walk and Spectral Armor function perfectly in Death Shroud. Between this and not knowing wells are unblockable, my guess is a long time.

Death Nova is quite worth it.

And for minion masters, your race doesn’t matter. Racial skills only go in your utility/healing/elite slots which are all filled with minion skills anyway.

youlostthegame.8102:

I imagine the main feature of this can just be dodged/aegis/blocked/interrupted? I would not recommend anyone getting rid of condition removal for this…

Yup. And even if they don’t do that for the activation of the skill, they can do so for any follow up and negate the mark. This wouldn’t be a problem if the active had some teeth (it would be high-risk, high-reward), but it doesn’t (making it high risk, tiny reward).

Charr do have the only dodge skill that necros can get, which is a pretty hefty bonus. Also, the Charrzooka elite is actually pretty good, if situational.

The other option is Transfusion, since it’s a 3k+ heal to your minions when you use it.

EDIT: Ninja’d by Bhawb

I think you meant to say “Blood Fiend” instead of “upcoming heal.”

tattoohead.3217:

If the new healing skill has no ICD on its active then combining that with dagger #2 will be really cool.

They already announced (and demonstrated in the dev livestream) that both the passive and active have ICD’s.

I run 20 Blood Magic because I like shorter well cooldowns. I don’t care about the siphoning one bit, because I know it doesn’t actually make a difference.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

3) Wells being unblockable (staff trait)

Funny thing about that. Have you looked at well tooltips before? They’re all unblockable.

Nagato no Kami.4980:

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I wouldn’t even be concerned about the lack of shroud-stomp/shroud res if they would take away mist stomp, distortion stomp, and tiny stomp (and their res counterparts).

Pretty much this right here ^

You want balance…well then balance. Don’t play favorites. No healing in those modes either, just like us. Then the playing field will be a little more even and they won’t have to jump through hoops to balance.

“Balance” and “the same” aren’t synonymous.

Besides, these are entirely different skills and not comparable. Unless, you’re also arguing that we shouldn’t be able to attack anyone in DS or only last for a few seconds? Or perhaps you’re arguing that you’d trade DS entirely for a slot skill like Mistform?

“Death Shroud” and “Invulnerability” aren’t the same either. The point is, necros can only get a protected stomp/res by cheating the system. My issue isn’t that they can go invulnerable to protect themselves and we go into death shroud to protect themselves, my issue is that they can do a basic action that we (by default) cannot: protected stomp/res.

If we aren’t supposed to get a protected stomp/res, then honestly, nobody should get a perfectly safe one. I have fewer issues with Stability stomps or stealth stomps, because there are still things that can happen to prevent it. Tiny/Mist/Distortion stomps, nothing can be done

Kardis.3297:

Well it sounds great, but i still don’t think it matches necro’s dual HP bars.

An FYI, those dual health bars take a lot of effort to fill back up. The longer you can drag a fight out, the weaker DS is as a mechanic.

I wouldn’t even be concerned about the lack of shroud-stomp/shroud res if they would take away mist stomp, distortion stomp, and tiny stomp (and their res counterparts).

I’m fine with not having skills 6-10 in death shroud, but the lack of ressing, stomping, and the fact it completely shuts down our Blood Magic line as well as give a huge middle finger to those who try to heal us does make it quite frustrating.

I would still like to see them come to us a bit more often and give us the reasons behind some controversial changes they make, however. The change has already occurred, so secrecy is no concern in that respect. Even if they say “We made this change because of some other things we are working on”, it still tells us that there is a definite reason and how it (may) relate to balance/fixing our problems.

The recent discussion for the Dec. 10 changes was excellent, especially regarding Weakening Shroud. The discussion clearly gave the devs an idea that they hadn’t had before (weakening the effect, but not nerfing the cooldown), since the idea was brought up at a meeting afterward, then implemented. Even if they had gone ahead with same effect/higher cooldown, at least we know that they were considering more options.

Lexan.5930:

True if there are no defiant stacks, the daze from wail of doom will interrupt the healing skill, but it wont interrupt if there are any stacks of defiant on. Where as stun interrupts the skill as well as removing a stack of defiant.

I’d like wrong answers for $1000.

If a champion has stacks of Defiant, knockdowns, knockbacks, pulls, launches, stuns and dazes all work exactly the same: they remove a stack of Defiant with no other effect. Fears almost do this, but the condition is actually applied and Terror damage still ticks.

So wherever you got the information that a stun will interrupt a boss with Defiant stacks is completely and utterly wrong.

Nope. All sigils other than Torment (for some unknown reason) share an ICD.

The signet isn’t worth using. You get much better siphons from Blood Fiend, even without the “minions siphon” trait. Plus, we know that Blood Fiend’s heal is affected by Bloodthirst.

Bhawb.7408:

A 10 point Blood Magic trait outheals this skill anyway, so if you need underwater healing go for that, it not only heals for more, but it is much more likely to get the full healing off.

Remember that Life Transfer isn’t on underwater death shroud?

JETWING.2759:

Another Anet mystery… Stolen skills better than original skills :/

True with necros and (IIRC) rangers too…