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It’s been core functionality of Life Force & Death Shroud since the game’s release. If you want Life Force from a mob, you have to leave Death Shroud before it dies.
Let signet’s passive work in DS
I read this and immediately said “No…It can’t be…They have to work in DS…” Tried it. Wow. Signets don’t work in DS.
Haha, it’s fun when an outsider comes to the necro forum and discovers some of the 3 year old skeletons in our basement.
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And while im on the topic of Unholy Martyr. The trait itself is fairly decent. The problem is we have no way to get rid of those conditions other than blowing cooldowns. We have no trait synergy with that grandmaster. Our condition cleanse trait is triggered on DS entry and unholy martyr works after you are in DS. They are in the wrong order.
Unholy martyr has incredible synergy with necromantic corruption if you’re a minion master.
If an ability, trait, resource, whatever in any context is only good if another ability / trait / resource / etc is used alongside it
Maybe it’s the second ability that’s useful, and the first is still just crap.
Incidentally, this is why I still can’t stand Chilling Darkness.
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Boosting a thief’s initiative to more than 1.5x of its base rate with a single GM trait seems a little much, since it’s the only limiter to the weapon skills.
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The major change is how specific the system is. Or rather, how much more relaxed it’s becoming.
Currently, you either need to pay an inflated skill point cost for traits, or do a very specific event. It looks like after the changes, you’ll be able to earn points towards your trait lines by completing any skill challenge on the map, as well as levelling up.
So the problem you detailed of waiting for a temple to become contested should be resolved. And from the looks of it, each trait will be closer to around 5 skill points in cost, rather than the current spread of 2/5/10/20.
More exact details are still on the way, but I’m willing to bet unlocking traits will be much faster, especially since you don’t have to wait on specific dynamic events anymore.
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If however we changed it to the following…
Plague signet
Passive: Transfer one condition from self to enemy.
Active: Transfer All (or 5 each, whatever works) conditions from nearby allies to self.The passive gives you some much needed ‘small’ condi removal, while putting more pressure on the enemy, punishing them with their own conditions (it also makes corruptions less bad).
The active gives you actually meaningful team support, and because you choose when you take the conditions, they are far easier to manage through consume conditions/deathly swarm etc.
This definitely makes it easier to set up transfer spikes. I’m a little worried though: if things like burning and poison are now allowed to stack intensity, taking everyone’s conditions simultaneously becomes a lot more dangerous. Acceptable risk, or just a trap?
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(edited by Softspoken.2410)
I’ll probably try out a Soldier Retaliation build sometime, just to mess around in PvP. Or laugh at mobs that actually attack quickly in PvE.
Spite – Spiteful Talisman, Axe Mastery (Which will be useable by the time it hits live or so help me), Spiteful Spirit.
Death Magic – Putrid Defense, Deadly Strength, Death Nova
Blood Magic – Bloodthirst, Quickening Thirst, Vampiric Rituals(?)
Axe/Dagger, Dagger/Focus for weaponry. Heal is Well of Blood because I’m terrible, Utilities are Bone Minions, Corrosive Poison Cloud, Epidemic. Elite is ???
The idea is to have high AoE uptime of poison and weakness on all enemies, while also managing 100%+ uptime of retaliation. With at least two opponents, that retaliation uptime should be easy. Bone minions are there because blast finishers with Death Nova is weakness application.
Wear your opponent down with Axe / Dagger, occasionally rush in for a kill attempt with Dagger / Focus. (Spinal Shivers, Reaper’s Touch, Dark Pact?) This build isn’t intended to generate or even use much life force, since for maximum Spiteful Spirit you only spend about 4 seconds in Death Shroud.
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Necromancers have absolutely amazing condition removal, and it even got buffed (slightly).
Oddly, this doesn’t extend to group support. There, we have Well of Power, and that’s basically it. The passive pull style transfers are generally just not good.
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I think it’d be neat. You’d get a defiance bar, probably fueled by your life force. It sacrifices the “extra health” defense in favour of crowd control defense, which is powerful, but still an interesting trade-off.
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Ferious Winds - worst trait ever designed?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Softspoken.2410
Necromancer’s Deadly Strength is in a similar spot.
That one converts toughness into Power, but the necromancer (as a light armor character) has little toughness and the Death line no longer grants toughness.
Does anet intend such a massive nerf for these boring % stat traits?
Hilariously, Deadly Strength is much better than Furious Winds. For starters, power is usually better than ferocity in terms of damage output on a point for point basis. Plus, converting from toughness means that you have 1000 base stats, so the trait is always worth at least 70 power, even if none of your gear has bonus toughness. To compare to Furious Winds, if an Elementalist has zero healing power on their equipment, this trait does literal nothing for them. Also, the stat bonus of Deadly Strength is doubled in Death Shroud, so it’s worth more than the base 7% conversion rate.
Also, armor class doesn’t change the Toughness a character has. It changes the base Defense stat of equipment, which changes the total Armor score (Equipment defense + Toughness), but it has no effect on traits / runes that scale from Toughness.
All of that said, I’m not a huge fan of % conversion traits, since they’re kind of boring. And Furious Winds is exceptionally bad, because ferocity & healing power are specialized stats for completely different builds. Maybe if you plan on most of your damage coming from arcane skills & arcane power procs?
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(edited by Softspoken.2410)
The drop of Condi cap is good, what I wish they’d do is give a synergistic buff based on conditions. Say once an enemy reaches X amount stacks of conditions the Necro begins to apply something that increases damage dealt to them by 5% for X sec. So say if the trigger point is 25 stacks; the enemy gets 25 stacks of bleeding the necros next bleed stack applies the effect for (say) 5sec. If the same enemy gets 25 stacks of poison then the effect lasts 5 secs longer…. Or something.
Whenever they were talking about cross – line synergy in other classes, one way they accomplished this was by making a hard-to-get boon trigger a strong effect, then adding extra sources of that boon to other lines. Necromancers could probably do the same thing with Chill, Blind, and Retaliation.
Chill & Blind they’re already playing with, as we’ve already seen in Bitter Chill and Chilling Darkness, but there’s basically no way to trigger blind via traits. Chill’s only opportunity is the Spinal Shivers at 50% trait, which people already take just for the flat damage. And there’s currently no extra pay-off for retaliation. All of these seem like suitable ways to make other lines combo with Curses and Spite.
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(4) Lifesteal traits are horrible. Even if the numbers were better, they are just damage + heal. They do not support the team or do anything else interesting. Ditto for life force traits. They are boring.
(6) Spite changes are bizaare with all of the conditional threshold stuff. Basically you can’t count on your traits to work for you during gameplay.
(11). Anybody who has been paying any attention to the game’s development knows that these traits, unchanged, are what the necromancer will be stuck with for the next three years.
I agree with a lot of your post. But for the parts I disagree with…
4 – Lifesteal traits could be made to work. Mostly they just have to be compressed time-wise, so that instead of applying a minor effect constantly throughout a fight, they apply more dramatic effects at pivotal moments in a fight. That said, I’d rather ArenaNet put our team support options in something more likely to be useful than group heals, like group condition control.
6 – A fight where you can’t get your opponent below 25% is a fight you weren’t going to win anyways. The only exception is point control in sPvP, where leaving your opponent alive and at high health for too long will still probably result in your death.
11 – I really disagree, since these trait proposals were shown to us as works-in-progress and the devs in question pointedly asked for feedback. What the Ready Up preview showed us is far from final, and now’s the time to change it.
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- One of my favourite, is the “Boomer Build”. The goal of this build was to put 3 curses on a foe, focus him, and if he died, he will explode and deals really good damage around him. The skills were Icy Veins (elit skill from Soul Reaping), Putrid Bile and Rising Bile(both from death magic).
Seeing that gameplay in Guild Wars 2 would be awesome, especially in sPvP, would be fun.
I really hate to harsh on your idea, but I don’t think you actually want this. Skills that only proc once a target is dead are snowball mechanics. They help secure a fight that you’re already winning, and don’t come into play in 1v1s until after a fight is over. In a fight where you’re slightly behind, they do basically nothing. We’ve already heard the devs talking about moving away from this (The new Spiteful Renewal triggers at 25%, not at zero) although they still need to expand that logic to Soul Comprehension.
- I don’t play that much sPvP, but I know enough that starting with 0% life force makes you the weakest class ever. It’s really hard to gere his own Life Force, since most of utility skills are “useless”.
-The Spectral Grasp is weird. It misses some creativity, nothing really to deal with a Necromancer, and even it’s a good amount of LF generate, and even if I tried to use it, you just can’t. It’s not that strong (even if it’s good for decents combos).
Why not add an F2 skill : Meditation : over time, increase LF from x to x%.
It might be a really long cast, and also, you can add some traits to that :
-gain HP each seconds while channeling
-gain Thoughtness while channeling
-inflict damage at the end of the channeling (Hi Shiro Tagachi)
etc…
And, in terms of lore and gameplay (especially PvE), it can be awesome !
I agree that Necromancers starting with 0 life force is a weird disadvantage, because unlike other profession specific resources, Life Force is a very long-term resource that persists between fights. I’d love to see them give a small baseline of life force to Necromancers every time they respawn. Probably around 20%, or the amount that a Necromancer gains from a single dead opponent. Or in an odd sort of way, their own death. It’s just enough to get into Death Shroud & soak a bit of damage at the start of a fight.
Requiring the Necromancer to spend extra time generating life force before getting back into the match feels like a trap in PvP, and allows them to regen to 100% life force between fights in a bunker spec, which is also questionable.
- Related to Death Magic, we are not the best profession for resurrect someone, neither to kill someone.
- Related to Blood Magic, as it was already said : we don’t feel like life steal is strong enough. There is a lot of posts about it, so I don’t have something to add about that.
Just don’t forget that, back in GW1, necromancer could heals/buffs, despite of his own health, a team member. That can be fun to see it in GW2, maybe.
It’d be nice to see Necromancer having a bit stronger of a “back from the dead” flavour though. Currently we’ve got Signet of the Undead and Ritual of Life, which are actually kind of strong? But they have some serious usability issues. (If I recall correctly, an opponent’s finisher is faster than your SotU channel!)
Blood Magic I really feel you on. They’ve pointedly removed health sacrifice, and I don’t think we’ll see that come back (Maybe life force sacrifice though!) but the loss of the Vampire archetype is really disappointing. As it is, siphons just don’t feel impactful.
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I think the whole idea of life siphoning should be gutted and replaced with some engaging gameplay design. I don’t want to be healing 50 with every damage I deal.
I want to be able to make use of necro active mechanics used timely to grant substantial heals to myself and allies. Same with the condition manipulation, no more passive transfers and all this uninspired design…
I think condition manipulation would be a good way to do Necromancer group support, but they definitely need to stop making it be on slow, passive effects.
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There is no “replacing” a single line, it is just a third line that you can mix and match as you want. The only special stipulation is that you can only have 1 elite specialization, and you need that specialization equipped if you want the specialization stuff.
I thought the purpose of the specialization was that you would trade off something for something else? If they introduce this specialization without you needing to give up anything for it, it will just be a straight upgrade unlekittenanges other factors of the necromancer at their core upon adopting it. At least until they introduce the next specialization set after this one. I'll be honest, I haven't seen anything beyond the current changes to existing traits as far as this specialization stuff goes.
Here’s the basic rundown of the new changes:
You pick exactly three trait lines, which will now be called “specializations”. In those three lines, you’ll get all the minors and your choice of major at every tier. (So three Adepts, three Masters, three Grandmasters.)
How the new elite specializations fit in:
Elite specializations that will be released with Heart of Thorns (Like Druid for Rangers) will be slotted in instead of one of the three ‘core’ specializations. So instead of going Spite / Death Magic / Soul Reaping, you might choose Spite / Death Magic / New Specialization. As well, you can only ever have one elite specialization equipped at a time, even if they release more in the future.
So the tradeoff for the elite specialization is one of your three chosen trait lines / core specializations.
Edit: Beaten to the punch. But I like this post, so here it stays.
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Sorry, I’m not really sure what kind of feedback you’re looking for here?
Do you want suggestions on what to use for your third line, once the specialization changes go through?
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Stealth isn’t invulnerability, and has never been intended as such.
The counter-play for a channeled skill is to interrupt it. They have a long window for you to do so, and you make your opponent waste their cooldown.
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Deadly Arts – Going to be used in almost every single build, that might be a problem. LOVE the focus on traps. Improvisation still feels a bit underwhelming with the “random skill recharged” when compared to it’s other grandmaster traits.
Improvisation hinges on the changes they will make on the stolen items. As far as those items are concern, all they’ve mention is that those items will lose the ability to deal damage. So far, the only plus is having to use 2 Mesmer stolen items — if it stays as is.
It also hinges on how heal and elite skills will now all belong to existing skill categories. So that means that no matter what your build, each usage of steal now has a 20% chance of recharging your heal or elite. Previously you could only do that with venoms or Signet of Malice, and I think SoM was taken more for its passive than its active.
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Moving the stats from traits to gear isn’t going to make the gear situation any worse* than it currently is.
*worse, depending on if you think it’s a problem at all.
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If they did make one of the tomes a Spirit Weapon, I’d hope they would also change its functionality somewhat. For Tome of Wrath, for example:
Auto / AI attack chain alternates between Conflagrate and Affliction, using similar targeting as current spirit weapons. The tome should have higher uptime on attacks than current weapons, if for no other reason than it having ranged attacks and not needing to chase down targets.
The new “Command” ability would be Zealot’s Fervor, then Judgement, then a final use of Zealot’s Fervor (Judgement’s current cooldown is too high to ever be used twice, and should probably be kept that way.)
Smiter’s Boon would probably be rolled into Zealot’s Fervor.
The main loss here is that you don’t have as much control over the two biggest skills of the tome (Fervor & Judgement), since you can’t jump straight to judgement nor can you chain two Fervors without a judgement in between. On the bright side, your Tome can be doing all of these things independent of you the player, so you don’t lose your weapon / heal skills.
I’m not sure if this is a good idea, but they could try and revamp a Tome into a spirit weapon, if they wanted.
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On the topic of Fear immunity: I’m pretty sure Terror doesn’t proc on any of the Silverwastes bosses. That’s the most recent content for open world PvE, and it straight up negates Terror for every boss fight.
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After reading some posts in this thread, I’m also concerned for WvW. sPvP gets things unlocked by default, and PvE is littered with easy skill point challenges, so those two seem fine. But WvW has a fairly limited availability of skill points, and I suspect things like daily challenges were an important source of the skill points you’d need to bridge the gap between levelling to 80 and unlocking all your utilities & non-racial elites. With skill point scrolls now being removed, players might be out a key source of skill / hero points.
I hope they manage to implement some sort of hero point reward for WvW participants, that’s closely tied to actual WvW participation and can’t be too easily dipped into by PvE-only players.
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Some way of cancelling the retreat on these skills would be nice. Maybe just hitting the button a second time rapidly? I can’t imagine this is intended as a balancing drawback to the skill, since it’s useful in so many other situations.
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If Necomancer had good access to blast finishers (eg, on axe 3 and Warhorn 4 and dagger 5), then Necromancers could have the option to take well of blood instead of consume conditions, blasting the well to remove conditions.
That old give us team support and more build variety and more strategic/tactical choice all in one move.
Blasting a light field gives AoE retaliation, not a condition cleanse. That’s why elementalists get mad at hammer guardians. Condition cleanse is only on projectile finishers.
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“Heal for X% of outgoing retaliation damage” sounds interesting. We have an effect somewhat like this as the passive on Signet of Vampirism, and retaliation is an effect that naturally scales up against multiple opponents. Plus, retaliation is easier to add to skills and traits than minions.
Do you think this should be limited to only retaliation the Necromancer applies themselves? Perhaps expanded to heal allies / the necromancer if they manage to (somehow) apply retaliation to others?
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Question. Does Unholy Martyr have preference to player allies over minions?
I actually have no idea which one it currently prioritizes. I’d say that going forward it should favour allies, since minions tend to be more disposable, and have a plausible condition transfer mechanism in the new Necromantic Consumption.
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Unholy Martyr seems like a wasted opportunity. As is, it’s too much like Plague Signet, but it doesn’t provide a bulk transfer to ruin an opponent. Plus, I feel like the devs have forgot that pulling conditions to the necromancer is still a drawback, even if you’re removing it from an ally. After all, no matter what environment, conditions are trying to kill you.
I get that for certain abilities, having the Necromancer suffer extra conditions is viewed as a good thing, because skills like Consume Conditions and Putrid Mark get positive value from conditions on the Necromancer. But these skills are good responses to spikes in condition pressure, rather than consistent, relentless conditions. With this in mind, passive (every X seconds) allied condition consumption should give straight value to the Necromancer, rather than just shift around the hurting on your team. Highly active condition consumption is more useable for transferring, so it doesn’t represent as much of a drawback.
Specific suggestions:
- Unholy Martyr: Keep this as continuous condition pulling from allies. Make it convert the condition pulled into a boon for the necro, in the style of Well of Power. This might replace the current LF generation. Will probably require a name change.
- Transfusion: This trait will make Life Transfer also draw 3(?) conditions per nearby ally across the duration of the channel. This somewhat matches underwater DS’s Gathering Plague, and the concentrated condition pulling provides a strong opportunity for a bulk transfer like Plague Signet, Putrid Mark, or Deathly Swarm.
- Deathly Invigoration: this trait already overlaps a lot with Transfusion, since they’re both allied-only healing. Since “entering Death Shroud” is a much more frequent event than casting Life Transfer, it may be more appropriate to have this trait cleanse one condition rather than draw it. Or, since this is apparently a grandmaster for some reason, convert it like a single pulse of Well of Power.
The idea here is to push Blood Magic group support into cleansing your allies of conditions, with some healing on the side. Siphons would be more more for a Necromancer’s personal sustainment.
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I believe they mentioned during the stream that where possible, they liked to have one “narrow” trait choice (intended for a specific build or category) and two “general” traits. So I think they expect Elemental Surge to be this narrow choice: something you only pick if you’re going for heavy arcane usage in your utilities. But everyone else will have to make the decision between the two generally useful traits.
Maybe that doesn’t answer your concern, but I think they expect the difficult decision to be between Elemental Attunement & Evasive Arcana, while the Elemental Surge option should be obvious based on your build / utilities.
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Edited slightly-
The vibe I got is that a few of the stronger stolen items (Fear skull, whirling axes) are going to get brought down a little. That change would be for all stolen items, not just for items used with Improvisation.
I believe that the current & future implementation is that the damage boost on the skill fact only applies to the stolen skill. I’m not sure exactly what they were saying during the stream, but it sounded like that 10% damage boost on using stolen items was likely to be removed. Executioner will still be the clear choice if you just want straight damage.
Sort of related: after these changes, Improvisation will have a way better chance to randomly recharge your heal or elite skill, since all of those options will have categories, rather than just Signet of Malice and the two venoms. So that’s a neat boost.
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(edited by Softspoken.2410)
I think the question is, on which of the following traitable effects makes the most sense on each skill?
- Convert one condition on affected allies into a boon
- Increased duration
- Extra self-heal, grants fury to nearby allies
All of these also include reduced cooldown. I didn’t include the new signet trait, since we’ve had a signet healing skill since the launch of the game.
So for me, increased duration seems very valuable on Shelter (them blocks) while converting a condition matches Healing Breeze, since it’s the only one of the bunch that heals allies.
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Btw did anyone hear anything about the new parasitic contagion? The picture on dulfy says it’s boosted from 5% now to 15%! Wtf that could be huge for PvP and even more so for PvE
Its 15% now, yes.
That means we get healed for 15% of the damage that our conditions do? If so, that seemed like a really big buff o.o why is no-one talking about that?
Tons of extra sustain in team fights, also in wvw groups, and basically unkillable in PvE.
Possibly because it’s competing with two of the biggest condition damage traits out there (and for sure the biggest ones for Necromancer), Lingering Curses and Terror. So any build that uses Parasitic Contagion is giving up a lot of power in exchange for that healing. Which is a fair and interesting choice, but it does curb the hype train a little bit.
Plus, a lot of discussion around the new Curses line is about how it isn’t quite a good choice for power necromancers now, since none of the GMs benefit a pure-power build.
Very late edit:
In case some dev comes through to read this later, I think in summary:
Spite is pretty great, just needs some numbers tweaking on the minors.
Curses is full of neat stuff, but only has grandmaster traits for condition builds.
Death Magic is full of neat stuff, but only has grandmaster traits for minion masters. And Unholy Sanctuary, which is “You have regeneration while in death shroud”.
Blood Magic is kind of a mess. A few cool traits, but the insistence on continuous healing as defense is weird, since Necromancers are the only profession that gets locked out of incoming healing. (Through death shroud)
Soul Reaping is pretty amazing.
There are some specific traits, but I think those are the big issues.
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(edited by Softspoken.2410)
Invigorating Precision – The design of this trait is not happy for a thief. You don’t want to take hits. This trait’s design is low potency all the time and fits a warrior better as they can trade blows. A thief plays hit and run, so allow this trait to play more like mug so you can turn a fight around on someone. Give it an ICD and maybe make it static heal on crit plus a percentage the critical damage inflicted retuned as well, seems more build defining this way.
Invigorating Precision heals based on outgoing crits, aka crits that you do to other people.
Yup, I would never use it at the current potency because it won’t trigger for enough healing reliably, and Thief doesn’t have the sustain to stand in fights to make the most of it, you don’t want to trade hits because of the lack of sustain and that 1500 health you might gain from dealing 10000 critical damage isn’t worth it as a grandmaster trait. You’d be better off taking Practiced Tolerance in my opinion.
I think it’d be more interesting to make this trait’s healing spike with an ICD creating vulnerability Windows and allowing you to turn a fight around or combo this heal off other Heals to get high health bonus effects like Scholar runes.
That’s just my opinion though.
Ah. When you referenced not wanting to take hits, I thought you had the traits functionality reversed, since the trait actually doesn’t encourage you to take damage any more than mug does.
I can understand wanting to make the trait more pivotal, so that its effects are concentrated in one powerful moment rather than spread out over an entire fight, but I think you’re underestimating the amount of healing you should get out of this trait in a fight when used on an appropriate build. In a build with a good crit chance and some ferocity, crits compose something like 2/3rds of all your damage. (50% crit rate, 200% bonus damage on crits hits this). At which point you’re basically gaining 10% of your damage output as healing. In a 1v1, that’s similar to a 10% boost in damage, since you’re causing that swing in your relative life totals, and that’s comparable to a 20% boost that’s only available 50% of the time.
To compare it to Practiced Tolerance: You’d need around 2140 precision to get 1500 extra health from that trait. At which point you have a crit rate of 60%, I think? So barring other tricks to manipulate your crit rate for important skills and the availability of fury and assuming zero ferocity, you’d only need to deal around 11,000 damage before crits to heal 1500 health across a fight. (11000 * 0.6 crit chance * 1.5 crit multiplier * 0.15 heal from crits).
Again, the major drawback of this trait is how its spread out across a fight. You can overheal with it, you can’t spike your health back up if someone does some burst damage to you, but all in all, it provides substantial healing that’s rather easy to access throughout a fight.
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I can’t wait to find out if they’re cutting down the damage, the blast finishers, or both.
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Reaper’s precision is bad. It will never compete with path of corruption or banshee’s wail. At 45% crit chance you’ll have a 15% chance to gain 1% life force on hit. This trait needs to be reworked entirely.
So as a question: say the trait gave 1% life force on every crit, triple its current strength. Would you ever take it? What about 2%? Or 5% on 33% of crits? I’m curious if this trait is bad due to fundamental design or just due to the exact numbers used.
How many other GM traits in the game have zero uptime without allies around like unholy martyr and deathly invigoration do?
Since you asked: Pure of Heart from Guardians (GM in virtues, allies get your Virtue of Resolve passive) and (new) Aquatic Benevolence from Elementalists (GM minor in Water Magic) only do things for other people.
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Invigorating Precision – The design of this trait is not happy for a thief. You don’t want to take hits. This trait’s design is low potency all the time and fits a warrior better as they can trade blows. A thief plays hit and run, so allow this trait to play more like mug so you can turn a fight around on someone. Give it an ICD and maybe make it static heal on crit plus a percentage the critical damage inflicted retuned as well, seems more build defining this way.
Invigorating Precision heals based on outgoing crits, aka crits that you do to other people.
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Well… For one thing, the livestream that detailed most of the changes people are discussing specifically invited feedback. They want to know what players think of those changes now.
As well, even though the specialization will be a big deal (new trait line, new weapon skills) there’s bound to be a lot of characters who can’t / won’t use it. So for them, the proposed skill line changes are way more important.
I agree that in terms of grand meta analysis (Will Necromancers have a place in dungeons / fractals? Will they be more PvP relevant?) the specialization is a huge piece of the puzzle that we don’t have yet, but there’s a lot of people who simply aren’t at that level of play.
So I mean… Yes, specializations are certainly a big deal and will change many things, but they won’t completely replace Necromancers as we know them, and we’ve been given a rare opportunity to see & provide feedback on changes that are still in flux.
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I doubt it’s a good build, but:
I’m gonna make some sort of permanent retaliation tank beast. I had tried it before, but now it’s way more plausible since I can cast Unholy Feast twice every 15 seconds. That alone gives me over 100% uptime against 3 opponents. With possibility of CDR and boon duration, I can get around 100% against two opponents. If I can add in a way to tank a lot of damage consistently without squatting in Death Shroud for too long, it’ll be interesting to see how much Retaliation damage an opponent will be forced to eat before they have a hope of dropping me.
Also up for consideration is yet another try at siphon-spam Necro, with the new quickening thirst & signet traits.
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Ah, I see what you mean. Making the third line choice for power builds be difficult / compelling would be the best way to push build variety.
I don’t think you should be able to have Lingering Curse, Terror, and Dhuumfire in one build though (at least not as they exist now). The new Lingering Curse would also boost Terror very significantly by allowing all of your non-Reaper’s Mark fears (its even possible to boost that one) to have double duration. That means a 4s Reaper’s Protection, 3s Doom (assuming it applies in DS), 2s Nightmare Proc, 2s Spectral Wall, and it allows you to drop Master of Terror in favor of the the other two traits, both of which will also boost your fears (more Dooms or more SWalls). If we want to move Terror, it will have to come with a (I hate to say it) nerf to the damage it deals.
On a side note, Corruption CD reduction trait being pushed into a fall trait sucks.
I wish I could just say that the new toxic landing is “Corruption CDR, with a fall trait”, but that 6s of self-weakness is tough to ignore.
Anyways, I agree with Bhawb that terror & lingering curse should remain exclusive choices, at least with the power level that lingering curses is currently representing. So pushing Parasitic Contagion somewhere else seems necessary. It’d probably also mean nerfing it slightly, but it could replace Reaper’s Precision completely as a defensive Master-tier curses trait.
At that point, we just need a GM trait that causes/works on crits and is pretty general. Since we’re concerned about Necromancers scaling up in groups, maybe something like “When you crit, apply 25% of that damage to foes around the target”?
Or something that grants additional ferocity, since that’s now completely missing from Necro traits. “Criticals against targets below X health have +200 ferocity”? But I hear there’s some concerns about over-saturation of health threshold traits.
Or as a more foolish suggestion, a buffed & combined version of Reaper’s Precision and Vampiric Precision, possibly with a small ICD to normalize it for non fast-hitting builds. (Siphon & gain LF on crit)
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Oh, and something that gets a separate post.
New Axe Training seems bad. Current usage for the axe never needs the auto attack. Swap in; use number #2; then #3, off hand skills, utilities, Death Shroud to fill the time in between; #2 and swap to your better weapon set. And that’s okay.
I like that you’re experimenting with other ways of cooldown reduction, but this doesn’t feel like a useful way to get it on Axe. (Compare Mesmer, where the opportunity cost is letting a clone live for an extra auto attack or two instead of shattering them immediately)
Hiding the damage boost behind cripple is… Okay, I guess? Because Locust Swarm exists and it gives a little more value to the new Spiteful Spirit. But if you don’t have Locust Swarm, you’ll be hard pressed to keep meaningful cripple uptime.
What about making the Axe CD recharge on AA 1% (or keep it at 2%) and making it affect all weapon and utility skills? :p
This appeals to me a lot, though I’m not sure of the numbers. Still, 4% per swing towards Ghastly Claws & Unholy Feast (Also Spiteful Spirit, for completeness) isn’t worth nearly as much to me as 2% per swing to every non DS, non elite skill I have equipped.
It might not be good, since it boils down to using axe so that I can use things that aren’t axe, but it is interesting and for me that’s a start.
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I’m still trying to decide if Curses could just become a “Condition damage via criticals” line, rather than “Condis and Crits”* as it was before, and isn’t quite now. Weakening Shroud is being pushed more towards conditions & lower direct DPS contribution. If you were to do something to Banshee’s Wail, the entire trait line would be lacking good direct-damage crit majors. (Which is a shame, considering Furious Demise & Target the Weak)
Since you no longer get 300 precision just for going into the line, does that make it okay if it offers basically nothing for a power-focused character?
*Sung to the tune of Kibbles and Bits
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
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Oh, and something that gets a separate post.
New Axe Training seems bad. Current usage for the axe never needs the auto attack. Swap in; use number #2; then #3, off hand skills, utilities, Death Shroud to fill the time in between; #2 and swap to your better weapon set. And that’s okay.
I like that you’re experimenting with other ways of cooldown reduction, but this doesn’t feel like a useful way to get it on Axe. (Compare Mesmer, where the opportunity cost is letting a clone live for an extra auto attack or two instead of shattering them immediately)
Hiding the damage boost behind cripple is… Okay, I guess? Because Locust Swarm exists and it gives a little more value to the new Spiteful Spirit. But if you don’t have Locust Swarm, you’ll be hard pressed to keep meaningful cripple uptime.
Mixing insults with your post is like pooping in a salad.
It’s pretty obvious, and nobody’s impressed.
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Okay, I managed to watch the entire livestream (Sans the warrior section, it’s the one profession I haven’t really played), and I feel like I’ve got a little more perspective now on where they’re aiming with the traitlines.
So with an eye on the changes to the Water Magic line for elementalists, and the Honor line for Guardians, it looks like Blood Magic is being divided into two major archetypes:
Self-oriented healing, via Siphons.
Outgoing healing, via DS heals.
Using DS to block parts of a heal so that they can have outgoing-only level scaling is almost elegant design, but it preserves the “Healing is wasted on a Necromancer in Death Shroud” issue. As well, the selfish healing option, siphons / vampiric, is still prevented from helping a Necromancer while they’re in Death Shroud.
My suggestion: if selfless Necro healing is going to be pushed, the alternative healing trait options need to get through Death Shroud. This helps to distinguish the two paths, rather than jumbling them into an over-loaded and useless mess. I’d like to see this done by allowing heals to help a Necromancer in Death Shroud by default, nerf Death Shroud generation / pool size if necessary(!), then making traits like Transfusion / Deathly Invigoration (The “selfless” heals) explicitly not affect the Necromancer.
As well, I feel that merging vampiric master into the minor trait, but still leaving vampiric precision (A crit trait. Almost by definition a crit trait) sitting around by itself is a questionable decision. If anything, vampiric master changed how you played a character, since now you knew your minions were healing you back up, while vampiric precision was just “I guess I want more siphons and my crit chance isn’t utter pants.”
Maybe it’s a weird solution, but consider rolling Vampiric Master into the new Necromantic Corruption (Rewards you keeping your minions alive and attacking for a long time) then move that grandmaster into the Blood Magic line. Then, compress Unholy Martyr and Deathly Invigoration (currently selfless, allied-based support) into one grandmaster trait. A heal now, and I’ll grab some conditions soon.
tl;dr – Split the Blood Magic trait options clearly between “Selfish, works in Death Shroud” and “Generous, doesn’t heal me at all”, combining traits that both fall into the same category at each tier. Probably with Siphons as the thematic core for the selfish option. Make minions be a clear and powerful choice in the Blood Magic line, rather than a side-benefit.
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What do you think of allied AoE Retaliation as a possible support outlet for Necromancers? I feel like it could be an in-flavour way to let Necromancers give out boons.
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It’s odd to me that they changed Deathly Invigoration to heal on entering death shroud “Because it felt kind of weird to reward you for leaving death shroud” when just a few minutes prior they showed us Beyond The Veil, which procs protection upon exiting Death Shroud. Consistency!
Also why is Reaper’s Precision still a thing. Can someone please explain to me how this is a strong trait because I just do not see it.
As one last thing, Toxic Landing now casting CPC on fall damage is… Iffy… Because 6s of weakness is the kind of drawback you actually need to manage. It’s not utterly ignorable like Epidemic’s vulnerability.
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specs: not able to use more than 3 lines?
in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns
Posted by: Softspoken.2410
I’m surprised by how little people value the idea of taking a third grandmaster trait.
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Really, really hoping to see some skills in the specialization that consume LF for either significant offense abilities or defensive abilities like blocks or projectile destruction that a Necromancer currently doesn’t have access to.
I don’t need them to remove DS, but consuming life force in new ways is a design area rich with potential that’s been completely unexplored.
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How will the current level gating be transferred into the new system, if at all? Currently characters can only access Master level traits at level 60, and Grandmasters at 80. Will those numbers be adjusted, kept the same, or removed entirely?
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(edited by Softspoken.2410)
Well, I’m excited. They’re changing the unlock system and making it use a more general currency. This removes the “Waiting 45 minutes for X event to proc so I can get this trait” problem.
It also puts the focus back on Skill Point Challenges (Now Hero Point Challenges?), which I always thought were a neat way to give a player small, unique trials. Even if the trial was “beat up this enemy”, that enemy tended to have an unusual skillset.
Elite skills will now all have a category. Does this mean Time Warp will be a Manipulation? Lich Form will be a Spectral? Plague will be a Well? Rampage as One will be a Shout? Introducing trait synergy to elites can have some really interesting effects, since so many of the old elites were only available on an “as-is” basis.
Adepts are getting buffed. This is only possible because they’re hard limiting people to three lines now, but adepts becoming more impactful is a big plus to me. In the example shown (Water Magic) the adepts were 2 strict upgrades from old adepts (with fairly significant boosts, really) and one as-is master level trait. 2 of the master level traits were old master levels + a matching adept. (The other was Cleansing Wave, which is super good already). And the grandmasters were as they are now.
This could be different than advertised if currently hidden information like cooldowns & recharges turn out to be awful, but the increased functionality of these skills is a really good sign. And in water, all we lost was “Arcane Abatement” and “Shard of Ice”.
My only worries are surrounding exactly how many skill points you need to unlock a particular line, and if it’s feasible to get them unlocked quickly if you’re focusing on it. But that sort of information can’t really be given just yet, as it’s fairly easily tweaked and adjusted right up until release.
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hahah omg i love this thread
Glad someone is liking it I expected more support but that would do the players became in game necros they got used to the downed state and they prohibited us from necro-ing threads. At this point it’s a conspiracy or they are just lazy.
I was kind of enjoying it, then it became largely dominated by one poster who was more interested in taking cheap shots than closely examining problems and giving creative or well thought-out solutions.
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Turret Engineer, only there’s less you can do about the damage and the Mesmer gets better value off of destroying their summons.
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