Guild Wars 2

I wish it was taller.

Could be nice and useful in a relaxed context, since a necro will always have a fear to provide no matter what their build. But as spoj has extensively pointed out, it’s not like necromancers have a significant advantage over anyone else when it comes to hard (Defiant-interacting) CC.

I’m actually really curious to see how they change FitG, if at all. Boosting its duration makes the 100% uptime on Stability cheese build attainable, even though the value of that stability is relatively lower. Boosting its intensity seems like the more obvious option, so that it’s a very short window that’s very difficult to punch through with CC combos.

Hopefully we’ll see a few of these things expanded into Necromancer territory, since I still maintain expanded degen / regen / consumption of Life Force could be very interesting. Too bad it’ll probably be Specialization-exclusive.

Schumi.4285:

Softspoken.2410:

For a fight like Golem Mk II, I’ve stuck around on the ground not because I expect to be revived, but because I’m trying to pick up the mechanics of the fight without someone teaching me. I enjoy that process of discovery and trial and error, and hanging around for a minute to see what’s happening to other people helps me piece together how the fight works.

Plus, it’s not like you can make Golem Mk II fail, or like there’s much of a time investment leading up to it.

Edit: Maybe I should just start typing “Do Not Resuscitate” in /say or something so that people don’t feel bad about ignoring me.

Ok but why aren’t you staying like 5 steps outside of the danger zone while alive and watch the mechanics? You can do that too while alive. Or watch a youtube video for mechanics? Most world bosses are easy to understand and you will know the mechanics within 1 minute.
By lying around dead, you trap other people into helping you which might get electrocuted.

But yes, MKII will always go down in time, so I guess it’s not that big of a deal. But you know… people watching MKII mechanics might also be watching Teq mechanics and Vinewrath mechanics, 3 headed worm mechanics and so on. And with some bosses it really makes a difference. And it sends a wrong signal to others. It should be common sense to run. But if too many players lie around, new players won’t port either.
I don’t care if you lie dead at MKII, I will ask all dead to port and I won’t rezz you, so we’re both good but please do not do this at harder bosses!

Typically I don’t stand 5 steps out of the danger zone because when I am new to a fight, I don’t know where the danger zones are. So the only way to stay perfectly safe is to be at 1200+ range (and that doesn’t even always work). And at 1200+ range, I can’t really tell the finer points of what’s going on. As to why I don’t watch a Youtube video about it:

I’m trying to pick up the mechanics of the fight without someone teaching me. I enjoy that process of discovery and trial and error

I didn’t note it explicitly, but I don’t do this at harder bosses, because for a lot of those you can either 1) actually fail the event, which is just a downer in general or 2) make someone’s prior time investment become meaningless, such as the front half of dungeons or the “Foothold” event period in the Silverwastes. Or, more succinctly:

it’s not like you can make (the event) fail, or like there’s much of a time investment leading up to it.

Golem Mk II is not what I would call a Serious Business world boss. So while there’s a lot of times where I get people’s gripes about others performing suboptimally, that one really isn’t worth bothering yourself over.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

I’m going to preface this by putting it in the context of the Golem Mk II event.

(…)

Within the first 30 seconds of the event, all I see on the minimap is a platform full of skulls and cross-bones. The platform is essentially a graveyard. I find a lot of these people will not resurrect themselves at the nearby waypoint. Instead they’ll expect others (I see it happen daily) to resurrect them and put their own lives at risk. It’s dangerous and selfish.

For a fight like Golem Mk II, I’ve stuck around on the ground not because I expect to be revived, but because I’m trying to pick up the mechanics of the fight without someone teaching me. I enjoy that process of discovery and trial and error, and hanging around for a minute to see what’s happening to other people helps me piece together how the fight works.

Plus, it’s not like you can make Golem Mk II fail, or like there’s much of a time investment leading up to it.

Edit: Maybe I should just start typing “Do Not Resuscitate” in /say or something so that people don’t feel bad about ignoring me.

I believe that Axe has regained favour because it has passable burst damage and burst Life Force generation. The idea is that you swap to Axe, use #2, switch to Death Shroud / Offhand / Utility Skills, Use #2 again, then swap almost immediately back to your primary weapon set.

It also has popularity in Minion Master builds because the ranged attacks make it easier to direct your minions to the next target, and the vulnerability on the auto-attack is one of the few ways to boost the damage of your minions.

There could be better and worse reasons, those are just the ones I’m aware of.

For everyone that does not already know this: Ascalonian Catacomb pants with Sorrow’s Embrace armor. Your light armor character in Metal boots / gloves / chestplate. Shoulders are also metal, but the lanterns are not to everyone’s taste. Face mask is always to taste.

Edit: It would be nice to have more options! I just thought some people might appreciate being told about a few I’ve stumbled across.

manveruppd.7601:

Because all the skills you mentioned (except Dark Pact, which is weak because it has a low range and high cast time) apply soft CC, which is almost useless in this game. It’s too easy to cleanse and its uptime (duration/recharge) is extremely low, so hard to reapply once cleansed.

If you think soft cc is useless in PvP formats, then I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to complain about the uptime of cripple / chill / immobilize on Necromancer skillsets, then there’s a conversation to be had, but writing off those effects entirely is pretty questionable.

Moreover, teleport/shadowstep skills completely ignore its effects, because, unlike charge skills, their range is unaffected by movement speed reduction. So thieves, mesmers, and sword guardians are basically immune to chill and cripple. The only classes whose mobility is seriously hurt by it are elementalists and warriors, and both of them have decent cleanses.

Just for the record: Guardian’s Sword 2 can only warp them towards a selected target. The target can be out of range (which is an annoying advantage over Dark Path), but it still requires them to have an opponent visible in a certain direction. The other examples certainly do have abilities which make them able to escape despite chill & cripple.

Also, don’t you dare call Dark Path a teleport. If you have swiftness you can LITERALLY outrun your own Dark Path projectile! It’s a good in-combat skill with all the bleeds and chill, but useless as a gap closer. If you cast it at over 600 range, your target is quite likely to outrun it and you’ll get an “out of range” message! All they need is a single movement skill and they’ll get past the maximum 1200 range!

I get what you mean about ‘teleport’, since the jump only triggers after (if) Dark Path hits a target. Still, if I recall correctly the distance is traveled isn’t reduced by chill / cripple and is executed in one instantaneous moment, so it’s not a leap skill like heartseeker.
Also, you can’t use swiftness to outrun your Dark Path projectile while outside of combat, let alone once a fight has started. You’re correct in that it’s slow, though. An unhindered opponent at 600 probably has enough of a head start to get to its fizzle distance, and a proper movement skill nearly guarantees it.

jportell.2197:

Softspoken.2410:

It’s odd, because you’d think Dark Path + any movement debilitating skill (Grasping Dead, Dark Pact, maybe even Chilblains) would be enough. After all, DS2 teleports you to your target and chills them on a 15s cooldown, regardless of weapon set or utilities.

Except any class we pull that on has some way to get out of it. Just one teleport on us isn’t enough. Not to mention we are the class that has to try and perfectly time almost everything we do. We get punished most for missing our damaging combos.

Not really sold on this. I can get why Dark Path isn’t (and shouldn’t) be enough on its own to prevent others from escaping, but a couple weapon skills (Locust Swarm, Dark Pact, maaaaybe Unholy Feast?) seem quite good at keeping you close. So why is this combination of mobility reducing skills and abilities insufficient for the typical enemy?

For the thread starter:

Something to consider for a casual-tier build is sigils that grant further condition application. Cheap entry level sigils include: Geomancy (AoE bleed on swap), Doom (Single target poison on swap), Earth (Chance to bleed on crit) or Blight (Chance to poison AoE on crit, weirdly long cooldown though).

These can give you a few more ways to apply conditions and a wider variety than just Burning. You’ll probably want to pair one with a Sigil of Corruption for the extra condition damage, but those are some cheap ways to tinker with your build.

That said, I’d highly advise going hybrid stats while you’re starting out. (The Rampager combo of Precision/Condition Damage/Power, especially) The Power stat will serve you very well in PvE.

jportell.2197:

But the biggest thing all of these classes have in common is an insanely high up time on vigor and build in dodges. Now I know at one point Anet said that necros were “supposed to be the class you can just not get away from” well at this point that is not true. To help our sustain I think we need better in combat mobility (a ground targeted blink that isn’t flesh wurm) and access to vigor (without having to convert).

Oh and if we really are supposed to be the class you can’t get away from why can medi guards stick to any class like an overly drawn out simile?

It’s odd, because you’d think Dark Path + any movement debilitating skill (Grasping Dead, Dark Pact, maybe even Chilblains) would be enough. After all, DS2 teleports you to your target and chills them on a 15s cooldown, regardless of weapon set or utilities.

I’m still glad that traits are being revisited, especially the method of acquisition. It feels like it just missed the mark, is all. It encourages players to wait around for specific dynamic events, which seems contrary to the philosophy behind those events. Unlocks like story paths and mini dungeons feel appropriate, as they are discrete player initiated experiences.

I also hope the timing for trait acquisition & unlocks will also be addressed. It feels odd to lock something as play-style defining as Grandmaster traits behind level 80.

Rym.1469:

It has potential.

But it lacks any Life Force management. It’s just extra HP and couple on-cooldown offensive abilities. No way to play with it as a resource for anything.

I hope that this Specialization thingy will allow ANet to add some serious Life Force management with bonus DS abilities to the game in the future.

As it is now, it just feels incomplete, especially playing as Power or in PvE.

Tl;dr Not bad, but could really use some expansion, because it has great potential.

Seconding this. In my opinion the most obvious potential skill dynamic was making certain skills consume or require life force. With a few more ways to control its usage, something more like the thief’s Initiative system (Which I find very engaging) could have been implemented.

As it is, Life Force usage barely counts as resource management, in my opinion. It’s just a weird sort of pseudo-healing.

Magic Find is weird in that its most desired effect is getting rares and exotics instead of junk, but its most noticeable effect is getting bigger piles of junk at a faster rate.

It’d be interesting to see an emphasis on non-damage roles in the expansion, but I think that would be more impactful if it was reflected in the encounter & enemy design.

I’m glad to hear the acquisition method is getting changed. Here’s to hoping that the timing is pushed earlier as well. Forcing a character to get to level 80 before using a Grandmaster trait still seems like a huge mistake to me.

Probably. But I’m waiting on some actual info, especially about the trait system. (Or specializations, as they may fit a similar role in my play experience)

Ashanomara.5431:

Specializations sounds like you have to make a choice, so i would hope they’d add more than one per class.

This, basically. It’s not really a “specialization” if its the only choice.

The alternative is if specializations come with drawbacks in selected areas, in which case what was before the default option will now fill a different niche.

I seriously doubt the might changes were brought on by dungeon runs. If they wanted to reduce the usefulness of might specific to dungeon & PvE groups, they’d probably have nerfed the blast finisher + fire field combination. (Since, iirc, that’s a key tactic for 25 AoE stacks)

Edit: I guess that’s not the focus of the topic. As to why not separate them: there’s a big push to keep things consistent between PvE & PvP, mostly for the sake of getting more PvE players into PvP. Confusion (like Retaliation) gets a pass because the hits / second that they are based on changes both drastically and obviously between the two formats.

I’m of the opinion that Signet of Undeath will never be allowed a good passive, because its active can be so good. I mean, reviving up to 3 downed characters that are near each other? If you can land this on 2 people, it’s a pretty big swing in how the fight is going.

But at the same time, it’s a situation that doesn’t come up often and can still be difficult to pull off (3s+ channel, I think?). So Signet of Undeath will always be good if you can actually use it, but you almost never can, so it’ll always be bad in general play.

As for the rest of the buffs: Really minor, which is fine. The buff to Signet of the Locust is pretty interesting: reducing the cool down to 40s alone makes it a lot more interesting.

DeceiverX.8361:

Conditions should never out-damage regular damage on PvE trash mobs due to the fact a lot of people fail to recognize condition damage totally ignores all toughness values, and condition damage builds can be optimized for DPT throughputs while building into one of the most durable stat combinations in the game and supporting directly by durability-focused traits/stats.

(All of what I’m going to say is in context of PvE)

To repeat this: direct damage builds that go full damage (glass cannon) are forced to invest in power, precision, ferocity, and have no further stats to take without losing damage. By comparison a condition-exclusive build needs only condition damage and (usually) precision. Because all equipment pieces worth talking about have 3 or more stat types on them, Condition builds are either forced to have hybrid damage (eg Rampager) or gain defensive stats (eg Rabid).

With that in mind, a build that is exclusively conditions (not hybrid) cannot be allowed to have a greater damage potential than a full glass-cannon build, since it does not sacrifice defensive stats.

This is why I think ArenaNet will never buff a pure condition build to match a pure direct-damage build.

Honestly I just wish it had been clearer from the start that condition damage is not an alternative to direct damage: it’s just an add-on. At most they’re an alternative to big critical hits.

In my experience with levelling:

• Get a main-hand dagger immediately.
• Unlock Well of Suffering for damage against any group you can bunch together
• Unlock Signet of the Locust for the 25% run speed boost at early levels. Later on you can use Warhorn & Spectral Walk to have easy, permanent swiftness, but Spectral Walk is kitten utility so you may not have access to it just yet.

As for dungeons with your guild, I believe that Spoj’s guide in this forum is still the definitive word on PvE Necromancers And How To Deal Damage With Them. Since they’re guild runs, you won’t need to copy it exactly for maximum possible DPS, but a read-through could help you find ways to quickly increase your damage.

Muchacho.2390:

Softspoken.2410:

Usagi.4835:

I would leave Reaper’s Protection alone. it would be an unnecessary nerf, particularly as other classes (namely, elementalist and mesmer) have similar traits as counters to CC but also better access to stability and more access to stunbreaks.

OP referenced Ritual of Protection not Reaper’s Protection. Ritual of Protection currently grants a few seconds of protection to allies inside a well when it is cast, the suggestion was to make it apply the protection in pulses, similar to how the other well effects are applied.

I agree that Reaper’s Protection shouldn’t be changed. It’s a pretty funny trait in my opinion, especially since Necros are CC magnets sometimes. If only it could trigger more often.

Nope the op did mention to change RP (hint it is number 8 ). And to be honest the op’s change would much more useful (for other builds then terror necro) since the traitline boosts boon duration not condition duration.

Huh. Bizarre. That’s what I get for not reading closely, I guess.

Still, I disagree. The counter-CC is often much better damage mitigation than protection of a comparable duration.

Usagi.4835:

I would leave Reaper’s Protection alone. it would be an unnecessary nerf, particularly as other classes (namely, elementalist and mesmer) have similar traits as counters to CC but also better access to stability and more access to stunbreaks.

OP referenced Ritual of Protection not Reaper’s Protection. Ritual of Protection currently grants a few seconds of protection to allies inside a well when it is cast, the suggestion was to make it apply the protection in pulses, similar to how the other well effects are applied.

I agree that Reaper’s Protection shouldn’t be changed. It’s a pretty funny trait in my opinion, especially since Necros are CC magnets sometimes. If only it could trigger more often.

Underwater combat suffers from a few things: loss of entire categories of utility skills, for one. The loss of ground-targeting also shrunk the gameplay space that was possible for the area-control or AoE mechanics, which had been featured pretty heavily in regular combat.

Another is that in PvE, mobs don’t seem to work properly down there. For one thing, it seems really easy to chain pull many, many opponents without intending to, since it’s harder to keep track of your relative position and to see enough of the space around you to make sure you’re still clear.

As a specific example, the Ship of Sorrows in Orr has some weird things about it: mobs tend to get pulled through ceilings or floors, or pushed through them. Some underwater enemies have bizarre behavior, such as incredibly long invulnerability / evasion periods even when there is no animation to indicate it.

I think people find P/P disappointing because it doesn’t quite meet the sweet spot of damage and survivability that melee sets do. Ostensibly it’s safer because it’s permanently at 900 range, so the reduced damage is fair. But unlike melee sets, it doesn’t have a shadowstep or an evasion move or access to stealth in its weapon skills. So while it looks a little safer at first, if something actively chases you, you’re forced into a second set / utilities / traits or something to escape with your life.

If you were ever to ‘fix’ P/P, it would probably have to be on Unload. (since as Cynz mentioned, both P/D and D/P are really good sets, so buffing either of them by association is questionable) I’m not sure what you’d do to fix it, if such a thing is possible / necessary: Maybe make unload reduce the cost of your next non-unload skill by 1 or something? As it is, the set often loses what utility it has because of the necessity of unload spam for moderate damage.

Maybe you could somehow let people use their dodges without breaking the channel? Putting free evasion frames on it seems a little too cheaty in my opinion.

America.9437:

Softspoken, i’ve viewed every vista in the game and have pics of them saved on my hard drive.

“I saw this location once and stored a picture, now I never want to see it again”?

Like okay maybe I shouldn’t criticize your life decisions but this still seems like a weird thing to be proud of?

Congratulations on pointedly ignoring your surroundings?

I’m glad you’ve at least learned to not talk about combat mechanics.

Hmmmmmm it could have been fluffier

but it is sufficiently bulky for my desires. Yes.

Ayrilana.1396:

Ohoni.6057:

I didn’t play GW1, and don’t care what GW1 did or did not do.

It matters though as this game is based off of it. What they did there has relevance here.

Not really!

Between the original Guild Wars and GW2, a large number of systems have changed rather drastically! In fact, you might consider them two different games, each of which needs to be evaluated on its own merits separate from one another!

While you’re trying to do CoF runs for your (first?) exotic level set of armor, make sure you have level 80 rare (or even masterwork) armor and accessories! It’s generally not too expensive to get a full set of level 80 stuff at that rarity, but the difference between a fully cohesive set of level-cap armor and a ragtag mix of whatever you grabbed while levelling up can be huge.

Ragion.2831:

Honestly..if im not mistaken, DS works during a control skill, foot in the grave makes necros the best stun breakers in the game.

It does and it doesn’t. Foot in the Grave will grant the Necromancer stability at instant speed, but it doesn’t actually break stuns. So you need to be anticipating the control condition to really get usage out of it.

Which is still very useful! But you can’t always see a stun coming.

I recall there being an entire mini dungeon devoted to an Asura Necromancer somewhere near the Asura starting area. Something about preserving her soul in golems?

Any of the colleges could work, in my opinion. Maybe it would be more like determining what flavour your Necromancer is, rather than which one is the most Necromancer?
Statics: A focus on building structures and objects that last without maintenance. Perhaps a necromancer focused on averting death completely, removing the decay of typical life.
Dynamics: A focus on new experimental technologies, and addressing problems that are only just being realized. A necromancer that would toy more with the line between life and death.
Synergetics: The college most focused on magic and the metaphysical. This type of necromancer would probably be very focused on the exact meaning of death, and the underlying nature of life force.

Maybe that doesn’t help, but it could be something to consider.

Emma J.1940:

I’m not a mm player normally but for fun last week my guild tried all necro mm parties in dungeons, with max amount of minions possible and we wizzed through AC without any trouble, was a fast and easy run. We didnt have any special stats or armor we just all chose minons for the skills and ran with it.
So I think a necro mm should be fine in a dungeon. I normally run condition damage so it was a nice change.

So I’m not sure if it’s true, but I’m under the impression that five necros with minions actually hit a sort of critical mass wherein boss AoE actually isn’t that effective at killing them. The reasoning is that AoE is capped at a certain number of targets, and having a pile of minions running around tends to overload that cap: so while a few will still die relatively quickly, they meat shield for each other and give greater uptime to the horde as a whole.

Again, not sure if it’s true, but if it is it’s hilarious.

If you have another source of burning to start the fight with and you can strike rapidly (Whirling Wrath, for example), you can almost treat Supreme Justice as a 67% increase in duration for the passive of the burn.

The passive proccing more rapidly gives it greater uptime, and since burning stacks in duration a little bit of a starter burn from yourself or a teammate (Even 4 seconds would do) makes it so the 75% boosted duration planned from other equipment / traits is still fully effective.

Interesting. I don’t know how well it carried across into the live test, but it looks like the damage split is somewhere around 11 : 7, favouring the necro over the minions? (About a 60% / 40% split, based on the 3600 damage overall and the 1400 expected from the video.)

For traits, how attached is your son to Vital Persistence in Soul Reaping? I think he’d get more use out of Unyielding Blast (Soul Reaping VI): the vulnerability stacks seem really relevant, and the current reduction on DS’ degen doesn’t strike me as crucial to his gameplay. (Axe, focus and staff are all fairly good at generating life force safely)

You could also try traits from other lines, of course. Weakening Shroud (IV in Curses) for example.

Roe.3679:

Axe mastery mainhand damage is from 924-1152, average hit is 1038.

Staff is 985 to 1111, average hit is 1048. Looks like staff’s average hit is higher, and life transfer is much stronger on staff than axe.

Slight mathematical error in there: Axe’s weapon damage after Axe Training is the equivalent of 943 – 1153, which gives it an average of 1048. Which is indeed equal to a staff’s weapon strength. So, like Roe mentioned earlier, Axe Training brings the Weapon Strength of an axe up to par with a staff. (At least, in this example with level 80 exotics, but probably at all points in the game with weapons of equal level & rarity.)

Crovax.7854:

I personally think they had the option to
a) make the game more fun so people want to play by themselves
b) resort to psychological manipulation and take the easy way out to avoid spending resources on improving the game

They chose option b and it’s hard to respect a company that acts that way. However that’s just my personal opinion.

As much as I understand your concerns over manipulation, there’s basically no coercive element to this that I can see? There’s no new punishment if you stop / don’t log in, for example.

Thaddeus.4891:

But why Anet is still putting time, effort and money on daily/monthly? I guess that ya some ppl were not happy with the current system, but it wasn’t a big issue for the vast majority of ppl. It should be so low in the list of priority of Anet that I can’t understand why they did that.

It’s the kind of system that can powerfully shape player behaviour, and can be especially good guidance for relatively new players. They can use it to push people towards certain content that might be under-utilized, and it would help introduce players to new zones. Which I think would be done so that people stumble over something they really like because of it.

Crovax.7854:

Neat changes but rewards for daily logins? Really? That is a psychological tactic for sleazy f2p games to get players to spend more money in their cash shop, not something for a supposedly respectable AAA MMO.

Overall good changes to dailies though, but still…

It’s worth noting that they avoided the slot machine / roulette reward screen that taunts you with the impossibility of premium currency. Also, they avoided “Log in every day or else”, since progress on a track isn’t reset.

I just say this because I had the same reaction to the “Log in daily” tactic, but this is a very tempered version of that strategy.

Norn Male, Elementalist

The Norn tier 1 cultural armor chest piece “Sheepskin Doublet” causes the wrists / forearms of the character to vanish entirely. This issue follows through whether or not gloves are equipped, and regardless of which gloves are used. Where the arm should enter the sleeve, there is a hole through which the entire character model is now invisible.

It’s not too noticeable when standing still, but when the character gestures or swings their arms the rayman-like effect becomes a lot more apparent.

Skin was applied via wardrobe after purchase from Sken / cultural vendor in Hoelbrak.

To be fair, adding basic functionality to DS in form of allowing you to interact / revive / stomp is a nice change, even if it should have been in the game 18+ months ago.

I, for one, can’t wait until the anecdotes of people ‘double hitting’ Death Shroud on accident with Unholy Sanctuary roll in.

(Someone tries to press DS right before death, overshoots and ends up cancelling their trait-procced DS early)

Bhawb.7408:

What traits do you like conceptually, but feel fall short of what they could be?
This is a trait where you like where it seems to be going, but you feel it isn’t as good as it could be. Say why you like the idea, what about it you think falls short, and how you’d like to see it changed to bring it up to par.

Siphoned Power (25 Spite) is this for me. The idea is that when someone is dangerously low on life, they get a surge of power that might help them finish off the other person first. A boost of power when they need it most.
To make it match that idea, I’d say that it should be normalized in terms of hit intensity: add a 1 sec recharge, and increase it to 3 stacks of might (5s) so that it doesn’t spike from multi-hit attacks, but still ramps up quickly.

Toxic Landing: This is the obligatory fall trait. However, the poison isn’t good for escaping, or even that good for initiating. I’d suggest switching its passive effect for summoning a Locust Swarm. (Rename to Flight of the Locust?) The idea being: locust swarm cripples those near you and gives swiftness, so if you initiate with it people can’t get away, and you can use it for an extra swiftness application to try and escape. Still a little cruddy, but that’s a fall trait for you.

Dark Armor: A safeguard for casting your long, drawn-out spells. I feel like this should just straight up give protection or retaliation, since 400 toughness is kind of arbitrary (and only 25% damage reduction on a glass cannon).
Or they could bump it up a tier or two and have it give stability for the duration of the channel. That way you could have some insurance for attacks like Transfusion, Ghastly Claws and Life Siphon.

Death Shiver: Needs a strict buff. It could also make use of the close=stronger effect theme that Death Shroud is gaining recently. Make it apply vulnerability every second, with 1 stack to people 600-900 away, 2 stacks to people 300-600 away, and 3 stacks to people <300. Could also use a name change so people stop thinking this should apply chill.

Necromantic Corruption: Should corrupt boons (boon -> condition) instead of just removing them. It’s directly competing with Death Nova, so it’s got to be potent.

Vital Persistence: If you’re using this, you’re going to camp in DS, which means you’re using life blast a lot. But you probably just gave up Unyielding Blast. For that kind of cost, this ought to slow the degen to a crawl: Either 1% or 2% lost per second.

The most useful aspect of that much immobilize in PvP would probably be to force someone off of a point (with Fears and the like) and keep them there, letting you neutralize / capture before you kill any defenders.

If it’s any consolation, the necro is almost certainly dropping either well of suffering or well of corruption. Suffering is an attempt at damage, corruption is an attempt to cancel the boonspam on a group of dredge.

If they’re dropping well of darkness on dredge, even I wouldn’t blame you for just kicking them from the group.

Of course, it’d be nice if they alternated their wells with your fields.

I was looking forward to more balance changes, but if the trait tooltips prove to be 90% accurate, I’ll be quite satisfied.

Petition to rename this skill “Bola Shot”, pending a more clever suggestion.

As far as I can tell, manually ending death shroud still causes a 10s recharge. Being forced out of death shroud by depleting all life force uses the 10s timer started when you first entered DS. So the exact same as before.