Guild Wars 2

Vuh.1328:

P Fun Daddy.1208:

It’s all about telegraphing. The vast majority of conditions are either applied through autos or though poorly telegraphed attacks, which makes dodging them far less effective. This in turn makes them have an edge over direct damage in PvP/WvW, where somewhat greater direct damage is split into several attacks that are telegraphed based on potency while conditions are spread somewhat evenly over less telegraphed attacks.

This is true, i also don’t think condition players wouldn’t mind if the abilities were more telegraphed and stronger while autos being weaker, this should go for power builds aswell though.
Relying on autos as a “main” source of damage in general is quite boring

I would mind it alot. let’s say it in this scenario:
After a lot of trouble I finally managed to place my powerfull telegraphed condition attack but they were immediately cleansed by my oponents condition removal while they only procced for one second giving me 800 damage for this “powerfull” attack. Quite fair isn’kitten

Cleansing conditions is equally easy (if not easier) as applying condition so making conditions telegraphed would be highly unfair.

You said this:
“A few big problems with conditions:
1. They usually provide both defense and damage through same abilities, like cripple+bleed, burn and something etc etc,Which is the biggest problem”

Together with this:
“My personal favorite way of dealing with it would be: reduce damage of condition specs and completely change the view of condition speced from being a damage spec to a more supportive spec through soft cc(blinds chill cripple weakness immobilize) but also make the soft cc abilities stronger, this would however mean that the Devs would have to nerf the conditions a power/bunker specs have access to and also in general rework ALOT of the classes defense, but the game oculd need more roles, especially support roles beside healing/tanking.
Or make condition specs more about damage and less about control, like improve condition damage but reduce the amount of chills/cripples/weakness etc they have access to.”

It is quite unfair to say this while power weapons like the warrior axe, warrior greatsword, warrior mace offhand, warrior hammer,ranger sword… are all multi-purpose weapons. You put the blame on conditions while power weapons are equally guilty on what you accuse to be a problem.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

It’s all about telegraphing. The vast majority of conditions are either applied through autos or though poorly telegraphed attacks, which makes dodging them far less effective. This in turn makes them have an edge over direct damage in PvP/WvW, where somewhat greater direct damage is split into several attacks that are telegraphed based on potency while conditions are spread somewhat evenly over less telegraphed attacks.

It’s a bit logical that condition are less telegraphed since you can always cleanse after you are hit so it’s fair in a way. It’s like having two chances the first one is your dodge/block/… and the other one is your cleanse.

Vuh.1328:

Tim.6450:

I’m not sure if cc + condi-damage is really a problem: a lot of weapons are multi-purpose. example:
warrior greatsword: damage+mobility+minor debuff
warrior hammer: damage+cc
warrior mace offhand: debuff+cc
ranger sword: damage+mobility+evades
…
The reason why condition weapons do that sometimes on the same ability is because they have a slot reserved for a bit more power based move. example:
necromancer scepter: feast of corruption
necromancer staff: necrotic grasp
warrior sword: final thrust
mesmer staff: phantasmal warloc
…
This filled weapon slot with power moves allows the for a hybrid playstyle.

And hybrid playstyles are the curse of balanceing problems.
Especially when it comes to 2 different damageing types, i’m all fine with weapon sets being say mobility+damage, or control damage(alth othe damage should be lower then)
or hybrid damagehealing like in some other games which makes it really hard to balance propperly

Indeed hybrid playstyles are more difficult to handle but they give the game more depth. But that was not my point with my previous post: you can not say that hybrid abilities are condition specific if every weapon in this game is multi purpose.

I’m not sure if cc + condi-damage is really a problem: a lot of weapons are multi-purpose. example:
warrior greatsword: damage+mobility+minor debuff
warrior hammer: damage+cc
warrior mace offhand: debuff+cc
ranger sword: damage+mobility+evades
…
The reason why condition weapons do that sometimes on the same ability is because they have a slot reserved for a bit more power based move. example:
necromancer scepter: feast of corruption
necromancer staff: necrotic grasp
warrior sword: final thrust
mesmer staff: phantasmal warloc
…
This filled weapon slot with power moves allows the for a hybrid playstyle.

Snow.2048:

@Tim, First off, thanks for clearing up what you meant. I think I get it now, and it is an excellent point. These stats can certainly act as a ballast to allow for enabling certain skills. While my first thought when I read this was “Why not remove the ballast and simply strengthen and weaken the different sides of the equation until it is balanced?” But you pointed out exactly why its not so simple. Too much weakening and it becomes pointless or worthless. Too much strengthening and there will be a power creep threatening to consume the world. Or something.

Yes this what I meant with my post.

But after weighing it a bit, I don’t think it will be so drastic. If the stealth is over performing, lessen the stealth heal relationship (currently stealth can heal and can be activated at a heal) or lessen the stealth damage relationship. Same thing is already done in some invulnerability scenario’s (stealth =/= invulnerability), their ability to attack is removed, thus the damage invulnerability relationship is altered. These are of course not all balanced that way, but thats an active balance issue, so I’ll leave it for now.

Again from a balance point of view you are right, this will be balanced. But from a diversity point of view your treading into dangerous waters: you are moving the classes closer towards each other. By lessening the stealth heal relationship you would move stealth closer towards death shroud (death shroud does not allow healing at the moment) or by lessening stealth damage relationship you are moving closer towards invulnerability. You could say that is not a problem because stealth is really different from death shroud or invulnerability, but we have more subtle differences as well.

Let’s take as an example stances vs elixer s vs distortion . Stances are long duration, one specific type of attacks (direct, condi or cc) and allows attacking. Elixer s is medium duration, all types of damage but doesn’t allow attacking. Distortion is short-medium (depending on how much you sacrifice) duration, all types of damage and allows attacking. You can see that by modifying in the way you suggested you will move those three closer to each other and you lose diversity between classes.

Also keep in mind that I now only took simple, small scale examples, but in large scales those diversity issues will make this even more complex.

Snow.2048:

If a thief choses the stealth route, it could cost him either his sustain or his damage. Which should be his choice, in the form of utilities and traits. Not saying you have stealth, so we’re taking a large chunk of your sustain, even if you weren’t planning on building around it. (evasion rears its ugly head here as well, but I’d rather see it standardized and allowing for traiting/choosing for extras [eg sword dagger get evasions + stealth, should have lower dps kind of idea (combo moves make this balancing harder than by other classes)

I don’t get what you try to say with this one. Isn’t that why we have only 70 trait points, only one healing skill slot, three utilities skill slot and on elite skill slot ?

Snow.2048:

@Tim, this is a view that I certainly can sympathize with. It isn’t wrong to see stats as a way of differentiating classes, however why not let the player choices and profession unique abilities be the shining light instead of just a flat stat raise.

I agree completely that the current state would be devastating if only this statistic change were to pass, but I’d like to pose you a question. Where would thief be right now without stealth/permabblinds/evasion? Like you stated, dead. But looking from the other way around, if the actives were gone but thieves had warrior stats, they’d still be dead. What’s that got to do with anything? Well doesn’t that just mean that base stats are an unnecessary complication?

A thief’s stealth was meant to be short from the beginning, it is too long now. And all the healing, etc in stealth would definitely be worth looking at, but this is true for all classes. However, reducing the parameters reduces complexity of the network, making it simpler to balance.

from a balance point of view your absolutely right : balancing is easier with less variables, from a diversity point your not. Less variables means less options means less diversity. Removing a variable from the game means flattening of other variables as well and this is what I tried to say with my example . I did not meant “stats are a way to diffirentiate proffesions” (I do aggree with this though, a thief wouldn’t be a thief without a high risk/ high reward playstyle) but as a counter-weight to allow our different play styles . If we were to remove said weight and rebalance the scales then yes we would have easier balance issues but our classes would be blander.

I believe bonus stats are neccessairy to allow different playstyles.
Let’s take an example to the thief :
The thief now has easily acces to stealth, if they had the same stats, thiefs would be horrible overpowered. So in order to balance this out they would have to
gut out stealth the stealth of the thief. So the thief lost his identity.

So it’s like the guardian greatsword #5?.

Brando.1374:

Tim.6450:

Brando.1374:

OP because there is really no counter to this trait, No way to stop it from being applied because you can dodge as much as you want but once we crit it will proc.
OP because its Mindless/skilless skill spam to be ‘good’

There is a counter to this trait, its called condition removal.

and 10s later its back on the target due to mindless skill spam. nice try though

and by then your sigil of purity is recharged.

Brando.1374:

OP because there is really no counter to this trait, No way to stop it from being applied because you can dodge as much as you want but once we crit it will proc.
OP because its Mindless/skilless skill spam to be ‘good’

There is a counter to this trait, its called condition removal.

I think healing shout greatsword warriors will benefit the most from zealot. A decent armor and health is already given so they don’t need vitality or toughness. vigorous shouts scales decently (0.9) and the precision combined with boon duration allows for big might stacks.

This “bug” is actually frquently used it in PvE especially by conditionmancers. Buildings and walls are easily destroyed this way. Even in pvp have I use it against the gates that guard the lord.

whyme.3281:

Doesnt that end in taking a cat for defensive builds, because it deals the most damage and a bear/dog/whatever for offensive builds, because it scales with my offensive stats?

I think you miss the idea of what I said. Let’s say you have 6000 stat points to give to a pet and X is 50% so the pet will have 3000 stat points spend depending on their type (cats in power/pre/critd, bears in power/ vit/tough,….). The ohter 3000 points will depend on the range. If the ranger ranger equips/trait zerker then the pet will gain power/pre/critd.

So A cat while equiping soldier gear will have more vitality and toughness but less precision and crit damage if you would wear berserker gear because 100%-X% of the stats scale with gear. A cat will always do more damage then a bear if you equip the same gear because of the preset X% percent of the stats.

whyme.3281:

Tim.6450:

whyme I aggree with most what you say but I do dissaggree with this one:

" for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values."
This will make it so that some pet will become useless depending on your build. Instead I suggest that 50% of the stats are preset depending on the type of pet and that the other 50% scales with the ranger.

Can you be more specific here? I was thinking in my post, that every pet has lets say 900 base stat for everything and health depending on pet type. The rest will get increases with every base point (no might etc.) the ranger gets.
Lets make some examples:

• A cat will scale very good with power and precision and gets lower benefits out of crit damage (ferocity) and vitality.
• A bear will scale good with defensive stats and probably as minor stats, power and healing power
• A spider will go for condition damage, duration and its minors will be precision and toughness.
• …..

The final numbers needs to be tweaked, maybe a fifth stat is needed, but I think you know what I mean.

If I understand you correctly, than you want the cats for example still have their high base damage and scale with condi damage and defensive stats (the rest). This woulndt change the current problem with those hybrid builds we have. Right now in PvP the only good ranger builds are tanky with cat (Tanky heal or tanky-condition). These builds completely destroys rangers balance, because they get 100% benefit out of their stats plus the full damage of the pet (30%+ of a berserker build). All this can be topped with spirits. Because he gets full benefit out of armor and condition stats compared to bad power scaling caused by the pet. And now try to balance this mess, with simple number tweaking, it’s impossible.

---

[added the point fix bugged skills, so that they work as intended. Some buggs are known for over a year now and were never touched]

Ok, the first part of argument ment that with your idea you pidgeon hole certain pets with certain gear sets/ traits because otherwise they would lose to much of their stats.

My idea was that every type of pet has a certain amount of base stats (50% was just a number) for instance the cat has X% of their stats like a zerker speck (more complex stat combinations can be used), the rest (100%-X%) will scale with the user but equally. Now about the tank issue, the cat will still do a higher amount of damage but it will not be ridiculous depending on the value of X.

Hello, Ihave an ele as an alt and this has bothered me for a quite a while so I will ask it on the forum:

Why do cantrips have such long cooldowns? Especially mist form and armor of earth but the others as well. They are not that OP, so why do they have such cooldowns? Do I miss some dangerous combination or something?

whyme I aggree with most what you say but I do dissaggree with this one:

" for example, every pet has 2 major, 2 minor stats, which he scales good with and the rest stay at base values."
This will make it so that some pet will become useless depending on your build. Instead I suggest that 50% of the stats are preset depending on the type of pet and that the other 50% scales with the ranger.

I’m afraid that we will get another nerf for when the other players will realize that they removed the crit chance from dhuumfire allowing dire or carrion geared necromancers applaying burn at a faster rate.

kyubi.3620:

Why so much hate on minions…

because players see minions (and any other kind of pet) as easy mode: the minions do the playing while the player is doing nothing (which is totally not true). The only way to solve this is to allow better response times to minions which would allow better/skillfull play.

MastaNeenja.1537:

You’re nerfing Vigorous Precision why? I understand that this is also happening to Mesmers as well, so it’s an across the board approach, but again I just don’t follow why this needs to happen. Dodging is a core mechanic of this game, so players are going to dodge. I don’t think taking boon duration to compensate for this makes sense either. We already have a hard nerf to our over all damage in the works, taking away from our damage potential to get boon duration up isn’t going to happen either. Dodging may trivialize some PVE bosses but it’s a matter of life and death in other scenarios especially PVP play. I would think the problem lies within making the PVE bosses more challenging.

While dodging is a core mechanic in the game, it should not be so easy to get 100% vigor uptime with a 5 point minor trait, that is way too good for a 5 point minor trait.

phaeris.7604:

http://i.imgur.com/gPc5cN3.jpg

This here is why base stat differences are an issue. He has 25 stacks of blood lust, but really. Where is the compromise in this build?

well you lost the ability to receive 20% crit chance to fury and probably you also lost the ability to receive at least 6 stacks of might.

Luke.4562:

The right chance would be a GrandMaster trait allowing healings under DS.
Or a balanced combination, maybe a 100% of siphons and a 50% of other healings.
It would fit and make potentially competitive bunker builds and promote build variety.

The real point is Siphoning as it works now isn’t eally worth, it should need a smart rework; it doesn’t boost the Dps that much and gives some low sustain which works in Pve when you can stay after a target for prolonged time.

So a necromancer has to trait to get something that every other class gets by default how fair is that? Necromancers should heal in death shroud no matter what build: every other class does when they use their defense.

Travis the Terrible.4739:

Let’s be honest here. Warriors were complete trash at the start of game for sPvP.

Was it because of their options or because of their play? Because I have seen a period where many warriors ran greatsword+frenzy+Bull’s charge which is quite stupid since you could easily dodge/block it.

draugris.9872:

Petitions are not allowed on the forums so maybe you get infracted.

Dhuumfire was the most stupid idea of the balancing team for the necro and should be removed. We need something to be done on the mobility front.

But we will never get it, the devs believe that we should be as slow as snails. It even gets worse when you realize that we have three incompatible movement speed increases.

I remember the tequatl fights when it was LS. Desolation was swarmed with guesters, it was so bad that desolation players themselves guested to a low population server.

Karl McLain.5604:

Necromancer:
One of our goals with the past few balance updates has been to add counterplay to various skills that lacked telegraphs. With necromancer, we’re changing the way that Dhuumfire is activated – allowing players the opportunity to react. This will also allow the necromancer to carefully plan their burning application. We’ve also adjusted some values for Minion Master builds based on player feedback.

• Putrid Explosion: This ability is no longer unblockable.
• Training of the Master: Reduced the damage increase to minions from 30% to 25%.
• Dhuumfire: This trait has been changed so that it will make Life Blast inflict 3 seconds of burning with a 10 second recharge.
• Vampiric Master: Reduced the effectiveness of this trait by 10%. The healing portion of this trait will now scale with the necromancer’s healing power stat.

I think the changes to dhuumfire will result in making the trait usefuless since:

- life force generation for the conditionmancer is very low.
- death shroud is a big loss of dps for the conditionmancer.
- it also forces the player to flash in and out of death shroud sacrificing to much defense of the conditionmancer.

I instead suggest to switch dhuumfire with withering precision and switch terror with lingering curse. It will make the player choose between terror and dhuumfire.

I also find the justification for the changes to the minion master build a bit unfair. You say that it is based on player feedback but the necromancers (at least I have) themselves haven’t seen a single post on their profession forum about it. It leaves us without a right to defend ourselves against (biased) opinions .

kyubi.3620:

So I suggest that 30~75% of the pet’s stats are predetirmined and that the the rest should scale (some stats are an exception like condition and boon duration).

This is what ive been talking about since the start. They need to give pet some predetermined stat and the rest is determined by player gear (aka the same as with GW 1 pet nature customisation but made via your equipment, the same bear may be dealing better damage or having better survivability depending on its nature so why not make the pet customisable trought gear?)

First if it looks like I’m stealing your idea it is not my intention. I only saw reduce in base damage but make it scale( I may have missed something so if I did sorry): it implied (in my view at least) that every pet would be a blank slate with the same starting stats. I meant with my statement that the bear would still be tankier then the moa and such things.

Second why do you limit it to gear? Trait lines are an important source of stats which define your build. Gear stats alone can give you the wrong impression. Also food does not benefit the pet in your case.

I think you are compairing the pet with the wrong thing. The pet is class mechanic first, AI second (in my opinion at least). In this belief, I think that the ranger pet should scale with it’s user since all other class mechanics don’t. Though I don’t believe that it should scale completely since every pet is different. So I suggest that 30~75% of the pet’s stats are predetirmined and that the the rest should scale (some stats are an exception like condition and boon duration).

On a side note: this doesn’t mean other pets should scale as well.

Proven.2854:

So, to the above three posters, why not just lower Retaliation damage further? Or you know, since this would be a major gamewide change, also look into all of those extra condition damage applications on power damage skills that also cause problems in PvE?

If we lower retaliaton damage more then it will become even more useless in PvE.

Necrotize.2974:

Or make it have different effects related to conditions based on your attunement at all health levels.

Water-Cleanse a condition every few seconds in water, activates when swapping to water then one condition every say 5 seconds thereafter
Fire- Conditions applied grant buffs when applied to you in fire for a brief time. Bleed/Poison=Regen, Weaken=Fury, Cripple/Immob=Swiftness, Burn/Chill=Might
Would have to be short durations for the boons applied obviously, but it would greatly synergize with ele’s boon generation

Air- Reduce condition duration by x%. Probably something like 50%

Earth- Reflect conditions applied within say 600 range, meaning if someone is in range and applies a bleed, they will also receive a bleed.

Earth is op. I suggest a 10%~25% chance modifier.

Bacon.4918:

For PvP I agree 3 seconds is enough burning (2 seconds was fine actually). However, for PvE (and WvW to some extent) the extra duration is very nice “burst” for condition builds. Burning is vital because things die very fast in these modes and necromancers often wont be able to stack enough bleeds to do decent dps in these situations making the 4 second burn very useful to me.

Well Anet is trying to change the dps meta so perhaps this won’t be a bother in the future.

Spicyhash.7605:

I guess it’s maybe “balanced” because traits that give damage boosts if a target has conditions or boons on them (i.e. target the weak) don’t apply to condition damage, only physical.

I’m pretty sure that is already so.

Conncept.7638:

Tim.6450:

Conncept.7638:

I really don’t think its a class balance issue at all, it’s a system issue. The condition and boon systems are both invisible and lack any play to counterplay beyond slotted hard counters.

conditions have counters beside thier hard counters avaidable that aren’t slotted on any class:

-runes of hoelbrak
-runes of melandru
-sigil of purity
-sigil of generosity
-runes of the sunless
-…

Those are hard counter slotted on every class, that isn’t better that’s worse! Not only do people have less choice on what abilities they can slot in a condition meta they have less choice on what stats they can pick because they have to consider anti-condition measures over stats.

So you want to be able to deal with conditions without sacrificing nothing no skill slots, no stats ? Sorry but this game won’t work that way if you want to counter something you will have to sacrifice for something else.

Maybe instead of leaps we should receive reverse-teleports ( teleport an enemy to the necromancer)? We would still be a low mobility class but we can keep our enemies in combat.

Heizero.9183:

Condition damage counters:
Blocks(Still damages if applied)
Invuln(still damages if applied)
Blind(same as first two)
Dodging
Condition Removal
Condition Immunity (Berserker Stance/Automated Response)
Total:6

Don’t forget:
Positioning
Condition duration reduction (runes of melandru, runes of hoelbrak,….)
Total:8

A question about cleansing ire if you take it with burst mastery, do you get condition for the netto removed adrenaline or for the supposed removed adrenaline?

I think it would be imbalanced if the latter was true.

Carighan.6758:

@Aberrant, the problem is that there’s no way to buff conditions right now. The amount of Expertise one can get is crazy, and as a result conditions have to individually and baseline be quite weak.

Nerf the food to 10%, at best. Cap the total at 30% or so. And then buff conditions baseline, remove the stack limits, etc.

cap the total to 30% percent? there are traits which give 50% bonusses, runes can give up to 45% bonusses. No 100 % is the absolute minimum.

korelg.7862:

if the HP problem is about PvE, just make mobs hit a fixed % of your max health, problem solved

Then why would you gear for toughness and vitality? By doing this you eliminate 2 stats from PvE.

Minors:
- Parasitic bond: The heal on kill trait is quite useless since you can’t reallly control it, together with death shroud makes this a weak trait.

- Death into life: It’s a stat boost not a great one but an alright one.

- Siphoned power: very situational and quite weak as well since necro’s don’t like to be hit at all.

Majors:

I – Death’s embrace: Ok trait but not that great.

II – Spiteful talisman: The 20% cooldown is great but the range increase puzzles me since there isn’t a main hand weapon that can be used at the same range.

III – Spiteful removal: It’s a good trait. Ver usefull if you don’t want to rely on consume conditions when you walk out of combat with conditions.

IV – Signet mastery: It would be a good triat if signets were better.

V – Spiteful spirit: 3 seconds of retalition when entering death shroud? Make it 5 and it would be usefull.

VI – Reaper’s might: a very good trait for DS builds.

VII – Spiteful marks: useless.

VIII – Axe training: Very good trait.

IX – Training of the master: Good minion trait.

X – Chill of death: A good trait but maybe we could add an extra trigger requirement like the enemy having at least one boon.

XI – Dhuumfire: Vey good for the conditionmancer but only them.

XI – DhuumfireV2: Junk, Death shroud is a damage loss for the conditionmancer, life blast even more .

XII – Close to death: A strong trait maybe even a bit OP (20% is a lot).

Oren.1736:

frans.8092:

Oren.1736:

Condi is supposed to be supplemented damage,

Really? Then why does it have a stat on gear?

The question is why does it have OTHER stats on gear, and there is only 1 stat related to condi damage, well not much of a question, more of an answer to you.

well let’s take the two gear sets that I believe are the most condition based namely rabid(prec/rough/codi damage) and dire(vit/tough/condi damage) as an example:

-condition damage is straightforward so I will not discuss this.

- precision is used to create more stacks of condition in combination with traits like barbed precision and dhuumfire and sigils like sigil of the earth.

- toughness and vitality are used to make sure you can survive the duration of your conditions, what’s the point of having a condition that does damage during 20
seconds if you can’t survive those 20 seconds.

I don’t get this 40% condition food hate, direct damage gets 50% crit damage on default.

Dadnir.5038:

Also I’m against the idea of being healed through DS, It would be a totally unskilled gameplay while being sustained by dancing in and out deathshroud is a bit more rewarding for active gameplay.

I disaggree the necromancer is the only class that has such restrictions for their only defense. Stances, bocks, evades, stealth,… allows someone to be healed when they are defending. It should be the same for. The only thing that comes even remotely close is the offensive skill quickening zephyr but this an offensive skill.

I feel that spirits should buff pets it’s only fair since they separated the dps of the ranger between player and pet.Why should someone else get the full 10% percent dps and the ranger only a part of it. The same for protection ,swiftness, protection and heal. Burning is the only one I can understand but the pet has low condition damage so no problem.

there is a cap for condition duration it’s 100%.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

I’m mostly wondering why my well of corruption isn’t a corruption spell..
makes sense right?

well of corruption doesn’t has a negative effect for the user.

I aggree that the necromancer needs some improvement to it attrition capabilities (more specifically sustain) but I think a total reconstruction of the class is too muc.h I think we can achieve more with smaller changes at the right place. So I suggest the following:

-let healing go through death shroud and make it possible to revive in it as well
-buff vampiric and vampiric precision but add an icd of 1/2~3/4 s
-remove/ merge a grandmaster trait in death magic and give something really defensive
-remove/merge the minion related minor traits in death magic and give something defensive

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

well, i believe this is working as intended. not broken or overpowered.
i.e. this is warriors’ specialty.

since day 1, warrior have the most access to personal stability, but only if they equipped those utility skills. or elite.

balanced stance 8 seconds
dolyak signet 8 seconds
rampage 20 seconds

that is all.
boon duration and sure footed may increase a bit.

yeah i think they are fine.

and boons can be removed, stripped, etc.

you are forgetting last stand and signet of rage + lyssa on a 48 or 60 second cooldown

this could be a good start:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/professions/

no, ‘on death’ traits should stick with clones, because there is need for counterplay. You can counter phantasm by killing them , you can counter ‘on death’ by not killing them (confusing combatant,staff clones and sharper images are a problem but not that big). If you were to combine phantasm with strong ‘on death’ traits they would be almost impossible to counter since you would have to kill them and not kill them at the same time.

I aggree with what you say , I also find the running mode on the champion clockwork a great idea: it gives a need for chill/cripple and immobize. The fact that it is immune during the mode itself allows for a bit more stratgic fighting. The spawning of different type of mobs (big group of small, a champion, some veterans and some smalls) is also very good allowing different play styles to flourish.

But this fight isn’t flawless, one thing that annoys me the most is the random teleport to the platforms: couldn’t they have made 5 smaller teleport field so you can coordinate the players a bit more. I also find it a bit sad that you can’t help the other platforms: it would be nice you could help your neighbor after you have finished your boss (it doesn’t even have to be by fighting the boss , a (de)buffing turret would be enough) .

All in all it was a good fight and thank you Anet for it.

will we ever be able to heal , revive, stomp, … in death shroud if not why?