I like your suggestion of:
Capping the amount of life-force you can lose to a set max rate per second no matter how many people are attacking you while in Death Shroud. That would give a closer approximation of the invulnerability/avoidance mechanics that other classes get.
Attacking a Necromancer would still cause them to have to exit Death Shroud sooner than they would unattended, but would help them greatly to survive the current behavior of mass focus firing a Necromancer the moment they are identified as such.
A hopefully simple way of doing this might include just two different degen rates while making the Necromancer technically invulnerable while in Death Shroud, one for not being attacked during the degen tick period, and one for being attacked during the degen tick period.
PROVIDED that the following addition is made:
The amount of overflow damage from deathshroud to the necro’s regular health will not exceed the max “under attack” degen rate that you are proposing.
To illustrate:
Assume a necro with 20,000 health and no points in Soul Reaping. Their deathshroud will also have 20,000 “health” if I’m correct in assuming that the recent fixes to deathshroud now make it equal 100% of the necro’s regular health.
For the purposes of this example, let’s further assume that the base degen rate of deathshroud is 5% of max per second and 10% of max per second when taking damage (but only for attacks which exceed 10% of the maximum potential life force).
Now picture a necromancer in deathshroud with only 5% life force remaining. They are hit for 10,000 damage. However, per the OP’s suggestion that the necro will have a capped life-force-loss-per-second when under attack and my suggestion that this be set to 10% of maximum life force, the necro will only take 2,000 damage:
Necro takes a 10,000 point hit.
10,000 points exceeds 10% of the necro’s max potential life force pool.
20,000 life force pool x 10% max loss per second from attacks = 2,000.
The original 10,000 damage attack now becomes a 2,000 damage attack.
20,000 × 5% life force remaining = 1,000 points of deathshroud “health”.
The first 1,000 points of this damage will be applied to the life force pool since the necro only had 1,000 points left. This knocks the necro out of deathshroud. The remaining 1,000 points of damage are then applied as “overflow” to the necro’s normal health.
It will NOT be the case that the necro absorbs 1,000 points of that 10,000 damage with their life force and the remaining 9,000 points spills over to damage the necromancer directly.
This is a compromise I’d be willing to live with. The whole “damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.” without any modifications has got to go, though.
TL;DR: Simply make deathshroud function similar to Protective Spirit from GW1; cap life force degen at 10% of max per second when damage taken exceeds this amount. The new damage overflow nerf for deathshroud remains in effect, but the amount of overflow damage taken is only that amount left over after having decreased it to 10% of max life force and subtracted whatever life force was still remaining in the necro’s deathshroud.
