On Scourge design, from Necro vet.

This is a response to a reddit post I made. I thought I'll paste it here as it summarizes half a year of Scourge for me, based on my own experiences with it and watching gameplay of other/discussing decently skilled people.

I present you, the Scourge design from PoV of pvp necro playing since launch:

• It's yet another elite specialization for Necromancer with a skill floor of a wheelchair ramp. But if the Reaper's ramp is at least sometimes a steeper one, Scourge's ramp is downwards one with handrails on both sides and safety net at the bottom. A lot of the necromancer players would welcome something with more outplay potential or advanced gameplay because we haven't seen that since Cele Necro or maybe even as far as pre-Dhuumfire Terrormancer.

• Immobile shades double down on both Necro's teamfight pressure (which was it's main strength already) and it's lack of open field solo capability&mobility (shades are immobile and terrible for chasing in 1v1).

• It lacks from the visual standpoint.

• Since shades require LoS and scourge being close for balancing purposes, the potential for clever placements around the area is minimized. "Puppet master" feeling the Devs were going for isn't felt at all.

• It didn't bring anything interesting to PvE since it's just more or less placing a shade at the boss and pressing desert shroud off cd, other sand skills are optional. Epidemic can make it a bit more fun for cleaving two non-stacked targets but so far such encounters are niche.

• Since the amount of sand skills you can cast is directly related to LF pool and it's based on set amount, not percentage, Vitality continues to be an invaluable stat for Necro forcing amulets with Toughness instead of it (toughness being a scalling defense which Necro always lacked) even further out of the range of options than for Reaper and Core.

• It's good that the idea of Life Force as a resource has finally made it into Necromancer after years of pleas, but LF gain hasn't been adjusted at all. The result is Scourge running into "rich man, poor man" even harder than Reaper and Core, being even more snowbally than both. Nearby deaths transform directly into more spammy playstyle and more damage. In WvW/open world pvelands life force resource management doesn't exist since all the deaths fuel your spam with no breaks or caps attached. If you start winning, your snowball potential only grows and it grows geometrically. Meanwhile, without nearby deaths, losing and dependant only on LF generation from weapons you are often too starved.

• Myself and many others were rather excited when Scourge was announced as a support-focused specialization (since support Necro in gw1 was a big thing). Today it has minimal amount of support and what's left is being nerfed as a ricochet of having "sub-theme" of massive AoE corruption which - surprise, surprise - has taken over. If it was a support with less pressure then arguably Shades wouldn't be as cancerous and require more careful placement (so they affect allies).

• Scourge's traits don't spice up the elite specialization at all. Minors are boring +stat passives and majors are, for the most part, very basic design with little creativity that don't foster any player-shade or shade-shade relation at all which could potentially add depth to shade placements. The only fun one (Feed from Corruption) is outclassed by the other two grandmasters and takes collateral damage every patch (corruption nerfs) even though it sees no use.

• But hey, at least there's some skill involved in managing your Shades, right? They don't cover a big area and have at least some play with your minor traits. Sadly, even here we can't escape sidewheels for our kid's bicycle in form of Sand Savant (big shade) - a trait that negates the little skill of managing profession mechanic Scourge has left and makes already boring minor traits irrelevant, removing gameplay from them as well. And since doubling size of our shades, reducing their cooldown and increasing target count (all in one trait) is so good you will in practice do a lot more damage with big shade than other dedicated damage trait - due to the fact that hitting someone with your sand skills becomes more than twice as easy.

Came out as a mild rant but it should probably be one. Trust me, if I could play the old Terrormancer competitively instead of this piece of shit design, I'd switch in a heartbeat as would many others. Current Scourge is fun for neither enemy nor the necro player.

I would accept all the bullshit mechanics if it looked gorgeous. I think i wasted my money. Meanwhile firebrand and mesmer animations look like from another game compared to scourge and necro core.

Top traits could have been area and barrier focusedMiddle traits could have been all about applying more condiTotally should have made the bottom traits give up shades for a true shroud while making you strong for converting allowing proper use of Feed from Corruption

I like you find that its the only real interesting trait in scourge's kit and it feels like it can never be utilized for 1 in pve most enemies dont have enough boons to make use of itIn pvp it forces you to use base shades are are considerably less effective which limit the whole elite spec. They should have known that small shades were never going to work even at this point the small amount of people who use the small shades and when they do its usually for demonic lore.

True...

Pretty much, yeah.

This is why I liked power reaper prior to it getting gutted; you could outplay people pretty hard, and had great resource management, and it was really engaging to play.

It's been similarly turned into a stack'n'spam F1->Faceroll->F1->2->2->2->2->2->2 design.

Pretty good post imo.