Contradictory design philosophy Shroud & Life force

A little while ago I made a post about how life force should be changed to better reflect the design philosophy that the devs originally intended for the profession and made a few statements about the wildly swingy mechanic that life force actually is in practice. Since I was at work at the time I couldn't go into great detail on the issues that is clear to anyone who's spent any amount of time on the necromancer. I'm not saying the mechanics don't technically work, because they do and they can be great. But as a mechanic it can ask far too much from the player in some situations and be the most potent passive energy mechanic in the game. And we've seen this in WvW and PvE open world but in more controlled settings like PvP or raids the mechanic is either burt or bust. Which contradicts the attrition that the profession was designed around. The Now that's just the flaw with life force.

Shroud on the other hand has its own set of problems. First off shroud is what we call a parasitic mechanic. So what does that mean? What is a parasitic mechanic and are their other examples of parasitic mechanics in order games we can point to? Absolutely! So phrase was originally coined by Mark Rosewater(to my knowledge) referring to a mechanic that only works with itself and doesn't have external synergy. When it would only work with other things in that set. What I am using it to mean is a mechanic that actively hinders external synergy with team play. Which Shroud absolutely does. Because you can't be healed in shroud you end up being unable to benefit from allies trying to heal you. Before this was even worse because if you would go down necromancer originally would enter shroud as a replacement mechanic. This harms team synergy. Now a mechanic doesn't need to combo with everything for it not to be parasitic. This terms is reserved for mechanics that actively hinder synergy. And shroud absolutely does. Guild Wars 1 had another Parasitic mechanic. It was called stripping if I remember correctly. It was a mechanic exclusive to the Dervish that some of their more powerful skills would strip one of their own enchantments off themselves in order to gain a bonus effect. Why this was a problem was because of beneficial allied mechancs such as monk enchantments primarily or Order of pain which wouldn't be worth it in the long run. So The devs felt it necessary to change how that mechanic worked and created an entirely new type of enchantment that only the dervish could apply in order to prevent itself from ruining its external synergy with allies.

I need to break this up a bit, as there are more issues with shroud. The mechanic has a passive damage reduction with may players don't realize it has, and I didn't when I first started playing because it isn't obvious to new players. This damage reduction probably shouldn't be added on top of the life but the devs might feel its necessary in order to balance off its passive degeneration. However, I would much rather have stronger external defensive options than increasing the passive strength shroud. Having more active defensive abilities that we need to plan makes sense on top of this mechanic to buffer some damage to really really push the limits of how this mechanic could work. Now, for those who are scared I'm asking to nerf the necromancer. I'd have to say to you that this isn't the purpose of the post. I'm trying to create a situation in which we don't stay stuck in the balancing limbo we've been in for the entire life span of this game. And some luxuries will need to be sacrificed.

Further, Shroud locks you out of your own utility skills. Putting aside everything else this is one of the biggest issues with shroud in my opinion. And there is no reason for it. Its a hold over from the alpha design of how the mechanic worked. And it should have been changed a long time ago. This makes the mechanic incredibly insular as well as parasitic. Shroud become incredibly predictable in this regard and has been countered out of the meta several times before. It reduces options and makes this sort of attrition style of play the devs envisioned even less viable. If nothing else was changed, this is the bare minimum that needs it bad. Scourge has felt like a freedom because its doesn't lose all of their options when using their defensive skills. If I had to describe this, I'd describe it as shackles.

Solutions:

Of course these problems are not a lost cause. Each of them could be fixed. And the necromancer could be freed to grow and develop in its own identity.

• Regenerating Life force: The first solution I have proposed before was switching shroud from a strictly death trigger mechanic to a slow regenerating mechanic that occasionally gains benefit from deaths. Its strange that this is even a thing in GW2 when Arena net tried this in GW1 with disastrous consequences. The necromancer has a mechanic in GW1 called soul reaping which used to trigger on all deaths around her at any given time. Eventually this had to be tuned down to 3 deaths every 15 seconds. I'd suggest this here. Life force regenerating 1-2% every second in and out of combat and starting at 0% still could really benefit them. Having the on death trigger only giving them a max of 15% every 15-25 seconds could go a long way to preventing future updates from letting the necromancer get too out of hand in WvW again. This lets the necromancer be less aggressive in situations like raids and PvP and motivates them to play slower rather than that burst or bust mentality we often see with this supposed attrition mechanic.
• Healing in shroud: You should be able to be healed by others while in shroud. This prevents it from being a parasitic mechanic. If the mechanic needs to decay quicker in order to balance this, that shouldn't be a problem with the next solution. Since the mechanic should be treated as purely a defensive mechanic. Not an offensive one. But the buffer is important. I feel that Reaper's shroud's current decay rate would be quick enough.
• Decouple the Shroud skills and Shroud: Continuing with the theme of keeping shroud as a defensive mechanic exclusively it should be part of tool kit on the necromancer's F1-5 bar as opposed to what it is now. Making shroud only a sort of superior barrier would go a long way for its usability. Entering shroud wouldn't be a free CC party for your opponents. But because the skills are decoupled this would mean your other F abilities would also be eating from your life force which could leave you with more meaningful options. Sacrifice offense for defense? The choice becomes more meaningful as opposed to the current option sort of gives you the worst of both worlds. For a good example of this design philosophy we can look to another profession. Mesmer. The mesmer's shatter mechanic lets you use your clones to sacrifice them for offense, control or defense. And choosing one takes the other option away from you for a time. This change would be like that on a larger scale as it would be incremental sacrifices which great necromancer players could really sink their teeth into raising the skill cap while not making them too daunting for new players to pick up.
• Traits care about Fskills and spending life force as opposed to shroud: Pushing the focus away from shroud and more to the way life force is used would be a great change for the problems we see with necromancer traits now. Which are so insular with shroud a few of them don't function well with Scourge at all. By pushing the focus on spending life force and specific skills could allow for interesting design choices and give players more to consider. What if their was a trait that made life force skills cost half as much life force to use but now made them also cost life? What if they could make them cost more but make them stronger in some way?
• Free up weapon's identity: Some of the weapons of necromancer have the soul purpose of generating life force for the necromancer in the eyes of the community. Dagger and staff both fit this. This forces the necromancer in order to maintain their defenses they need to be the aggressor in combat. They can't afford to stop attacking in much of their play style which even though this adds complexity to combat, it limits the mental space and reactions a necromancer player can afford because they have to be this hyper aggressor and can't be the responder. This isn't always the case currently, but it is typical enough. I'm not saying remove life force completely from weapons, but limit its generation a bit in favor of the regeneration and adjust them to have a real identity. If Staff could become an actual ranged support and control weapon like it always should have been as opposed to its awkward use now. Or if dagger could be a strange life stealing weapon that awakens its power for a short time when you start bleeding could really add new flavor and design to them. Letting necromancer experience more flavor and better game play.

There is plenty more i could talk about with this topic. But I want to keep it simple for the time being since I'm firmly in the camp that necromancer needs a major overhaul. And although some of these problems I mentioned above sound small, they are not and require a lot of reworking to function as a more interactive and synergistic couple of mechanics.

I strictly disagree with two of your statements here.

First is the claim that shroud should be a strictly defensive mechanic. Anyone worth their salt in the PvP community will state that duality and versatility in skills is what defines a successful kit. This is something that's universal to nearly every class mechanic in the game, because the process of using resources and allowing for skilled play patterns is based on the fundamental principle that the decision tree at any given time should have many branches, and "skilled play" is making the best decision at any time. More branches = more possibilities = more interesting gameplay and more potential for success.

The other is that traits should absolutely not focus on individual skills/life force. This is kind of how the original, pre-launch soul reaping/death shroud concept worked and it was HORRIBLE. It's also the same issue the thief and the initiative system has today in respects to trying to balance a resource when it's constantly being affected by traits. It creates a constant state of over-dependence on only a few options and massively cuts build diversity. We saw this a little bit with Soul Reaping, but that was much more high-level; it came down to "If you want to play a shroud-oriented build, take this line," whereas the thief right now is "Unless you want to play SA+Deadeye D/P+Rifle Permastealth specifically, you need Trickery because the class becomes immensely weaker without it."

Decoupling shroud skills from shroud is an absolutely massive undertaking and would completely change the necromancer's identity. I'm not sure if I can get on board with this one, because there's just not enough detail listed. This would require changing quite literally every single trait, weapon skill, all of its elite specs, and likely even utility skill the necromancer has access to. It'd be equivalent to simply asking to delete necro and start over from scratch. It also ends up homogenizing the class a lot. How is it much different from mesmer/guardian in its skill spread and how does this get balanced? How is this resource managed and what are the costs and impacts like? How is it different from an OOC version of adrenaline? How is it then thus comparably weaker than burst skills since the warrior only has access to one at a time and depends on in-combat resource acquisition? I see this as being a potential balancing nightmare worse than even the current shroud. A lot of problems with current DShroud could be solved with some QoL in some formats and are exacerbated by the nuances/differences in others, like Dire/TB gear making necros too tanky in WvW while being squishy in sPvP and the lack of early/starting LF making the profession snowbally and inconsistent/focused too much early in the matches.

Continuing with the theme of keeping shroud as a defensive mechanic

This is my opinion but, for me that's the major issue of the necromancer. Keeping it as a defensive mechanism is what shackle the necromancer. This is the part of the necromancer that need to be reformed. And with barriers introduce in the game, fixing the defense of the necromancer (or I should say sustain, since necromancers have to outsustain their foe, enduring all hits) is but a trivial matter. It even answer your concern about the shroud reducing damage.

If we remove the 2nd life bar, the shroud can freely become a "weapon swap" that you can improve throught traits. Additionnally, there is no need anymore for it to lock you out of healing or your utility skills.

As for the defensive part of the necromancer there is few easy thing that can be done:

• Core shroud skill Life transfert can give an amount of barrier per foe hit instead of giving life force. This skill is design for survivability, it just put it up to date.
• Unholy Sanctuary can grant you barrier when you enter shroud and send you in shroud when you would have taken a deadly hit. Just keeping the purpose of the trait and traitline.
• Spectral armor and spectral walk can grant you an amount of barrier when hit just like they give you an amount of life force when hit.
• Spectral mastery could give you barrier on use of a spectral skill instead of giving life force.
• Augury of death could grant barrier per foe struck instead of leeching life.

With just this, the necromancer would pretty much be balanced without changing that much it's gameplay. Yes it would suck that glass canon build would lose quite a lot of survivability but a glass canon isn't meant to have a lot of survivability anyway.

After that come the scourge, with such change, the scourge survivability skyrocket which mean that there is a need to tune it down a bit.

• Sand shroud would lose it's base barrier. Remember, there is now a trait in death magic that make him have a barrier, sand shroud having it would be redundant.

Very few change done and everything fall into place already.

Now as it's done, we also need to tune done life fore gen because we wouldn't have necromancers that only stay in shroud (aka super sayan mode) for the whole fight in WvW.

Thus I'd suggest something pretty simple:

• When out of combat, the necromancer reap life force the same way as he does right now.
• When in combat, the necromancer gain a 10s "death halo" buff for each death around him, that stack in duration up to 5 time. When under the effect of the "death halo" buff, the necromancer regain a set amount of life force per second, This amount of life force would thus be affected by healing power and traits related.
• When living combat, the remaining duration of the buff is eaten and converted into life force instantly.

Now this could help fix death magic as well by focusing this traitline on "death halo". We could then:

• Change armored shroud to apply it's effects while under the effect of "death halo".
• Soul comprehension would have a direct effect on it increasing death halo LF gen by 20%.
• We could even imagin that one of this 2 minor traits allow minions to grant this buff when they die while you are in combat.
• We could change corruptor fervor to reduce incoming damage and condition damage while under the effect of "death halo".
• ... etc.

All this change the necromancer so that he become more in line with other professions, freeing himself of this parasitic mechanism (very well found!), even almost fixing death magic.

Wow, these are such long posts for an old person to read. I need more time to digest this much information. However, you three put a lot of effort into your replies so I thought to bump the post with this:

The "parasitic" Lily describes reminds me of an independent module with a simple interface. This type of thing might well be described as a special (independent) mechanic/feature/bandage. The problem with an independent module that does not comply with core mechanics is, well, just that. It becomes a "black box" that must be characterized by... let's call it behavioral testing and modeling.

@Lily.1935 said:in more controlled settings like PvP or raids the mechanic is either burt or bust. Which contradicts the attrition that the profession was designed around. The Now that's just the flaw with life force.

I don't want to disagree here. Rather, I would like to point out that Burst or Bust (a lovely alliterative expression, by the way, kudos for that!) is THE game. It's all competitive mode combat. ALL of it. That's GW2, it might as well be CALLED Burst or Bustcraft! Asking for a for a different system is like asking why more classes can't have stealth (I invite you to ponder, if you will, why JRR Tolkein gave the power of invisibility to the most powerful object in the world).

As long as we remember 'bursting' with condi works because bosses do not clear them. What I mean is that bosses in PvE do not convert condi to heals, transfer them to opponents, or clear them. This "meta" of condi-mean-nothin'' to bosses annoys me.

@"Anchoku.8142" said:As long as we remember 'bursting' with condi works because bosses do not clear them. What I mean is that bosses in PvE do not convert condi to heals, transfer them to opponents, or clear them. This "meta" of condi-mean-nothin'' to bosses annoys me.

I concur. It's half-thought-out - someone, somewhere, is surprised!

OP makes a lot of good points but I have a problem underlying all of them - it requires a major overhaul of the entire class. Everything from traits to weapon skills to elite specs will be fundamentally affected by those changes. Anet is very unlikely to do this.

I prefer to look at what shroud does successfully now (or in the past pre-nerf), identify those functions, and focus the rebalance around those functions. The first and most obvious is a survival tool. The second is to access shroud abilities - usually CC, or in the case of Reaper, it's burst damage. There's a "rotation effect" with shroud that I really like the feel of. Engage, use your basic cooldowns, pop shroud and use those skills, exit shroud and regen life force and spend CD's again, repeat. With good timing, you can weave in and out of shroud using all your cooldowns to the maximum effect. The result is spectacular, and the counterplay is obvious - interrupt the cycle in some way (burst damage works best, forcing them into shroud early). I don't think we should disrupt this core necro gameplay.

@Dadnir.5038As great as barrier seems to be on the surface level as a means to replace Death Shroud, it has a pretty big flaw in that barrier caps out at 50% of the target's max HP. This makes necro innately weaker in group environments because it can't benefit from barrier from other people. I think the fix is going to need to be a bit more nuanced.

@Svarty.8019 said:

@"Lily.1935" said:in more controlled settings like PvP or raids the mechanic is either burt or bust. Which contradicts the attrition that the profession was designed around. The Now that's just the flaw with life force.

To be honest, it's the case in virtually every skill-oriented PvP game and always will be. Otherwise you're just competing rotations and number-crunching for a winner unless someone messes up pretty tragically. "Burst" is at its core a fundamental part of PvP, because it defines taking advantage of a given situation and making conscious decisions to punish your enemy between its periods of strength, or understanding and baiting defenses to follow-through. To predict incoming burst and out-maneuver it or respond with counter-bursting. PvP can't really be skillful if both sides just slam rotations at each other until someone dies.

This is also the fundamental principle behind playing a more durable build in GW2: Sustaining though burst rotations and grinding the enemy down over time enough to out-damage their innate sustain versus your own.

Whether or not ANet has achieved that vision is entirely another story, however...

@"DeceiverX.8361" said:I strictly disagree with two of your statements here.

First is the claim that shroud should be a strictly defensive mechanic. Anyone worth their salt in the PvP community will state that duality and versatility in skills is what defines a successful kit. This is something that's universal to nearly every class mechanic in the game, because the process of using resources and allowing for skilled play patterns is based on the fundamental principle that the decision tree at any given time should have many branches, and "skilled play" is making the best decision at any time. More branches = more possibilities = more interesting gameplay and more potential for success.

The other is that traits should absolutely not focus on individual skills/life force. This is kind of how the original, pre-launch soul reaping/death shroud concept worked and it was HORRIBLE. It's also the same issue the thief and the initiative system has today in respects to trying to balance a resource when it's constantly being affected by traits. It creates a constant state of over-dependence on only a few options and massively cuts build diversity. We saw this a little bit with Soul Reaping, but that was much more high-level; it came down to "If you want to play a shroud-oriented build, take this line," whereas the thief right now is "Unless you want to play SA+Deadeye D/P+Rifle Permastealth specifically, you need Trickery because the class becomes immensely weaker without it."

Decoupling shroud skills from shroud is an absolutely massive undertaking and would completely change the necromancer's identity. I'm not sure if I can get on board with this one, because there's just not enough detail listed. This would require changing quite literally every single trait, weapon skill, all of its elite specs, and likely even utility skill the necromancer has access to. It'd be equivalent to simply asking to delete necro and start over from scratch. It also ends up homogenizing the class a lot. How is it much different from mesmer/guardian in its skill spread and how does this get balanced? How is this resource managed and what are the costs and impacts like? How is it different from an OOC version of adrenaline? How is it then thus comparably weaker than burst skills since the warrior only has access to one at a time and depends on in-combat resource acquisition? I see this as being a potential balancing nightmare worse than even the current shroud. A lot of problems with current DShroud could be solved with some QoL in some formats and are exacerbated by the nuances/differences in others, like Dire/TB gear making necros too tanky in WvW while being squishy in sPvP and the lack of early/starting LF making the profession snowbally and inconsistent/focused too much early in the matches.

What do you agree with than? Its easy to post about what you don't agree with its more difficult to state what you agree with. This is a major issue I have with the necromancer form were people point out only the things they don't like but not the things they do like. Which ultimately warps the devs perspective on the post thinking there is no consensus among our community. So I'd ask you to also talk about what you do like so we can get some positive feed back and changes.

Also, The duality you speak of is still very much there in my solution. You said you want it on shroud but why? There's no point in doing that. It can be on life force as opposed to shroud. Shroud can be pure defense while the other F abilities could be offense and control. I even gave an in game example of a profession that does this, all be it using a different mechanic. It doesn't take this away just makes the choice more meaningful for the player. Considering I also didn't mention reaper's shroud being changed as I feel it still needs some retooling as well, I'm still considering how to go about that.

As for the "Too much work" argument. Stop that. That shouldn't ever be justification for anything. You all keep bemoaning this and no changes will come. Stop that! Seriously. Its annoying and just not at all true. Anet did major overhauls on 4 different professions over the span of a year for GW1 with much larger overhauls than even this would be considering that one of them had close to 90% of their skills changed, their mechanic changed and a new mechanic. So no. It isn't too much work. Stop that!

The rest I don't really have feelings about to be honest, and are pretty irrelevant given what I mentioned; to perform the aforementioned, the entire profession would need to be thrown away and restarted from scratch. What's presented otherwise may or may not even matter by that point.

I just don't think your suggestions really change anything in terms of necro viability and won't make the class any more fun to play. The other mechanics are either resource-driven, come at a big cost like being forced into one weapon like ele/engi and using the additional skills as separate kits, or substantially cooldown-blocked like how Guard's F2/F3 virtues are on 30 and 40 second cooldowns respectively or mesmer's 10/25/38/50 second cooldown shatters. Part of the decision-making process of necro is knowing when to use shroud and budget the life force combined with it's cooldown. It's a hybrid approach to high cooldowns without resource and allows for lower cooldowns because the decision tree requires more understanding of fight tempo than responding with X to Y condition. Your proposal suggests making necro shroud skills effectively act as virtues if they're on a high cooldown (which removes the shroud build concept from the game which a lot of necros enjoy, and particularly does not accommodate for the design of the reaper at all), or strictly better versions of burst skills that are nearly always offensively-minded. By putting everything on a LF cost, you literally have pre-release necromancer. It was absolute trash. Total garbage. Shroud was a useless mechanic with no viability anywhere and honestly was really just not fun to play with. There was very little interaction or thought involved and it felt like just a strictly worse version of Guardian.

The duality is only half-there; the decision tree becomes vastly simplified as a consequence depending on various factors of current necromancer balance and the meta. The notion of timing shroud to retaliate hard during your opponents' offensive pressure/combo during their period of weakness is completely removed as well, which isn't always the case. A guardian can pop multiple virtues, a mesmer use BF while MW'ing, and so on. It becomes an even worse balance nightmare to try and balance necro around what effectively amounts to initiative + cooldowns + defense all bundled in one.

I've already pretty much laid out the easy solution that could be the basis of further changes in a number of threads and alluded to a few of them here.

• Remove Dire/TB from the game to unify the formats better.
• Nerf boon access and uptime to keep the identity of corruption strong but not overpowered and tweak scourge as needed.
• Give the necro some starting LF at the beginning of a sPvP match.
• Make the old Speed of Shadows trait (25% movespeed and 7s shroud cooldown) baseline for core necro and reaper.
• Tweak shrouds accordingly.

As far as the "Too much work" argument goes: Necro has had some of the highest amounts of attention paid to it by the developers since the beginning of the game. For better or for worse is another story, but for those who play other classes, there are builds, weapons, concepts, etc. that have been in desperate need of a re-design since the game launched. I've put six years into D/D power thief for example. It's needed a rework because it's been about as good in the PvP formats as necro currently is in raids since 2012. It took five years to get CnD down from 6 initiative to 5, and none of its shortcomings on the conceptual level have been addressed.

Initiative has been under-developed since a number of changes made in 2013; the fixes were "in the works" and they never happened.

That's ONE offhand weapon and ONE resource. Revenant still isn't even a complete class and that got release over two years ago. To pretend like a complete profession overhaul is reasonable from ANet is unfortunately just being unrealistic. MO himself has even come out and said in years' past they try to avoid reworks at all costs and go with simpler fixes. The necro at its core isn't poorly designed. A few numbers tweaks to reaper and it's good again. The problem is boons (scourge) and gear discrepancies (Dire/TB) which makes balancing it impossible without breaking it somewhere. Those two things are still going to persist regardless of what you change on necro.

"Too much work" is definitely a valid consideration. Anet is a business, and must by necessity balance cost vs benefit. The level of changes requested by the OP will require almost as much work as making an entire new class. There's no way Anet will do that without a paid expac. It's valuable discussion and helps people understand the mechanics, which is good, but when it comes to setting expectations it's important to ask for something attainable.

There is absolutely nothing contradictory about the relationship between Necromancer death shroud and life force. Gain life force to activate a shroud which consumes life force at a fixed rate; it's as straightforward as can be. There are, however, deep design flaws associated with how Necromancers generate life force as well as how the potential use of life force is extremely limited (all one does is passively spend it by pressing a button; Scourge has a somewhat more active way to spend life force, but it's brainlessly spammy, so it sort of detracts from any net positives). Point is, there is nothing wrong with the base functions of life force and its relationship with shroud usage; the issue is how life force is generated and how shallow the act of "spending" life force is.

This sort of stuff is why my core necro re-work advocates for a mechanic which smoothly separates LF generation from weapons and is full of LF threshold points which advocate for timing and LF management within a rotation rather than just using shroud time to blow 2-5 and then spam autos.

@"Rhyse.8179" said:"Too much work" is definitely a valid consideration. Anet is a business, and must by necessity balance cost vs benefit. The level of changes requested by the OP will require almost as much work as making an entire new class. There's no way Anet will do that without a paid expac. It's valuable discussion and helps people understand the mechanics, which is good, but when it comes to setting expectations it's important to ask for something attainable.

This is why the game will never get better and why its going to continue to decline.

@"Rhyse.8179" said:"Too much work" is definitely a valid consideration. Anet is a business, and must by necessity balance cost vs benefit. The level of changes requested by the OP will require almost as much work as making an entire new class. There's no way Anet will do that without a paid expac. It's valuable discussion and helps people understand the mechanics, which is good, but when it comes to setting expectations it's important to ask for something attainable.

Also you are extremely mistaken about that. I'm not asking them to make new skills and animations. This wouldn't take as much work as a new profession. Its quite a bit of work, but not much more physical work than the mesmer update. It would be more work, but again they've already done this multiple times in GW1. So it isn't a valid argument. Also don't give arena net excuses for letting a stagnant profession remain stagnant. You give them excuses they'll continue not to fix the problems. You have to think of it more in line of "I pay them to have the best online gaming experience possible. I'm not getting that, I have every right to demand change." not "Please anet gods. Grace us with your balance. If not, I understand. You're a business and I'm a lowly peasant." It isn't a good argument and you're going to need a far better one to convince me because its a business and they want my money. I haven't put any more money into the game in 4 months. Why? Because they WONT give me the changes we need. Because they WONT update the content I love. And because they keep pushing out high profit purchases that well make up for development costs. Which that's what Profit means. Its not breaking even, its a surplus. They're making far more than they're putting into it. So, if you make that absolutely terrible argument you are saying that you are perfectly fine with being taken advantage of. I'm not.

@Lily.1935 said:

@"Rhyse.8179" said:"Too much work" is definitely a valid consideration. Anet is a business, and must by necessity balance cost vs benefit. The level of changes requested by the OP will require almost as much work as making an entire new class. There's no way Anet will do that without a paid expac. It's valuable discussion and helps people understand the mechanics, which is good, but when it comes to setting expectations it's important to ask for something attainable.

I think you're missing the fact that in asking for the changes you're proposing, a profession-wide deep rework would be necessary for the profession to function and be cohesive. If not done, it just makes it worse than now pretty much across the board.

Your proposals would fundamentally change how the profession is played by their very nature. That requires a re-evaluation of every single component and interaction, design ideal, etc. of every skill, trait, weapon, and ability on the necromancer. You can't change fundamentals of design and say it's not a lot of work to balance it, and ANet is not a fast-moving company when it comes to making these kinds of changes. I'm not advocating for or promoting their behavior - I've stopped spending money on the game altogether because of it - but this isn't how they run their business and this game's been a sinking ship and will continue to be. If you want improvement, you need to ask for simpler tweaks, and to be honest, I've already also gone over why your proposals aren't going to benefit the necromancer as a whole and have mentioned that ANet has tried some of these things before and how big of miserable failures they were. If that's not enough to dissuade you to change your proposal, there's no point in discussing anything further because you're adamant on strictly being wrong due to sheer stubbornness.

@DeceiverX.8361 said:

@Lily.1935 said:

@"Rhyse.8179" said:"Too much work" is definitely a valid consideration. Anet is a business, and must by necessity balance cost vs benefit. The level of changes requested by the OP will require almost as much work as making an entire new class. There's no way Anet will do that without a paid expac. It's valuable discussion and helps people understand the mechanics, which is good, but when it comes to setting expectations it's important to ask for something attainable.

Dervish. I rest my case.

But seriously. This isn't an argument that is going to convince me. I could be convinced but I haven't heard a good argument yet. Dervish was in much the same boat we are in now and they had 90% of their skills change, reworked a mechanic, added a new mechanic and changed their unique ability. And consider this. The dervish had about 100 different skills. You guys keep saying this sort of thing but I keep pointing to what arena net has already done in the past. Nothing I've suggested is unreasonable. I'm not asking for new animations for skills. They've already shown they are willing to make major changes in GW2 as well. Look at mesmer. I was there when the dervish update hit. It was divisive at the time but its popularity exploded because of it. The profession really began to come into its own as a unique experience unlike any other profession in GW1. They've changed the function of skills in GW1 entirely. Aura of the Lich was a weird forgettable skill that I honestly don't even remember what its original function was. And it was changed to spawn a minion from all corpses becoming a really interesting and fun skill. And the necromancer NEEDS a fundamental change to it. Clearly the design they have currently is too limiting to its design. And the best build for necromancer now in PvE has been the necromancer's best build for years. It hasn't changed much at all. And we don't have many options because all of them can be achieved on other professions but better. The one thing we do have is Epidemic and if we lost that(Which many have suggested removing it. I don't agree with them) we'd quite literally have nothing keeping us viable in PvE what so ever. PvP is slippery as well since we have dropped out of the meta entirely due to our poorly balanced mechanic. Its obvious to everyone there is a major problem with the design. And People keep saying minor fixes will save the profession but we've had minor fixes for the games life and necromancer is still in the most tenuous situation. If your solution worked it would have worked 4 years ago. It hasn't, we need to try something new.

Edit: I now remember what Aura of the Lich used to do. It halved your total health but also halved all incoming damage. Remembered it then looked it up to confirm. Yep. Rather have the minions.

That was a decade ago and on a different product with a different team with a different platform in a different market. You may as well be saying how EA makes great games at great value like some of the titles they were also releasing in that same period of time. It's not a business-savvy move long-term but the CEO and owner of the company in 2013 came out and said they were not interested in doing reworks unless absolutely and totally necessary. The closest thing that happened was a single CDI which the ranger won by a landslide because the class had traits and weapons that literally didn't even work (as in yes, they actually straight up did not function) and those concerns went unaddressed for years.

GW2 is handled differently with less emphasis on its professions and it still doesn't change the fact your proposals do not really change anything that is pertinent to many of the biggest underlying balance issues with necro, which would still persist, even if your proposed changes went through, anyways.

It's a stupid business decision to ignore professions, but it still doesn't change the fact that what you've proposed is largely unnecessary and very expensive labor with limited potential return on investment. The claim about such reworks not needing changes to animations and assets, etc. is also untrue. That's very presumptuous and splitting the skills from shroud itself already requires a lot of animation changes. All of this stuff also needs to undergo rigorous QA testing and a hell of a lot of math and analysis. The implications of splitting shroud skills from the defensive nature of shroud are way bigger than you realize, especially for PvP. On a default regen completely throws most of the math behind necro out the window, and mandates a lot of changes to a lot of aspects of the kit. Any such re-designs are going to propagate to other areas of the profession such that skill functionality may very well need to change quite heavily to be compatible with the result. And these will also need overhauls. And so on. Before you know it, a lot of things need to change.

I understand you're passionate about wanting change but I'm telling you as someone who's been in this position for the past five years on the thief section for the kits that have never had viability outside of abusing bugs and exploits: This isn't the way to go about it and it's not a very good solution for the reasons I've mentioned. Adapt your proposal or provide every little detail about what needs to change, including skill coefficients, cooldowns, and the likes to justify your math and research.

If you're going to propose such sweeping changes while making the claim that they are limited in their nature and continue to remain stalwart about why those changes are all benefit and do not demand much: Prove it. I've done it. Pro players have done it. Please provide the details, the rationale for each individual change, and how it works and address why it can't possibly not work with existing loadouts. If you're an expert enough to make this judgment call contrary to people who are just as passionate and desiring of change for the benefit of the profession telling you that the magnitude of change seems unreasonable or impossible, and contrary to existing mechanics run by the same systems having already failed in the past, it should be well-within your capability to demonstrate at length why re-implementing the idea is a benefit. Convince me and I'll do my best to promote the hell out of the post. I'm still going to insist how this interacts with the reaper as well, because you can't just shelf an elite spec for later as an afterthought. It's all gotta be tackled in one fell swoop and all work together nicely.

Otherwise it's all speculation at the high level, and right now analysis of high-level speculation paired with previous history of what you've proposed having not worked is simply disagreeing with your proposal despite your intentions.

Something as simple as "How does this allow for all existing play styles, such as ones encompassing Spite/AA-oriented traits work?" appears to make the idea run into some real problems. I won't even go into utility skill use while in shroud, damage resistance and heals, etc.

@"DeceiverX.8361" said:Anyone worth their salt in the PvP community will state that duality and versatility in skills is what defines a successful kit.

While I readily agree, I also want to add that this is a 3-game-mode MMORPG, not a multiplayer brawler. As such, a versatile kit with loads of options and duality of skills is usually a detriment because it breaks class-design. Which it actively does, GW2 is a very good example of that. Game-wide. The game's insistence on overloading everyone with 30+ skills, loads of weapon options, gear-stat choices, runes, sigils, traitlines and traits makes it so that any possible power-combination can usually be achievement.

Which in turn means that any however-small imbalance will immediately be augmented significantly by focusing on it (and the game allows you to focus on it!). Which in turn forces it to be brought back in line.

"But wait!", you say. "Isn't that perfect? Devs are forced to balance classes!"

Yes it is - for smallest-scale PvP modes, where you want the characters to be as carbon-copy of each other as possible, bringing distinct styles to gameplay and character design instead of distinct mechanics or weaknesses. So it's more about individual player skill, not about picks or team-composition.

But for everything else, specifically where you want a larger group of players to work together (say open world mass-combat or WvW!), a confined class-design where someone is funneled into a specific role they take in the larger group is far preferrable. It allows the game design to overcome a few issues which otherwise crop up - comparing GW2 with DAoC here is interesting, the latter having extremely shallow classes but far richer mass-PvP as a result. Among the issues which can be fixed is that enemies an friends are easier to judge ("X is a Y" as a universal truth in regards to class role is helpful in quickly assessing large groups!), balance of large armies becomes easier (everyone only brings 1 or maybe 2 things to the table after all), inter-reliance is far enhanced, promoting cooperative play and this is a MMORPG after all, PvE becomes trivial to balance, and weaknesses in each classes' design can be actively exploited to create dependency on other classes.

As a Necro-example, "Shroud is always a defensive option" is perfectly fine, so long as this extends into the classes' overall role and design. If a Necromancer is someone who is not as strong as others but also nigh-unkillable, then this gives them a purpose! They can be balanced as outrunners, unlike others not able to easily picked off when separating from their group, they can be tanks in PvE, they can even be given options to center their defensive aspects more around debuffing enemies or healing allies, ultimately always being super-durable and low on offense, "tanks", but with options on how to be tanks.

@"DeceiverX.8361" said:That was a decade ago and on a different product with a different team with a different platform in a different market. You may as well be saying how EA makes great games at great value like some of the titles they were also releasing in that same period of time. It's not a business-savvy move long-term but the CEO and owner of the company in 2013 came out and said they were not interested in doing reworks unless absolutely and totally necessary. The closest thing that happened was a single CDI which the ranger won by a landslide because the class had traits and weapons that literally didn't even work (as in yes, they actually straight up did not function) and those concerns went unaddressed for years.

GW2 is handled differently with less emphasis on its professions and it still doesn't change the fact your proposals do not really change anything that is pertinent to many of the biggest underlying balance issues with necro, which would still persist, even if your proposed changes went through, anyways.

It's a stupid business decision to ignore professions, but it still doesn't change the fact that what you've proposed is largely unnecessary and very expensive labor with limited potential return on investment. The claim about such reworks not needing changes to animations and assets, etc. is also untrue. That's very presumptuous and splitting the skills from shroud itself already requires a lot of animation changes. All of this stuff also needs to undergo rigorous QA testing and a hell of a lot of math and analysis. The implications of splitting shroud skills from the defensive nature of shroud are way bigger than you realize, especially for PvP. On a default regen completely throws most of the math behind necro out the window, and mandates a lot of changes to a lot of aspects of the kit. Any such re-designs are going to propagate to other areas of the profession such that skill functionality may very well need to change quite heavily to be compatible with the result. And these will also need overhauls. And so on. Before you know it, a lot of things need to change.

I understand you're passionate about wanting change but I'm telling you as someone who's been in this position for the past five years on the thief section for the kits that have never had viability outside of abusing bugs and exploits: This isn't the way to go about it and it's not a very good solution for the reasons I've mentioned. Adapt your proposal or provide every little detail about what needs to change, including skill coefficients, cooldowns, and the likes to justify your math and research.

If you're going to propose such sweeping changes while making the claim that they are limited in their nature and continue to remain stalwart about why those changes are all benefit and do not demand much: Prove it. I've done it. Pro players have done it. Please provide the details, the rationale for each individual change, and how it works and address why it can't possibly not work with existing loadouts. If you're an expert enough to make this judgment call contrary to people who are just as passionate and desiring of change for the benefit of the profession telling you that the magnitude of change seems unreasonable or impossible, and contrary to existing mechanics run by the same systems having already failed in the past, it should be well-within your capability to demonstrate at length why re-implementing the idea is a benefit. Convince me and I'll do my best to promote the hell out of the post. I'm still going to insist how this interacts with the reaper as well, because you can't just shelf an elite spec for later as an afterthought. It's all gotta be tackled in one fell swoop and all work together nicely.

Otherwise it's all speculation at the high level, and right now analysis of high-level speculation paired with previous history of what you've proposed having not worked is simply disagreeing with your proposal despite your intentions.

Something as simple as "How does this allow for all existing play styles, such as ones encompassing Spite/AA-oriented traits work?" appears to make the idea run into some real problems. I won't even go into utility skill use while in shroud, damage resistance and heals, etc.

Comparing Arena net to EA is a really bad strategy in trying to convince me. Since EA has a really terrible predatory business model. And capitalization of another MMO's success by trying to copy the most popular MMO at the time is why the MMO genera has stagnated now. GW2 is one of the only Decent options left, otherwise I'd have left a long time ago. And I've been searching.

Clearly you don't know much about the necromancer as the comparison to thief is an extremely odd comparison Since the method on how their energy mechanics work is extremely different. And there are successful Tool box sills of other professions in the game. Mesmer, Engineer, Guardian, Elementalist, Scourge to some extent. Yes the changes don't look like they don't do much to improve the profession if you don't play the profession that often. But considering this frees up design. And it does free it up quite a bit, it can allow for us to have more quality of life changes.

About half a year ago a Dev came onto the form and basically told us that "We can't give the necromancer good support or damage because their defenses are too good. It would just make necromancer's dominate everything" Which rightfully infuriated the community because we've been asking for the ability to play support and damage roles for years and the release of the game even promised us that Necromancer would be the home for monk players from GW1. Think about that. Necromancer was supposed to be the profession for people who like to run as healers. Not Ranger. Something that drives me mad to this day because I absolutely want to heal on a necromancer. And other do as well.

By pushing the focus away from shroud and on the energy mechanic itself it frees up options. I'd suggest reading the suggestion again because I detailed several reasons as to why its current design is a problem. Since you are not a necromancer main you might not be able to see it, but I can. I can feel how clunky it is especially when comparing it to similarly designed classes in other games. Mind you, the similarly designed classes are two completely different classes that seem to be mashed into one taking the worst traits of both.

Lets go over it though. By making their Mechanic more of a tool box we get some options. Life blast could become our F1. Making it function much the same way only thrown out quicker as a life force sink that could deal high damage but burn you out quickly, letting you finish something off, or chip life away. . F2 as dark path as a ground teleport that costs about 20%ish life force at 600-900 range would give us a pursuit option or escape option as opposed to trying to rely on a slow moving projectile that is unreliable. F3 As doom which would act the exact same as just a fear which is arguably Death shroud's absolute best skill. F4 as Tainted shackles but changed to a pull that torments as opposed to a strange tether that is honestly really terrible at locking an opponent in place. F5 as death shroud, treating it as part of the tool box as our defensive option that doesn't strip other defenses away gives us a means to Keep going as opposed to hoping we don't get CCed into the ground or having to cut our damage against bosses.

Opening up traits as well. Currently we have several traits that don't function well with scourge since spending life force isn't a thing. You might assume that this would limit the class more in the Soul reaping line, however the class is already required to take soul reaping and Scourge is especially bad with this. And giving interesting options across their other Specializations would lessen the focus. A trait that heals allies around you when spending life force in blood is far more consistent than one that heals on a single skill or while exiting shroud like we have now which doesn't aid the play style of a healer all that well. Giving death this option would really go a long way as Death magic is the worst trait line we have Only taken for minions even though its supposed to be our defensive option. It doesn't succeed in that since Both Soul reaping and blood provide better defensive options and that partially because of the poor nature of shroud. It even has a trait in it that is a novice trap.

This also frees the utility skills to take up stronger defensive options since we can't be as reliant on the power shield that Shroud originally gave us. Shoud's up time with the suggestion would probably last about 70% less time considering the loss of Damage reduction and its increased decay rate. (Note it wouldn't cost to activate shroud but its decay rate would be there) so we could have real options like blocks or teleports as opposed to running 2-3 stunbreaks like what seems to be the best option now. Gaining access to more stability, something that is bemoaned about on the forums for the entire life span of the game, would be fantastic with the extra tools.

Weapons could be freed up by making life force a slow regenerating mechanic we wouldn't have to be the hyper aggressor. If I wanted to be that, I'd have played warrior with its Burst mechanic. I don't want its burst mechanic I want to be the antagonist, not the aggressor. Which the two play styles don't really work all that well together. The community has been asking for better access to life force for years and the request is always to make us more like warrior. I don't like warrior, and I don't like their burst mechanic. I'd like the weapons theme to be more unique. Both dagger and Staff function in much the same roll only one is ranged and the other is Melee. Both are there, or at least perceived to be there in order to quickly generate life force. What other class uses a weapon to make sure their mechanic can function properly? Arena net even had to Add life force gain on both greatsword and torch because of the massive requirements that we need for our mechanic. Clearly there is a problem with this design and goes against the design of the rest of the game. You think scourge wants to use dagger? NO! We don't want to use the dagger at all, we'd rather just use scepter/dagger and scepter/torch. We have to. We don't have a choice in this decision. Freeing this up lets the dagger be more of a defensive/recovery weapon. It seems that arena net wants its design to fit this archetype for the necromancer, yet its being used to fuel our offense on scourge. And they have some half design with the dagger that looks really cool, but its not quite there yet and our mechanics are just holding it back. Staff is even worse as it is the closest thing we have to a support weapon and it just can never be that. Many have suggested making the marks capable of being detonated so that it could have more utility potential. And I understand where they're coming from. Able to lay down mark of blood and pop it to give allies regen or Putrid Mark to blast a finisher, it makes sense that there is a desire for this. But again we have core design getting in the way of this.

Necromancer has amazing potential to be just an absolutely spectacular experience for everyone involved. But its mired in poor design choices that were dated at the game's release and no band-aid fix will solve. I've mention this a dozen times almost monthly and people seem to never take my word for it. For a while people did, they started to realize just how right I was, but we've got an influx of new people on the forums and I have to do this over again. I'm not coming at this from a lack of experience, I'm coming at this with hyper analysis and looking at all possible option. I've considered your options and we've seen them put into practice in our design. It didn't work. And worse its made problems far worse than before. Many "Buffs" we received to the necromancer turned out to be unintentional nerfs and this has been the case for the game's life time because the mechanic is just that bad and the devs don't know how to make it function properly in its current form. It absolutely needs to be changed, that isn't a question. The question is how should it be changed. Because everyone agrees that its a problem, but we have two camps. Band-aid solution camp, and overhaul camp. And band-aid camp has gotten their way for years and it still hasn't worked. Which insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

@"Lily.1935" said:I need to break this up a bit, as there are more issues with shroud. The mechanic has a passive damage reduction with may players don't realize it has, and I didn't when I first started playing because it isn't obvious to new players. This damage reduction probably shouldn't be added on top of the life but the devs might feel its necessary in order to balance off its passive degeneration. However, I would much rather have stronger external defensive options than increasing the passive strength shroud.Such as??? I dont see where you make any thing about defensive options below or maybe its just not as clear to me.Keep in mind anet has already said they are less likely to change how a skill works but more likely by tuning them up or down.

Further, Shroud locks you out of your own utility skills.

Honestly my solution to this would be through traits. IF you trait for spectrals you should be able to use them in shroud. Same for signets, corruptions, minions etc. While this wont let you use everything at once it will open tools up that fit the users play style.

Solutions:

Of course these problems are not a lost cause. Each of them could be fixed. And the necromancer could be freed to grow and develop in its own identity.

• Regenerating Life force: The first solution I have proposed before was switching shroud from a strictly death trigger mechanic to a slow regenerating mechanic that occasionally gains benefit from deaths. Its strange that this is even a thing in GW2 when Arena net tried this in GW1 with disastrous consequences. The necromancer has a mechanic in GW1 called soul reaping which used to trigger on all deaths around her at any given time. Eventually this had to be tuned down to 3 deaths every 15 seconds. I'd suggest this here. Life force regenerating 1-2% every second in and out of combat and starting at 0% still could really benefit them. Having the on death trigger only giving them a max of 15% every 15-25 seconds could go a long way to preventing future updates from letting the necromancer get too out of hand in WvW again. This lets the necromancer be less aggressive in situations like raids and PvP and motivates them to play slower rather than that burst or bust mentality we often see with this supposed attrition mechanic.

Honestly why not just remove the death trigger all together if you are going to limit it like that 15% maybe if its 15% for 15 seconds but at that poitn why not just add it regen for free at 1% a second. 15% every 25 seconds is a bit long imo. I get what you mean here but i honestly feel it should be High regen of LF at any time, No regen and weapon skills give you a ton more, or leave it as it is.

• Healing in shroud: You should be able to be healed by others while in shroud. This prevents it from being a parasitic mechanic. If the mechanic needs to decay quicker in order to balance this, that shouldn't be a problem with the next solution. Since the mechanic should be treated as purely a defensive mechanic. Not an offensive one. But the buffer is important. I feel that Reaper's shroud's current decay rate would be quick enough.

IF it cant heal the necro at least let it restore the shroud but i dont know how this would honestly work in either situation. Even if this was a yes thing you talk about decoupling skills below which completely negates the whole point but assuming they wont do that yes some sort of healing needs to penetrate to the necro in shroud even if its a reduced amount.

• Decouple the Shroud skills and Shroud: Continuing with the theme of keeping shroud as a defensive mechanic exclusively it should be part of tool kit on the necromancer's F1-5 bar as opposed to what it is now. Making shroud only a sort of superior barrier would go a long way for its usability. Entering shroud wouldn't be a free CC party for your opponents. But because the skills are decoupled this would mean your other F abilities would also be eating from your life force which could leave you with more meaningful options. Sacrifice offense for defense? The choice becomes more meaningful as opposed to the current option sort of gives you the worst of both worlds. For a good example of this design philosophy we can look to another profession. Mesmer. The mesmer's shatter mechanic lets you use your clones to sacrifice them for offense, control or defense. And choosing one takes the other option away from you for a time. This change would be like that on a larger scale as it would be incremental sacrifices which great necromancer players could really sink their teeth into raising the skill cap while not making them too daunting for new players to pick up.

I really disagree with this even as they are the skill decoupled assuming anet wont change them completely (because they likely wont) would just leave the necromancer wide open to any sort of punishment that could kite it. The way the skills currently work leaves no active defense with the exception of the fear on shroud 3 in core and 3 in reapers. Not to mention lets consider how doing this would rip reaper apart.

Honestly we shouldnt be trying to make other forms of necro like scourge by decoupling the shroud skills on other specs. Scourge only works because its skills provide strong zone control and barrier the other versions of necro will lack this zone control.

The only way this would work assuming they didnt change the mechanics too much for the shroud skills for core and reaper would mean that they would have to be offensively wayyyy over tuned. Most of them now becoming instant cast or 1 shot skills means that necro will now have great dps on the other hand in pvp perspective its just another reason for them to be hated and targeted first before anything else.

Mesmer is a all tools in one shed profession. Its not a surprise that its f1-f5 provide offensive and defensive mechanics. Its not a good comparison to make imo.

• Traits care about Fskills and spending life force as opposed to shroud: Pushing the focus away from shroud and more to the way life force is used would be a great change for the problems we see with necromancer traits now. Which are so insular with shroud a few of them don't function well with Scourge at all. By pushing the focus on spending life force and specific skills could allow for interesting design choices and give players more to consider. What if their was a trait that made life force skills cost half as much life force to use but now made them also cost life? What if they could make them cost more but make them stronger in some way?

This sounds honestly like you are talking about scourge only and furthermore why would you want to do this. Whats the benifit to this other than saving some LF which one shouldnt have a problem building to start with. Like i want to understand this change but rather than helping necro in general this sounds very scourge only and anything that honestly only refers to scourge wont solve any of necromancers problems when core is the part that has most of the problems.The reason i say it sounds like you are speaking on scourge only here is because you say "Life force skills" I know you talked about decoupling the skills above but ive already pointed out how likely even if they did this the skills mechanics wouldnt change enough and you wouldnt end up with active defense skills just offensive ones that would have to be highly over tuned to make up for 0 mobility, lack of evades / invuln, and lack of active defenses. .

• Free up weapon's identity: Some of the weapons of necromancer have the soul purpose of generating life force for the necromancer in the eyes of the community. Dagger and staff both fit this. This forces the necromancer in order to maintain their defenses they need to be the aggressor in combat. They can't afford to stop attacking in much of their play style which even though this adds complexity to combat, it limits the mental space and reactions a necromancer player can afford because they have to be this hyper aggressor and can't be the responder. This isn't always the case currently, but it is typical enough. I'm not saying remove life force completely from weapons, but limit its generation a bit in favor of the regeneration and adjust them to have a real identity. If Staff could become an actual ranged support and control weapon like it always should have been as opposed to its awkward use now. Or if dagger could be a strange life stealing weapon that awakens its power for a short time when you start bleeding could really add new flavor and design to them. Letting necromancer experience more flavor and better game play.

If you do this what will you give the other weapons that lose life force generation. Its important that you provide more examples for other weapons sense you called "limiting lf generation on all weapons."Ideally if something is being taken something should be given in return. While what you sayis true that necormancers must stay on the offensive to in a weird way keep their defenses up then maybe we should look more at the tools that are used offensively that necro already has.

FearFor example. Is not a truely hard cc anymore because it is countered by so many defensive boons and breakstuns. At the very least necros could use more of it and it could break target just as taunt does.

VenerabilityNecros are some of the best at applying this extremely quickly yet we dont really have many traits that play around with it other than reapers decimate defenses

Active/offensive defenceNecros seem to love getting hit to gain lf or getting hit to soak damage from shroud bar. Why dont we have some kind of insanely strong retaliation option within our builds

@ZDragon.3046 said:

@"Lily.1935" said:I need to break this up a bit, as there are more issues with shroud. The mechanic has a passive damage reduction with may players don't realize it has, and I didn't when I first started playing because it isn't obvious to new players. This damage reduction probably shouldn't be added on top of the life but the devs might feel its necessary in order to balance off its passive degeneration. However, I would much rather have stronger external defensive options than increasing the passive strength shroud.Such as??? I dont see where you make any thing about defensive options below or maybe its just not as clear to me.Keep in mind anet has already said they are less likely to change how a skill works but more likely by tuning them up or down.

Further, Shroud locks you out of your own utility skills.

Solutions:

Of course these problems are not a lost cause. Each of them could be fixed. And the necromancer could be freed to grow and develop in its own identity.

• Regenerating Life force
  : The first solution I have proposed before was switching shroud from a strictly death trigger mechanic to a slow regenerating mechanic that occasionally gains benefit from deaths. Its strange that this is even a thing in GW2 when Arena net tried this in GW1 with disastrous consequences. The necromancer has a mechanic in GW1 called soul reaping which used to trigger on all deaths around her at any given time. Eventually this had to be tuned down to 3 deaths every 15 seconds. I'd suggest this here. Life force regenerating 1-2% every second in and out of combat and starting at 0% still could really benefit them. Having the on death trigger only giving them a max of 15% every 15-25 seconds could go a long way to preventing future updates from letting the necromancer get too out of hand in WvW again. This lets the necromancer be less aggressive in situations like raids and PvP and motivates them to play slower rather than that burst or bust mentality we often see with this supposed attrition mechanic.

• Healing in shroud
  : You should be able to be healed by others while in shroud. This prevents it from being a parasitic mechanic. If the mechanic needs to decay quicker in order to balance this, that shouldn't be a problem with the next solution. Since the mechanic should be treated as purely a defensive mechanic. Not an offensive one. But the buffer is important. I feel that Reaper's shroud's current decay rate would be quick enough.

• Decouple the Shroud skills and Shroud
  : Continuing with the theme of keeping shroud as a defensive mechanic exclusively it should be part of tool kit on the necromancer's F1-5 bar as opposed to what it is now. Making shroud only a sort of superior barrier would go a long way for its usability. Entering shroud wouldn't be a free CC party for your opponents. But because the skills are decoupled this would mean your other F abilities would also be eating from your life force which could leave you with more meaningful options. Sacrifice offense for defense? The choice becomes more meaningful as opposed to the current option sort of gives you the worst of both worlds. For a good example of this design philosophy we can look to another profession. Mesmer. The mesmer's shatter mechanic lets you use your clones to sacrifice them for offense, control or defense. And choosing one takes the other option away from you for a time. This change would be like that on a larger scale as it would be incremental sacrifices which great necromancer players could really sink their teeth into raising the skill cap while not making them too daunting for new players to pick up.

• Traits care about Fskills and spending life force as opposed to shroud
  : Pushing the focus away from shroud and more to the way life force is used would be a great change for the problems we see with necromancer traits now. Which are so insular with shroud a few of them don't function well with Scourge at all. By pushing the focus on spending life force and specific skills could allow for interesting design choices and give players more to consider. What if their was a trait that made life force skills cost half as much life force to use but now made them also cost life? What if they could make them cost more but make them stronger in some way?

• Free up weapon's identity
  : Some of the weapons of necromancer have the soul purpose of generating life force for the necromancer in the eyes of the community. Dagger and staff both fit this. This forces the necromancer in order to maintain their defenses they need to be the aggressor in combat. They can't afford to stop attacking in much of their play style which even though this adds complexity to combat, it limits the mental space and reactions a necromancer player can afford because they have to be this hyper aggressor and can't be the responder. This isn't always the case currently, but it is typical enough. I'm not saying remove life force completely from weapons, but limit its generation a bit in favor of the regeneration and adjust them to have a real identity. If Staff could become an actual ranged support and control weapon like it always should have been as opposed to its awkward use now. Or if dagger could be a strange life stealing weapon that awakens its power for a short time when you start bleeding could really add new flavor and design to them. Letting necromancer experience more flavor and better game play.

Your post is contradictory. You complain about something I mentioned above and you address yourself almost forgetting that I mentioned it above. I find your post, inconsistent which gives me no way to actually respond to what you're trying to criticize.

@Lily.1935 said:

Your post is contradictory. You complain about something I mentioned above and you address yourself almost forgetting that I mentioned it above. I find your post, inconsistent which gives me no way to actually respond to what you're trying to criticize.

To be honest you kind of did the same i just followed your flow bit by bitWants to change life force generationWants healing in shroud.Suggest removing shroud by detaching the skills to be more like scourge skills

Then you go on to talk about wanting to change skills from offensive ones to defensive ones or something of that nature. I honestly cant tell if you want to keep shroud or get rid of it with your suggestions half of them seem like you want to keep them the other half either are scourge focused only or you actually want to remove shroud and make all of necromancers profession mechanics like scourge's.At the same time you are also throwing up things that seem to serve little to no good reason other than thematic and flavor changes. A trait that makes life force cost half but also cost half your own life pool???

I think your post needs a small edit to determine if you want to keep shroud or not in your suggestions because its very hard to tell the way you go from one thing to the next.

Where you started to really throw me was atDetaching skills to be more like scourge/mesmer

@"Dadnir.5038" said:

This is my opinion but, for me that's the major issue of the necromancer. Keeping it as a defensive mechanism is what shackle the necromancer. This is the part of the necromancer that need to be reformed. And with barriers introduce in the game, fixing the defense of the necromancer (or I should say sustain, since necromancers have to outsustain their foe, enduring all hits) is but a trivial matter. It even answer your concern about the shroud reducing damage.

If we remove the 2nd life bar, the shroud can freely become a "weapon swap" that you can improve throught traits. Additionnally, there is no need anymore for it to lock you out of healing or your utility skills.

As for the defensive part of the necromancer there is few easy thing that can be done:

• Core shroud skill Life transfert can give an amount of barrier per foe hit instead of giving life force. This skill is design for survivability, it just put it up to date.
• Unholy Sanctuary can grant you barrier when you enter shroud and send you in shroud when you would have taken a deadly hit. Just keeping the purpose of the trait and traitline.
• Spectral armor and spectral walk can grant you an amount of barrier when hit just like they give you an amount of life force when hit.
• Spectral mastery could give you barrier on use of a spectral skill instead of giving life force.
• Augury of death could grant barrier per foe struck instead of leeching life.

So it would literally just be turning LF int barrier on activation of shroud? My only concern with completely removing the bar is that hard burst eats barrier instantly unlike the way barrier works on ele necro does not have evades, repetitive condi removal, or anything of that nature. Once you are caught you are caught and im not sure barrier can make up for the mass amounts of damage that necro can be spiked with and not have any way to disengage a fight. Then again it depends on how much barrier we are talking about from a numbered value stand point I doubt you meaning anything that could negate as much damage as the current shroud could though.

Although if you did do it this way the best way would be to think of a reverse holosmith. Keep the 2nd bar just as a reference to how much LF you have stocked. your F1 becomes a weapon swap that actually gives you very potent and deadly skills. While in shroud the bar drains ideally about the same rate as holo builds heat. Using shroud skills consumes a % of LF from the bar. Incoming damage no longer is taken from that bar but your hp instead. This makes barrier play work even better.

Would it be too much to ask for at least 1 stack of stability on spectral armor for its duration just as it is on scourges break stun?

Thus I'd suggest something pretty simple:

• When out of combat, the necromancer reap life force the same way as he does right now.
• When in combat, the necromancer gain a 10s "death halo" buff for each death around him, that stack in duration up to 5 time. When under the effect of the "death halo" buff, the necromancer regain a set amount of life force per second, This amount of life force would thus be affected by healing power and traits related.
• When living combat, the remaining duration of the buff is eaten and converted into life force instantly.

Now this could help fix death magic as well by focusing this traitline on "death halo". We could then:

• Change armored shroud to apply it's effects while under the effect of "death halo".
• Soul comprehension would have a direct effect on it increasing death halo LF gen by 20%.
• We could even imagin that one of this 2 minor traits allow minions to grant this buff when they die while you are in combat.
• We could change corruptor fervor to reduce incoming damage and condition damage while under the effect of "death halo".
• ... etc.

All this change the necromancer so that he become more in line with other professions, freeing himself of this parasitic mechanism (very well found!), even almost fixing death magic.

I have to respect the well round thought to the deathmagic line here honestly. I love your idea with this and it makes deathmagic strong I think at least in line with the other traitlines at the very least.

@ZDragon.3046 said:

@"Lily.1935" said:

Your post is contradictory. You complain about something I mentioned above and you address yourself almost forgetting that I mentioned it above. I find your post, inconsistent which gives me no way to actually respond to what you're trying to criticize.

if you read it as several separate suggestions rather than a single complete idea I could see the confusion. But that in lies the problem with the way you view it. And not not cost "HALF THE USERS LIFE" that would be ridiculous. Half the cost would be put to health. Its an interesting push pull mechanic. And that was just one example. As I give few details on how that could work it isn't designed to be taking as an absolute suggestion either. Just an idea.

Lets clarify were I stand. I stand on making the necromancer have better active defensive abilities in sacrificing the strength of shroud, Greater access to offensive abilities and greater access to supportive abilities. Shroud can't exist in its current form to get any of these things as the devs have mentioned previously. And My method is designed to streamline its design so we don't have the current mess we are in now with two polar opposite designs in Scourge and Core/reaper.

And as always. Greatness at any cost.