A Disturbance in the (Life) Force.

Hey there,

Seeing as the developers have been more keen on making some fundamental changes how classes and specializations work in the recent months, I've decided to tackle the subject which has been kept under the rug pretty much ever since launch - Life Force generation from deaths.

Now relevant more than ever, with Scourge using life force as fuel for it's AoE skills and presumably more life force usage coming in the future, I think it's worth a discussion.

As we all know, Necromancer soaks Life Force from all nearby deaths at 10% LF per "honorable kill" (player, most pve mobs, minions). Staying in Shroud prevents the soaking.So what's the problem? It causes Necromancer's life force intake to be incredibly shaky. While thematic, 10% Life Force (or more with minors) is a significant amount, that only the strongest Life Force generating skills can keep up with, especially in mass-death scenario. In WvW or open world the passive LF generation from deaths outclasses using and landing skills that provide it.As a result, Necromancer has always had this problem of running into "rich man, poor man" scenario. Every necro player knows how significant winning your first fight in sPvP is - it feeds you a ton of Life Force just by you standing nearby. From there, you can easily snowball. If you don't win, too bad, because you're LF starved easy target.

With Necromancer's specializations using Life Force for more than a glorified mana shield like in the past it's becoming a problem in design. Reaper chews through large amounts of Life Force in seconds to be relevant, Scourge is mostly limited by the amount of Life Force it has to play with.Both run into the snowball issue I described above harder than ever before. They're one-dimensional - they either slaughter, spamming like crazy or have to scrape through with little bits of resource coming from just weapon skills (and often their LF generation being carried by Spectral Armor alone, making it so necessary).In Open World or WvW this issue is of an incredible magnitude with the amount of constant deaths. With enough deaths, landing your Life Force generating skills doesn't matter anymore. On top of that, Scourge has no Shroud to stop the soaking, so it always benefits.

If we use Life Force as a resource, I'm a huge advocate for it, but part of it is having resource management. When landing skills matters less than standing near stuff dying, we have a problem.

What should we do? The most logical way to adress it, in my opinion, is moving power of Life Force from deaths to weapon skills themselves. This not only potentially adresses our "snowball or nothing" issue we've had since launch, but also adds some skill and counterplay back to Necromancer, as landing your LF generators/evading gets increased priority.

I'm unsure about the exact values, but I think lowering Life Force gain from deaths down to 2-3% still keeps the theme, while being far less impactful (LF from minion deaths could be kept at 10% like on live). How high would be bump weapon Life Force generators? That would differ from skill to skill I feel and is hard to evaluate without testing.And finally, for those who enjoy getting stronger from deaths, Death Magic's infamous trait - Soul Comprehension - could be changed to provide additional 1-2% Life Force per death, making it relevant.

Feel free to discuss it.

EDIT: Mea culpa for the "early-access release", but making threads on this forum on mobile is some devil's creation.

i agree, while in zergfights necros dont Need to take any LF regenerating skill because LF is full all the time, necros have a hard life in small scale situations when fights last 5+ min with just a few deaths. making LF reg-mechanic more active would allow necromancers to get better LF reg. controle in relation to its skill lvl

Agreed. We've been asking for this since forever, and now is as good as time as any. Life Force from Deaths should just be a nice way to help scale Necromancer sustain for large situations since we don't have damage avoidance, but that's it. Currently it is far too much weighted to on-death and not enough for skill usage.

Yes, it's a scalling defense of sorts, but as we established, it gets too out of hand. Back in the pre-HoT days it was mostly noticeable in sPvP with the whole snowballing thing, but now it's visible everywhere (but raids I guess).

To put it simply, Life Force now is not only your "mana shield", but actually your "mana".

PS. Wb Bhawb.

I've also advocated for similar before. The class is binary more or less based on environment.

@"Rym.1469" One note: You say that necro is "two dimensional;" I think you mean one-dimensional as that's how the phrase goes, as 1D is a line, which can only go one way or another, which is the problem you're describing.

That's what I get from writing threads on the bus. Thanks for the obvious correction @DeceiverX.8361 .

I am definitely in the minority, but I run a Reaper with Spectral Mastery, and then slot at least 2 Spectral skills, usually Spectral Armor and Spectral Walk. I can passively generate LF by using these skills repeatedly from the moment I enter an area, and usually generate enough to fill the bar by the time I encounter anything that needs fighting. Also, if you slot Spectral Grasp and use it while at essentially "zero" range--i.e. standing directly on your opponent--you can almost fill your LF bar, and apply an enormously long chill (~20 seconds), as well as possibly interrupt. I almost never worry too much about LF management: as Reaper, you either stomp stuff (PvE) or get wiped (WvW) in the blink of an eye from my experience. I play mostly WvW and PvE, so your mileage may vary.

I would not mind changing the proportion of LF generated between deaths and skill use. The "on death" LF generation is really only there for PvE defense scaling but PvE has changed since 2012 with more challenging content.

One thought might be to give bonus LF to critical hits or certain conditions inflicted.

Oh hey, 

Long time no see. Checked up on GW2 and this topic is, I reckon, still relevant with problems unresolved.

Given that the next elite spec may also drop Shroud partially or entirely and with expansion coming around, this is probably the best time to ressurect this old thread and hopefully bring some attention to it.

Have a good night,

PS. I've seen that the death magic minor has been changed, so hey, groundwork done.

With Staff and Soul marks we can already get a sample of how it feels to have a more active LF generation based on weapon skills, and imo it feels great and very rewarding. Reworking LF generation could also provide a chance to rework traits and weapons that have proven to be either underpowered or too hard to consistently rely on, notably mainhand dagger, staff AA and traits that rely on nearby deaths like Dread or Soul Comprehension (or just Death Magic in general). If we could vote somewhere for things that should be worked on concerning necro this would be it for me (aside from a full staff rework for PvE but I'll rest my case for now regarding that one)

edit: Now I think about it, reworking LF generation could also provide a chance to make Soul Reaping less mandatory. I really like the trait-line, but the dominant position it currently holds is not very healthy for Necro as a class. It means that other trait lines (like Death Magic) often are not even considered and to less build diversity. Having more ways to generate life force without relying on the Soul Reaping minor traits would be very healthy

Disclaimer: I wouldn't normally answer seriously a 3 years old thread because many things happened in 3 years.

The problematic of the LF on death is a problematic that's been there since GW1.

- Thematically it's a very important feature because it is what define the necromancer within GW's universe.

- Balance-wise... It's just a nightmare that already had to be nerfed in GW1.

In most of the content that that feature balanced encounters in GW2, LF on death isn't an issue. The problematic arise in the imbalanced encounters that GW2 offer where the mechanism tend to overperform.

Personally, I think that it's not a subject that's easy to take a stance upon. I wouldn't be against some changes to this mechanism because it's bothersome to have such high difference in LF gen base on the encounter you are in. And at the same time I think the mechanism is already more or less trivialized enough by the sheer number of other sources of LF to not really matter balance wise.

Years ago, I would have fought for LF gen to be changed in such a way that instead of gaining chunk of LF at once, the necromancer would gain a stackable buff granting 0.5 or 1% of LF per stack each time a LF source is triggered. Such mechanism could have had interactions with traits from adding raw stats per stack to health regeneration.

Now, with "carapace" being forced upon death magic, it would just feel redundant.

I don't think the necromancer need more LF gen on it's weaponsets, nor do I think that there is really a need to touch LF on death right now.

This is the first expansion since Arenanet decided to fully split "numbers" between the three game modes so the beta preview weeks may feed into balance splits right away instead of after the expansion is released.

It feels bad to use gravedigger and not get any lf from a big meaty hit. It feels like it should and doesn't feel particularly good to be sub 50% using gravedigger and having your lf stay where it's at. It really makes raid bosses feel odd at <50%.