trait that makes shroud skills cost health

what if necro had a trait that made it so you could use shroud skills with no cooldown at the cost of 10% hp per cast?

Two aspects of your proposal are bad, but one is amazing!

The amazing idea is the health cost damaging you through shroud. You can use it to activate some traits that way. The passive spectral armor for one, granting huge sustain for shroud itself for next few seconds. Other being healing bonus from Last Rites, good before casting transfusion traited #4 or using Ritual's of life passive Well of Blood.There are also few runs that will respond to you reaching a certain health treshold.

The first bad aspect is the health cost itself - 10% doesn't make much sense. Healing does not scale with vitality. So 10% means squishy builds will have easy time healing back up, but for high health builds this trait would be very suicidal. I think it should be flat health cost, moreover individual one for each skill. I don't see Executioner's Scythe taking same amount of health as death's charge.

Second bad aspect is the reward - being able to ignore cd on a shroud skill is gonna be very problematic balance wise. Core necro might get away with it just fine, since whatever his Death Shroud does (save the fear and auto) is crap and waste of a button push. But reaper with his shroud's kit would really get outta hand.

This needs to be changed to a reward that will justify the health loss, but not be a balancing nightmare, like a damage increase on shroud skills for price in your health, or adding damaging condi to your shroud skill for the price in blood you just paid.

@ZeftheWicked.3076 said:Two aspects of your proposal are bad, but one is amazing!

The amazing idea is the health cost damaging you through shroud. You can use it to activate some traits that way. The passive spectral armor for one, granting huge sustain for shroud itself for next few seconds. Other being healing bonus from Last Rites, good before casting transfusion traited #4 or using Ritual's of life passive Well of Blood.There are also few runs that will respond to you reaching a certain health treshold.

The first bad aspect is the health cost itself - 10% doesn't make much sense. Healing does not scale with vitality. So 10% means squishy builds will have easy time healing back up, but for high health builds this trait would be very suicidal. I think it should be flat health cost,i thought about a flat health cost and figured that would be harder to balance, having the health loss be percentage based adds a hard limit to how much stuff you could spam in shroud, you could for example do 9 executioner's scythes back to back but then you're coming out of that shroud with 10% health left. thats pretty risky

besides, builds with high vitality already have their pay-off by having more health, while 10% of 30k is more than 10% of 19k i would say that it's balanced that it scales badly with high vitality. no one wants tanky as balls builds with good damage in the game

moreover individual one for each skill. I don't see Executioner's Scythe taking same amount of health as death's charge.

considering necros bad mobility being able to spam rs2 would be worth the health cost. mobility is worth a lot man

Second bad aspect is the reward - being able to ignore cd on a shroud skill is gonna be very problematic balance wise. Core necro might get away with it just fine, since whatever his Death Shroud does (save the fear and auto) is crap and waste of a button push. But reaper with his shroud's kit would really get outta hand.This needs to be changed to a reward that will justify the health loss, but not be a balancing nightmare, like a damage increase on shroud skills for price in your health, or adding damaging condi to your shroud skill for the price in blood you just paid.reaper shroud skills could have a higher health cost than death shroud and scurg skills if it turns out too strong. or the cost could increase by increments or possibly exponentially if we start with a lower base value than 10% each time you use a skill

fantastic idea. This way we use our big health pool (that is supposedly the reason we dont get cool stuff like 'blocks' or 'invulnerability', whatever those are) to get actual decent mobility or damage or support!I think it'd be best to be part of the shroud mechanic btw, since it'd force everyone to pick one traitline if it were a trait. And maybe have cooldowns reduced by a massive percentage or even better a flat number rather than simply skipping, so we dont end up actually being mesmer lvl op

Issue with this is that is going to be the same problem with initiative system in PvE. You are going to spam your strongest skill, in Reaper's case it would be using just RS4 over and over again.

I think there are better ways to buff necros.

Necromancers would die even faster.

@Nilkemia.8507 said:Necromancers would die even faster.

^This

Remember that shroud is the necro's only defense mechanic in pvp/wvw. We enter it when we're about to die. Your suggestion would kill necros in pvp settings

So you want zo make a spec (scourge) that rewards spamming all your skills even more rewarding for doing so?

as is often said, if you kill the enemy before they kill you you take less damage.10% health loss isnt too bad, autoattacks from enemies tend to deal more than that.btw i suggest having it work as such: Press a (shroud)skill again while it's on cooldown to reduce your health by 10% and cut the cooldown of the skill by 10(or 5, might be better) seconds.If it's a flat second reduction you won't have anyone do 10 soul spirals in a row

Although, if it's really bad in pvp/wvw, stuff like RS#3 should definitely be changed to a temporary block rather than damage reduction.

@Nilkemia.8507 said:Necromancers would die even faster.@Sephylon.4938 said:Remember that shroud is the necro's only defense mechanic in pvp/wvw. We enter it when we're about to die. Your suggestion would kill necros in pvp settings

no one would force necros to take this trait in pvp or wvw though.but im sure some madmen would make it work for them in those modes

@Namless.4028 said:So you want zo make a spec (scourge) that rewards spamming all your skills even more rewarding for doing so?

yes. necro needs higher apm and funnier rotations. this was the best i could think of to increase that. i will also admit i was mostly thinking of death shroud and reaper shroud.

problem with scourge was that a lot of the time spamming your stuff didnt really cost anything because sand savant more or less made sure you were going to hit something regardless in pvp/wvw. and in pve you didnt even have a rotation, you just had priority skills and had to make sure you had 2/3 shades up and didnt goof bip transfer.

Most likely i will like idea that if you are in shroud (reaper or death) you gain utility skills locked to shroud. yeey

I feel like if life force was spent to cast skills in the same way holosmith builds heat per skill it would be ok to considerably reduce the cooldowns on reaper shroud but at no point should the skills not have cooldowns.

This also means shroud would need to drain much slower but perhaps the damage reduction from shroud is dropped a bit as well its a hard thing to balance honestlyI dont see anet putting enough thought into it right now to make it happen.