Should the Death Shroud be Reworked?

As long as I remember the Death Shroud always has been quite underwhelming, but this is something we, alongside the developers, overlooked when we got Reaper with HoT because it gave us a decent alternative for a time in the form of Reaper’s Shroud, and then when PoF gave us the Scourge we had even more excuses to simply ignore how underwhelming Death Shroud feels.I recently tried few builds on core Necromancer, and this is something that struck me again, how sluggish and badly defined Death Shroud is, and I don’t think we should leave it in the gutter only because we have better toys to play with, particularly since core Necromancer could really feel unique to play compared to Reaper and Scourge, because how those especs change the nature of Necromancer's unique mechanic.

Here are my main issues with Death Shroud:

• Life Blast – It has a very slow attack speed for decent damage, but clearly not worth the casting time.
• Dark Path – The projectile speed is way too slow, and can easily be outran or dodged, making it one of the worst teleport in the game.
• Doom – It’s a single target Fear, but is barely longer than Garish Pillar (Scourge equivalent) and Terrify (Reaper equivalent), both affecting multiple target.
• Life Transfer – It’s probably the best skill in here, as it has a larger radius than Soul Spiral and a Sand Shade (even with Sand Savant), so it’s better with Transfusion, but also generates a good amount of life force allowing you to stay longer in the Shroud.
• Tainted Shackles – It’s alright, but the cooldown is far too long for such skill, and I think it should really deal more damage if the bind is not broken.

So those are my issues skill by skill, but overall the Death Shroud also lacks identity, you have skills that are designed for long range combat (Life Blast and Doom (sort of)), then you have mid-range (Life Transfer and Tainted Shackles), and at last you have two melee options, one being a gap closer (Dark Path), the other creates a gap (Doom), so unlike Reaper’s Shroud where all of your skills are clearly defined to be used in melee, the Death Shroud doesn’t really know where it stands.

Moreover the Death Shroud is clearly oriented towards power damage, seeing that only two skills deal condition damage (Dark Path and Tainted Shackles), and the condition application is weak to today’s standards on those two skills. But we already have a power option in the presence of Reaper’s Shroud, therefore Death Shroud should be redefined to play on the core Necromancer strengths, that might be condition control, condition application, minions, tanking, or boon corruption (even though the latter is already enhanced by Scourge).

It's actually pretty funny because the aquatic version of Death Shroud has a pretty unique identity compared to the land one:

• Plague Blast – It transfers a condition to your foe, and also has half the casting time than Life Blast.
• Dark Water – It has a better condition application than Dark Path, but without the utility.
• Wave of Fear – It can hit multiple target, and has a longer Fear duration no matter what.
• Gathering Plague – It works similarly in spirit than Plague Signet or "Save Yourselves!", you draw conditions from nearby allies on yourself, and then you can send them back to your enemies with Plague Blast.
• Tainted Shackles – Is unchanged.

So here we clearly have a rather well defined identity, which is condition control and weakening your enemies with conditions like Fear, Poison, and Blindness.

In any cases I think Death Shroud should be reworked, it could be by making it closer to what it does underwater with a bit of tweaking:

Dark Water could be a poison field, Wave of Fear could be used like Ripple of Horror on Lich Form, so you could use it to cancel the wave and shadowstep, Gathering Plague could pulse within a 600 range and grant you few seconds of Resistance to work better with Transfusion and not being too dangerous to use, and Tainted Shackles could be slightly buffed.

That or something else, anything else would be better than what we have.

Alongside a rework on Death Shroud core traits should also be looked at, it's not really the focus of this thread, so I'll send you there if you want to talk about it.

I wouldn't say that it's been overlooked by the necromancer's community. Threads that suggest some change on DS pop up now and then, it's just that it always seem to be ignored by Anet, If you add the fact that core necromancer is... hum... underwhelming, you understand that most player just gave up on DS.

On your analysis of DS (land), I'd add that life transfer could use a cool down reduction to 30 second from it's current 40 seconds CD.As for DS (underwater) I think gathering plague is a relic of the past. Drawing condition might have had a chance to be a thing in the vanilla game where conditions were relatively "tame" but not in the current game.

A common suggestion for DS shroud is to merge land and water shroud into a single shroud with:

• AA: Plague blast
• shrd2: dark path (improve with faster cast time, projectile speed, after cast... Yeah the skill is terrible right now.)
• shrd3: most likely Doom since wave of fear is on lich form.
• shrd4: life transfer on a shorter cool down.
• shrd5: unchanged.

Another point that would help the shroud as a whole would be to allow signet passive to apply while in shroud without having to trait for it.

There are some "nice" changes. Except nice guys finish last.

Whole DS needs being scrapped all together and redone from ground up. Other core classes can dish out round 30k dps, maybe bit less but around that number. Anyone knows what core necro can dish out, assuming epi bounces are outta question?

Reaper shroud has great synergy with traits and itself. There is a combo field, combo finisher, on demand stab, auto chain that works with dhuumfire, reasonable cooldowns..Death Shroud has none of it. Except for maybe Doom (insta ranged fear) and Tainted Shackles everything is trash or at least underperforms. Forget about any good synergies either.

A Core class is a generalist - elites are supposed to be specializations - pushing a certain aspect of gameplay to new heights. Yet core DS is a caster tool, that fails on all ends. Core power necro needs to be competent in melee (dagger), yet shroud does not offer any decent tools for staying in a melee brawl (aoe cleave, stab). Condi core nec is a ranged caster for most part....and once again DS fails by lacking proper ranged condi pressure (dhuumfire sucks with life blast, tainted shackles are mid range).

Lastly core necro is weak af compared to Reaper and Scourge. There are only two ways to bring it up to standards. One is to employ very intelligent traits that will provide strongest boost on core nec while staying viable for elites. If they got the brains for it, go ahead. I do, but i'm not a-net employee, so i get no say.Other and much simpler one is a whole new, powerful DeathShroud. This is the only piece of core necro elites can't get, and the first place to make changes to improve it, without making the other specs skyrocket.

Current interation of shroud is not even a "part" of core necro, much as it is achilles' heel, the biggest underperformer on already underperforming profession. It needs radical changes.

General theme of ds is perfect, all i wout do is some number changes and better synergy of ds 1 with burning trait. Ds is best designed skill in this game. Atm core necro is more meta then reaper. At least we in spvp.

Recently I fought a hybrid core necro a few times. He ran spite/curses/soul reaping. I ran spite/curses/reaper.

That guy was pretty good and his playstyle showed me that core has potential if you get used to it. The only reason I could beat him in 9 out of 10 attempts was his lack of stability. My hard-cc was pretty much his hardcounter. Otherwise the fight would have been much more even.

Conclusion: Core shroud needs more stability. And... well that's nothing new. I dropped the necro class for a year in 2014 until reaper was announced, because of exact that issue.

Yes. Death shroud needs to be reworked. Its absolutely awful. And this is for a few reasons. The first of Which is just how poorly the skills synergies with each other. The next is the massive cool downs. After that its the Minimal impact of those skills. And finally we have the lack of access to our utility and inability to be healed while in death shroud which reaper shroud shares with death shroud.

1. Life blast if it had a bit of a shorter cast time and after cast delay would be okay. But the plague blast idea has been tossed out before which I adore.
2. Dark path needs to be a ground targeted teleport. Having it as a slow moving projectile that puts you into melee range is antithetical to the attempted theme of death shroud.
3. Doom is good. I like Doom.
4. Transfusion needs both higher life force gen and higher damage along with a much shorter cool down. Like, 25 seconds as opposed to 40!
5. Tainted Shackles is just really really bad all around. Long cool down with very low impact. It could be better as a tether and pull that causes torment or replaced entirely by gathering plague. I wouldn't miss Tainted Shackles if it went away.

Next both death shroud and reaper's shroud should have access to healing and utility. Cut the passive damage reduction shroud gives to allow players this tech. Its still a power shield but now we have more utility. This could also curve some of the issues arena net is fearing with buffing the utility and damage of necromancer as a whole.

@Lily.1935 said:Next both death shroud and reaper's shroud should have access to healing and utility. Cut the passive damage reduction shroud gives to allow players this tech. Its still a power shield but now we have more utility. This could also curve some of the issues arena net is fearing with buffing the utility and damage of necromancer as a whole.If you do this you have to lower necro cooldowns globally as shroud is also designed to compensate this. We cycle through two weaponsets, shroud and utilities at the moment. If others can oneshot our base shroud (13k LF) we can't cycle trough shroud skills anymore ending up naked with nothing to do except autoattacking.

Also people seem to underestimate the strengh of the 50% reduction. It's huge esp. when combined with spectral armor (which restores at least 1,2k LF on hit in shroud). E.g.: 5k hit -> shroud: 2,5k -> spectral armor -> 0,9k / 1,3k LF damage taken (with/without protection)

We would take an incredible impact in sustain which utility usage alone would never compensate.

So much about solo play. In smallscale the ability to take healing from others in shroud would still be overpowered.

Losing 9/10 is not exactly potential...hell my spvp core necro build does better then that...

@Lily.1935 said:Yes. Death shroud needs to be reworked. Its absolutely awful. And this is for a few reasons. The first of Which is just how poorly the skills synergies with each other.Well its true skills cant combo each other, but saying they synergise poorly is just wrong.

@ZeftheWicked.3076 said:Losing 9/10 is not exactly potential...hell my spvp core necro build does better then that...I've enough experience in that game to know how outcomes would change with minor improvements - in this case if he would have had stability. Core necro would be strong if it had a stability source in one of its shroud skills (like reaper has in RS3). Core necro is and has always been too easy to shut down.

This thread is about a shroud rework, which is not nessessary at all in terms of viability. You don't have to like core shroud and its skills. Then the spec is simply not made for you. But you should not confuse unviability with design you don't like. That's not the same!

@Emapudapus.1307 said:

@Lily.1935 said:Yes. Death shroud needs to be reworked. Its absolutely awful. And this is for a few reasons. The first of Which is just how poorly the skills synergies with each other.Well its true skills cant combo each other, but saying they synergise poorly is just wrong.

You have to look at what they are trying to do. You have part of the shroud just trying to deal raw damage and another part of shroud trying to deal condition damage. Both of these sides are too weak on their own and together they are still much too weak. The shroud doesn't provide protection against CC, so it almost seems to be designed as a pursuit tool that offers defense. But the issues are as a pursuit tool Tainted shackles will break if a foe gets out of range, Dark path is a slow moving projectile and Doom actively sends enemies away from you. Transfusion doesn't follow the pursuit them, so when I say they synergies poorly, this is what I'm talking about.

A. You have the split identity between power and condi where neither of them are capable of preforming well.B. The pursuit tools actively work against each other.C. Its sustain within shroud is reliant entirely on its natural bulk but the skills offer nothing for that.

All in all, this is what I'm trying to say.

@KrHome.1920 said:

@"ZeftheWicked.3076" said:Losing 9/10 is not exactly potential...hell my spvp core necro build does better then that...I've enough experience in that game to know how outcomes would change with minor improvements - in this case if he would have had stability. Core necro would be strong if it had a stability source in one of its shroud skills (like reaper has in RS3). Core necro is and has always been too easy to shut down.

Seems i failed to provide proper context here. This season i'm gold 1 reaper in spvp. But previous seasons i was s3 core power nec using my own bruiser build which i used to duel warriors, thieves guards and other "not for necro" threats. And i still say DS is shit. It definitely works great as a meatshield if only because core nec doesn't have reaper's increased life force degen. And that build of mine is a tank on legs. But as you said it yourself - hardcore lack of stab is something core necro can't jump over, he just can't. And reaper is a bad opponent for core nec due to being purely melee and sticking power. So i can understand the 9/10 losses not being that shameful

But DS is failing hard. In your case the issue here is that Death Shroud is too "physical caster". Core nec has only two power mainhands - dagger and axe. Bigger damage being dagger. It's only reasonable that when going shroud he should have tools for both close and ranged combat. He doesn't. CC ragdoll syndrome is in effect, life blast sucks at close rage since it's easy to just run around nec. Life Transfer is easy to interrupt and doesn't do much damage, tainted shackles are control and bit of condi (nowhere near to reaper's chills + spin to win with deathly chill traited).

Shades free scourge from transformation and life force decay issues.Reaper Shroud has crazy good synergies with it's traitline and it's own skills.Death Shroud is a relic. Simple adjusting numbers here and there won't address the issue.

Core necro needs real damage, proper synergies with his traits (hello useless dhuumfire) and shroud skills themselves, and more verstatile kit that lets him do damage at rage but also not be just a punchbag in melee when shrouded. The first and most significant place this all can be done is Death Shroud itself, since it's the only mechanic elites don't have access to, and can easily help the core necro move along.

DS2 is awful. Absolutely awful... the rest of the skills are serviceable, but could use some improvements for sure.

I'd say scrap core DS entirely, but I know that won't happen because it's too late in the game for all that. It's a failed mechanic that just doesn't synergize well with anything. If you're going to keep it and expect it to be viable anywhere, then yeah it needs a full rework. Maybe it's on their list like Mesmer Phantasms were.

Remove the second health bar, make it work like druid celetrial avatar.

Yes it should get reworked. No, it's not just changing what DS skills do.

What is wrong with DS (and RS as well) has nothing to do with the skills it gives; Shrouds suck because they aren't synonymous with the builds people use ... it's just like a second, crappy build you have to take to access it's skills.

DS/RS need more 'connection' to the non-shroud stats/traits/skills .

I think it needs defensive boons.

ds is more verstile than rs, thats why ppl outplay reaper easyer and thats why in my opinion core necro is stronger atm than reaper. You cant define its role simplisticly like with reaper beeing melee. You cant say ds is ranged/melee, or power/condi, or these skills are ment for pursuit.... Its verstile and thats its strength, utility. Maybe the identity you are trying to give ds is not correct. It only lost some conection with few traits after they were nerfed because reaper.

I'd love if "Wave of Fear" replaced "Doom".And if "Dark Path" was changed to be a ground teleport.