sweetmesquite.5024

Please. Please please please. SCOURGE 👏 SHADE 👏 DURATION The current state of scourge gameplay is dire, and the proposed changes are slapping a couple bandaids on a bullet hole. Increasing the base alacrity duration is a good choice. 1 second per application was insultingly low and required an enormous gear investment/damage sacrifice, especially considering the base duration that other classes have. (Bladesworn and Spectre require 0 boon duration for full uptime, for example) Adjusting Blood as Sand and Sand Sage to apply the bonuses with any shade up is also a step in the right direction, if you intend to keep shade duration in its current infuriating state, which I emphatically do not recommend. The Demonic Lore torment damage boost looks great. It’s good to see it back after a few years. Reworking Sadistic Searing will make the trait actually usable. I’m excited for this change. Reverting the barrier application rate is also a good decision. Barrier is the biggest tool in a healscourge’s kit. Protection from Sandstorm Shroud will be quite nice. Good change. Boosting life force from Harrowing Wave is another good choice. I understand that the shade changes were likely a result of not wanting scourge to provide alacrity to a full raid squad. I will echo all the other individuals in this thread and previous balance threads in asking for alacrity to be moved to the Sand Savant trait. Have the alacrity only come from the shade. Cap it at 5 ally targets. Revert the Desert Empowerment/Feed from Corruption swap and just. put. alacrity. on. Sand. Savant. The biggest problem, however, is still the shade duration. 8 seconds is bad. Part of the fun of playing scourge pre-balance patch was maintaining shades: sustaining uptime on all 3 and strategizing placement, and it was generally engaging. Post-patch, it’s bad. Annoyingly bad. Having to choose between slapping down all 3 for a burst and then having nothing for a while, and thus no bonuses, or having a thin spread of 1-2 shades maximum is not good gameplay. Again, 8 seconds is bad. Currently, if you select Sand Savant as the grandmaster, the shade lasts 8 seconds, but the count recharge is every 10 seconds, which can lead to shadelessness in some longer encounters. It does not feel fun; it feels tedious and spammy. Restoring shade duration to 20 seconds and putting alacrity on the Sand Savant trait would completely negate the need to change Blood as Sand and Sand Sage. It’s fine having barrier application also give alacrity. What’s not fine is encouraging skill spamming. One of the goals stated at the top of the balance preview said you wanted players “to have more flexibility in their utility skill choice and not be required to activate a particular utility type on cooldown to provide quickness or alacrity.” Now imagine the playerbase’s confusion when the changes indicated in the same post that alacrity (on scourge and druid) was tied to a specific skill type and encouraged skill mashing off cooldown. No, they’re not utility skills specifically, but requiring a scourge to use all barrier sources to apply a boon instead of waiting to use the skill when a situation requires it is a confusing design choice. (Requiring a druid to dip into a limited-resource class mechanic to give a boon instead of using it for healing is another baffling decision, but I digress). Improving the base alacrity duration is a good decision, but it’s still not a great fix. Another pain point that remains unaddressed is how a scourge heals and how the changes affect that. Healscourge mainly uses damage mitigation through barrier application to soften the impact of the hardest hits and, until the patch, had the strongest pickup ability of any class. Having to spam barrier skills–your main defensive capability– to maintain a boon instead of timing a big application with a hit you know you need to mitigate does not feel fun. Barrier application getting a quantitative boost and the increase in base alacrity duration are some positive steps. Collectively, those will both allow for more flexibility in utility choice, which leads to a much better gameplay experience. However, necromancers still don’t have access to much in the way of sustained healing, which brings me to my next point. Nuking pickup capability (Transfusion/Life from Death/Well of Blood/Ritual of Life) into the ground was not a good decision. Please revert it; the bulk of a scourge’s green number output came from that. Alacrity generation doesn’t offset the loss of pickup capability. Transfusion is also currently broken. It doesn’t work consistently, and often doesn’t work entirely on players outside your subgroup. The previous “grace period” down pull was a great tool in the kit to have–especially for positioning– and now it just feels clunky and awkward to use. Necromancer only has two weapon skills that can apply healing: regeneration from staff’s Mark of Blood, and a tiny amount of healing from warhorn’s Locust Swarm. The alteration to dagger’s Life Siphon is nice; it would be better from a support standpoint if the pulse heal affected allies as well. Healscourge can now apply decent regeneration, especially with the Serpent Siphon changes. (Excellent changes, by the way.) TL;DR summarizing pain point fixes: Revert shade duration to 20 seconds. Change the alacrity trait to Sand Savant. Restore the revive percentages to Ritual of Life/Well of Blood/Life from Death. Fix Transfusion. Add an ally heal to Life Siphon.

Hello! I’m a necro main and I have some 🌟thoughts🌟 about the upcoming balance changes. First, and most importantly. DO NOT REDUCE SHADE DURATION TO 8 SECONDS. NO. BAD. All this does is promote skill-spammy gameplay. Reducing the shade duration will also eliminate a scourge’s ability to maintain 3-shade uptime, or force a player to choose Sand Savant to continue enjoying the concentration, expertise, and damage reduction bonus of full shade coverage. Also PvE only? WHY?? Overall, I’m fine seeing scourge get alacrity. It’s fine tying alacrity to barrier generation. But reducing barrier generation and a large part of the healing a healscourge can provide to “offset” gaining alacrity is very not fine. Additionally, part of the necromancer’s class identity is boon corruption. Why are you removing so much of it? Boonstrip is different, and they serve different purposes. Now to specifics: Dagger already provides a ton of life force generation; changing Quickening Thirst to further increase it is unnecessary. Why not change it to allow Life Siphon to apply to allies as well? The Banshee’s Wail changes would take it from somewhat useless to completely useless. Don’t remove the healing from it. As a matter of fact, improve the healing from it. Even running full healing gear, the healing provided from it is negligible. Vampiric Presence could also use a boost if you’re still planning to nuke Life from Death. Why would I take Sadistic Searing for a single stack of burning, and no other bonuses? Very excited for the Serpent Siphon change. It’s going from a skill I’ve literally never used to what looks to be a solid support utility. A+ change. Why are the harbinger elixir cooldowns only getting reduced in competitive modes? And Healscourge. Look how you’ve massacred my boy. It’s already a niche build. Its usefulness in instanced content is inversely related to group skill; it’s godly in training squads and borderline useless in experienced squads. And, because necro doesn’t have access to significant sustained healing, the core of the build is barrier generation to block the hardest hits, and Transfusion to pull downs to you so you can pick up. The bulk of a healscourge’s burst healing comes from Ritual of Life as you’re rezzing downs. Destroying the Blood Magic traitline to completely gut its pickup capability –as an offset to unasked-for alacrity on an elite traitline– feels unnecessary. Other classes don’t have to sacrifice healing for boon generation; it feels like necromancer is getting singled out unfairly.

For background: I main a necro, and have 4k hours played in the class in PvE, including open world, fractals, fractal cms, strikes, and raids. I do not participate in any PvP, and have very limited experience in WvW. Overall thoughts on Harbinger: it feels like a good start. Currently, the risk in endgame PvE is high (ESPECIALLY in some raids and fractals. Ask my healers; one said keeping three harbingers up was harder than solohealing Dhuum.) but the reward doesn't seem to scale with the class mechanic. The new shroud has good flow, the aesthetics and sound effects are very solid, excellent condi application, and some great CC. My only complaint is that skill 4, Voracious Arc, has a cast animation that feels jarring when used directly after any of the other shroud skills. I understand the need for CC skills to have tells for PvP and WvW, but it feels a touch longer than reaper shroud 5, Executioner's Scythe. The pistol weapon skills are pretty solid. It brings good CC, solid condi application, and some decent life force generation. Vicious Shot does feel a touch slow when fighting a single target, but the ricochet is very nice when facing several mobs. Blight is a good concept, but it lacks potential. It's good that blight accumulates in shroud, but it doesn't have enough interaction with elixirs and shroud skills. Holosmiths have to manage heat: they get bonuses when they have a lot of it, but the overheat mechanic is a punishing consequence. Making blight a mechanic that needs to be regulated, instead of max-and-forget, gameplay, would be much more interesting and engaging. There is no way to remove blight, aside from waiting out the long timer. The heal elixir currently applies blight. I think the heal should remove a modest amount of blight, 5-10 stacks, in exchange for something. What came to mind: "Cleanse (5-10) blight. Heal ‘x’ amount, plus an additional amount for each boon on you. All boons on you are stripped." Elixirs are alright. The flat healing on the heal elixir feels very low, but the life force is nice. Elixir of Bliss has the most interesting play of the utilities: scaling life force gained per condition cleansed is good. The rest are less compelling, just "press button, receive boon" or “press for more blight.” Suggested improvements: Elixirs could be thrown skills with an AoE indicator, or have a different effect when in shroud, or could be traited to do additional things, similar to how Master of Corruption tweaks corruption skills. Traits need some revisiting. Some of them (Twisted Medicine) are excellent for a support spec. Others feel uninspired. All three master-tier traits are all different flavors of "convert 13% vitality to x stat." All three grandmaster traits are "select your pulsing shroud aura." This lacks diversity. Scourge traits give a variety of options and niche uses: think cdps to varying levels of support and hybridized builds to fully-fledged healer. Scourge traits offer interesting changes that can fundamentally change how you play the class. The constant healing from life force should be a trait, not the default. I found it to be difficult, and often frustrating, to build enough life force to even enter shroud. The life force bar constantly shifts in size based on blight changing the health pool, and it is aggravating to try to figure out exactly how much life force you have so you can determine what shroud skills you have enough life force to use. I suggest that healing by consuming life force replace the GM trait Cascading Corruption; power builds don’t mesh well with the class. Overall, Harbinger is fun to play, but it needs a few adjustments. My other suggestions are for equipment provided to beta characters. I like that runes and sigils are provided, but what’s better for testing is the ability to select what runes or sigils we get to play around with. There were 12ish different runes provided, so offering 12 boxes with a selection bar to pick what runes you want would be great. Same with sigils.