Allium Cepa.6927

I like that health sacrifice is back. But it feels lacking. Back in GW1, the main benefit of life sacrifice skills was most of them were way less energy expensive compared to other similar skills. GW2 does not have an energy resource (ignoring rev), so there needs to be some other benefit for the sacrifice. A new/updated trait or two that trigger when sacrificing health would be my choice. Flip skills should be available a couple seconds longer after using the main skill. From PvE perspective. Sword 1: This feels fine. A little less damage than axe, but get chill and healing. It can hit multiple targets but is a reflectable projectile. I like it. Sword 2: When using both main skill and flip, the damage is a bit low, or needs to do something extra. It has about the same damage as Axe2, but has less life force gain, a health cost and enemy health threshold requirement. The only benefit being it can hit more than one target. Flip should be instant cast. Sword 3: I like it. But it is strange having a gap closer on a raged weapon. I guess it's fine on a reaper before they hit shroud or something. It just feels like a good skill on the wrong weapon. Sword 4: On paper, this skill looks fine. But it feels a little off when I use it. My gut say the flip should be unblockable and faster cast. Sword 5: I don't like it. The base skill has the same damage as reapers mark (staff 5) but longer cooldown and is a projectile. The flip skill has a high health cost for only a fear, something reapers mark also does, without health cost. In PvE fear isn't that important, even though it is an impressive 2 second base duration.

Necromancer What I like: Well of Blood: Adding regen to it is a nice little boost to team healing. It's mostly used for reviving with Ritual of Life and this should help outside of that situation. It's not much and will just get overwritten by stronger regen from the party though. Quickening Thirst: I never used this trait for its cooldown or move speed. If for some reason you are blood magic and not taking Ritual of Life and using daggers I guess its better. Life Siphon: Changing it to single hit that applies a DoT/recovery effect frees up time to do something else and avoid being interrupted halfway into channeling. Desert Empowerment: Thematically, grating alac when applying barrier works for scourge (although I feel alac itself is another problem). I don't know any builds that were using Feed from Corruption that it replaces. Serpent Siphon: Probably my favorite necro change for these notes. A targeted party defensive skill. Barrier, regen and aegis. Good times. Abrasive Grit: Might generation isn't much of an issue in most groups, but its not a bad addition. Sandstorm Shroud: Pulsing barrier. Seems fine to me. What I don't like: Ritual of Life: Why the massive nerf to revive? What's wrong with a trait/skill focused on picking up downed players? It's something (mostly) unique in the game. Or are we only allowed to play DPS and Boons? Elementalist will be way better at downstate/death management than Necro with Geyser and Arcane Resurrection now, somehow. Desiccate: It's better? Numbers wise at least. I'm not sure I would use it over other options yet. It feels like the skill is trying to do too much, but failing to do any of it well. Fury, Might, life force and boon conversion. It looks like the intent is to spam it off cooldown for maintaining 8 stacks of might and fury (at full boon duration). Spamming any utility skill off cooldown is just bad design imo. Spiteful Spirit, Path of Corruption, Enfeebling blood, Unholy Feast: I don't see any reason to make these changes to boon strip/conversion. That's one of necromancers class identity things. In PvE, boon conversion/strip is just nice to have for things like fractals, but not that strong, and in PvP, there is so much boon spam that any boons removed are gona get reapplied in a few seconds. At least when a boon is corrupted you get a condition or two on the target, that you don't have that much control over. Banshee's wail: I see the heal was moved to Life from Death. I don't mid the heal moving, but now Banshees wail only makes Locust Swarm a tiny bit better. Anyone building for fear on Wail of Doom is going to take the Fear of Death trait. This trait needs to do something more to ever be worth picking over Vampiric Presence or Life from Death. Why not something like foes you fear/hit with warhorn skills have attributes reduced by 15% for 5 seconds? (kind of like how wail of doom worked in GW1). Sand Cascade: That is a massive nerf to barrier. At 1200 heal power that's 1104 less barrier. This is the main way scourge gives barrier and now it's down to ~2484 every 10 seconds, if you have lifeforce. I know healing and barrier aren't quite the same, but for comparison, that's averaging about 250 barrier/s. Now look at heal tempest. They heal 450hp/s by literally just existing near someone (soothing mist). Manifest Sand Shade: 8 seconds is way too short. Unless Blood as Sand and Sand Sage are getting changed it's going to cause problems. It also means you need a new sand shade every cycle of shade skills. That's just clunky. If you want players to summon shades more, keep them at least 12-15 seconds but make the first shade skill you use after summoning a shade do something extra on that shade. Like how ventari tablet works. After these changes we get (for heal scourge): Gain the ability to distribute aegis every 20 seconds Barrier gives alacrity and might Gain a bit of healing (~2500 every 20 seconds at 1200 healpower) from taking Life from Death over Banshee's Wail now that it provides the outgoing healing boost A bit more regeneration from Well of Blood and Serpent Siphon Gain a bit of barrier application from Desert Empowerment, now that it's mandatory and grandmaster But: Much weaker revive potential Weaker barrier generation from Sand Cascade Depending on the numbers, even weaker barrier still when we need to drop some healing power for concentration. Judging by the might duration on desiccate (9 seconds and 16 sec cooldown), we will be expected to have near 100% Sand shades that only last 8 seconds leading to Blood as Sand and Sand Sage being weaker. Lose Sand Savant for big shade, as we now need Desert Empowerment for alac Must pick between Well of blood for regen and the now limited revive and Sand Flare to compensate for the missing barrier generation and to keep alacrity/might up Lose a utility slot to Serpent Siphon. It's too good not to take. Conclusion: What is the end goal for heal scourge mostly here? I understand you want to give it alacrity so it has more viability in end game group content. That's fine. But are the sacrifices is worth it? After thinking about it a while, it's not as bad as my first reaction. I'm not convinced it's enough though. With what I predict to be lower overall barrier values, and lack of revive, I would want to see a little more normal healing potential. Add a trait that makes regen a little stronger, or allies siphon more life while they have regen. (remember, tempest can get 450/s doing absolutely nothing). The 8 second sand shade duration means you are going to need to summon a new shade every time you want to use a set of shade skills. Summoning a shade is going to need to do a little more on it's own to feel worth it. Other Concerns: There is way too much boon spam in the game. In all game modes. Back in my day (GW1), Boons (enchantment) and removal meant something. It could be a key layer of defense providing the target 75% block chance as long as they keep critting. You corrupt that and now they are rapidly losing health for 10 seconds and your big meaty warrior friend can slap that silly sin around, and that enchantment is not coming back for another 30 seconds. Now days in GW2 you rip off a boon and 2 more show back up within a couple seconds. I genuinely feel that boon application rate needs to slow down to like 1/3rd its current speed, but increase the duration and cooldowns so losing it is more impactful. That or necro needs to be obliterating boons at the same rate. (or perhaps you could make something where corrupted boons cant be reapplied for a few seconds) The game is now being built around Alacrity and Quickness. I don't like Alacrity or Quickness Classes are slowly losing their identity every patch.

From a PvE perspective: Alchemic Vigor had a good change helping sustain and actually making blight do something beneficial on it's own. The problem here is that it needs healing power to scale. It makes sense, as it heals you but heal power does nothing else for harbinger other than a bit on Elixir of Promise regen. So its hard to justify taking that attribute space. Based on my testing it looks like it has a 13 + 0.013HP heal per stack. So at 1000 heal power, that's 650 heal a second at 25 blight. Quite reasonable, just not worth the investment. (Its 325/sec with 0 heal power, max blight). Everything else in this spec is based on vitality. it would be nice to see it scale with that or be based on %health, rather than flat. Pistol. Not that exciting but I don't dislike using it. The problem is damage. Power build is better with axe, condi is better with scepter, especially with Lingering Curse (and the parasitic contagion nerf bringing less reason to not take lingering curse). Pistol does work well for death magic carapace stacks though. decent life force gen. The grandmaster traits still are boring. The only one worth taking most of the time is Deathly Haste for perma quickness(and fury). That alone makes up for the lost damage the other two would have given. but it also gives it to the party. Not saying this is a bad thing, just the other two need to do more, and actually change the playstyle. Not just pulse damage + stats. This has been a complaint from beta1. Vile Vials. No benefit from blight. Make it add a small splash heal based on blight or reduced recharge higher, but based on blight. Fear. If harbinger isn't getting fear, at least make the fear traits apply to daze/stun in harbi. I'm still figuring out a build and rotations, but so far am struggling to do more damage than scourge. A glass cannon needs damage to work. Like, a lot of damage. 12.5% from max blight just isn't enough, especially when you need to take elixirs to keep it up or be in shroud that removes utility skills (and lose max hp/shroud protection). When I jump into melee with little defenses, the damage needs to be high enough to kill a target before it kills you. Scourge should not be able to out damage it from range with better survivability. The more feedback I see the less I feel that Anet actually reads any of it. Or at least those that make the decisions care. For example, the blight tooltip still says -2% health per stack (It's actually about 1.5%). Seriously. This would take 30 seconds to fix. They had ~3 months to do this. I don't expect any changes for a while. We'll see where harbinger is in a month or so once people figure it out and if it ever gets taken over scourge/reaper/firebrand. Just hope they don't abandon it as a lost cause if it doesn't see play. Harbinger still has potential.

Just a thought that came up for damage to survivability ratios. Have the expected damage increase be the inverse of the survivability lost. For example, if harbinger is losing its survivability to 2/3 what it was (It's probably more, survivability is not just max hp), then it should be gaining 3/2 in damage. Of course, this taken to extremes gives you some wack stuff like if we drop survivability to 1/4 we would be getting 4 times damage in return. But an inverse ratio would be a good guide for turning necro into a glass cannon.

So this feedback is mostly from Vindi support in open world metas like Drizzlewood. (Minstrels gear) Urn: I like Urn, but it needs a few tweaks. The new energy cost for Urn feels good. -10 was way too much before. -5 feels right. I didn't find it worth risking the 25% hp threshold for resistance. Was it intended to be something you aim for or just something that's there to help out if you happen to be at 25% when dropping urn? If you should be aiming to get that low health threshold I think the healing bonus from dropping it at low health needs to be a bit stronger. Make the bonus stack multiplicatively with itself, not additively, but reduce its power to like 80/85%. Assuming it has a base heal of ~1000, the 25% threshold would heal about 6k, rather than 4k with additive calculations, while higher hp thresholds would be less impactful. Make dropping the urn faster. So many times I have died because I clicked to drop the urn and follow up with Selfless Spirit (the heal) only to end up canceling the drop and wasting the self heal from Selfless Spirit. Using the urn required me to do a few things to survive. As a Healer/support focus I wanted to take Saint's shield but found that did not provide the survivability needed in Urn. To have the surviavlity needed I needed to do a few things: 1. Take Imperial Impact for the protection. 2. Take the Retribution trait line for Determined Resolution. Grab Spiritual Reckoning, Resolute Evasion and Vicious Reprisal. These together provide 93% strike damage reduction and 83% condi damage reduction while urn is up. It helps to offset the constant damage and lack of healing. Providing a little more in survivability options while urn is up, like stronger self barrier. While it didn't feel necessary with the above setup, taking Resilient Spirit provided great survivability. But not quite enough to take Saint's Shield or drop Retribution. Alliance Tactics: While the utility skills are much easier to use now that they don't flip, they now lack the charm and "fun" factor they had. I felt more engaged managing the flip. Now it just feels like a 3rd stance. I would like to see the flip mechanic come back in some way. Make a trait that brings back flip and provides some benefit for having them flip. The other supports: While I think (support) vindi is fun on it's own merit, its running into a problem that many supports have. They just can't compare to chrono, druid, healscourge or firebrand. I don't see it being used at all in any challenging group content. Is this a problem with Vindicator being too weak or is it that the other support are too strong? No one wants to see their favorite firebrand meta nerfed, but buffing vindicator up to that level with quickness and such may be too much. Hard choice, but perhaps a little of both?

I'm not much of a thief player so I can't compare much to base thief, deadeye or daredevil. I also did not test specter much in the previous beta, so this feedback doesn't take into account whatever changed. I can say though that what I have tested of specter is fun. I love the idea of providing single target support also applying rot wallow venom for a damage boost that isn't might. Healing linked target by doing damage is cool. Spector appears to have decent (for a support) damage potential if built for it, counting the venom stacks on an ally while providing a bunch of barrier. It actually reminds me of the 600hp monk duo from GW1 in a way. I like that all the wells teleport you. Well of tears should probably do more though. It literally only does a bit of strike damage on what looks to be a mostly condi/healing spec. The traits feel diverse and meaningful (I'm looking at you harbinger). Perhaps Consume shadows shouldn't remove 100% of remaining shroud, more like 50%? Larcenous Torment and Strength of Shadows both make torment way better. Literally doubling its damage together. Not sure if that is a good thing or the power should be spread out a little. It still is a support spec, so I'm not sure how viable building for damage is anyway. Shroud, while a cool idea feels like a heal with 2 more steps. Spector doesn't have the damage to feel worth using shroud over say, well heals or scepter/dagger 3. Maybe if the link would chain from your main link to other nearby allies but provide less benefit to them? Offhand weapons don't do much for specter. Perhaps a minor trait could make them provide shroud power or self barrier? Because specter is so single target focused, but most content is a group thing I think a way to help with this would be to make barrier and heals/boons splash off your link target at reduced effect. They play style would probably remain the similar, but it wouldn't feel like you are neglecting everyone else that you are not linked to. Specter is fun. In its current form, it feels like it would be great in 2-3 man content, but I can't think of any content like that outside the occasional pvp thing. It doesn't feel bad on it's own merit, but rather just how the game was designed, it doesn't fit in yet. You can make a square peg fit in a round hole, it just depends how hard you push.

Harbinger is better than in Beta 1 but I just don't feel compelled to play it over scourge/reaper yet. Some tweaks on elixirs, reworking 7/9 traits and blight buffs would fix it I think. Elixers: On paper, all these elixir skills are fine. The numbers are comparable to other skills. They are certainly way better than in Beta 1. But on actually using them, they feel lacking somewhat. Throwing elixirs is a good change. Blight management based on where you throw them is a good change. Blight thresholds are a good idea, but are seriously under powered. Move some of the elixir power to the threshold and make what threshold offers better. 100% inc duration on 6 sec weakness or 100% inc damage for a single ~470 damage strike is not enough. I feel like one of the things that holds elixirs back is Twisted Medicine. Because of this trait, every elixir needs to have boons and they can't be too good because they will end up on 5 people. All the elixirs need to be support oriented, but Harbinger was supposed to be a glass cannon spec. The elixir designs don't significantly aid that style any more than many of the core utility skills. The main reason you would use them I feel would be maintaining blight for that 12.5% damage. But that is not worth 3 utility slots. I think they should just splash boons by default, not needing Twisted Medicine. As that's all I predict they will be used for if there is no change. Promise: This one feels good actually. Reasonable heal with a ~7.5k poison at threshold However, the regen is silly. No one is going to build healing power on harbinger and harbinger has nothing to support regen. It's better than nothing but not signifigant enough to make a difference. In PvP it will get stripped, in PvE, someone else will give you a much better regen. Make the heal or regen effect stronger above the threshold. Bliss: A condition cleanse + boon strip. While thematically appropriate, having resolution here is not the most effective (without Twisted Medicine and concentration). You just cleared off all (hopefully) your conditions on using the skill. Sure you get life force for each one cleared but Specral walk does the same thing, but also stun breaks and has a teather teleport mechanic. While the boon strip portion isn't bad, it feels like an afterthought. It doesnt really synergise with harbinger or do anything per boon removed. Also, you either need to wait to have conditions on you, or waste the condition removal portion of the skill for the boon strip portion. Risk: Compare this to “Ya'll Weaklings!” from Reaper and its quite similar. If it hits 5 targets, the main difference would be Elixir of Risk grants Fury, while the shout “You are all Weaklings!” is instant and stun breaks. Problem here is that Harbinger benefits from Fury way less than Reaper would. For the sake of Twisted Medicine I would leave Fury here, but make the threshold do something the harbinger can benefit from. Anguish: Swiftness is a nice utility thing but not that powerful. Quickness is incredibly powerful. I somehow have avoided playing anything that provides quickness before but 5 sec base on 20 sec traited cooldown feels fair. Perhaps make threshold apply slow. Ignorance: Stun break + Resistance (5s) is reasonable but a little under powered. The blind works well with it. The threshold is useless. No one is going to use this skill for damage. Well of Power is just a better skill though. It Stun breaks, removes the conditions that resistance would be negating, helps the team without needing to be traited, combo fields and offers stability. Ambition: ALL THE BOONS + some conditions. Very powerful when used as support, less so for solo dps. The condition damage side of it gets about ¼ the damage that Plaguelands will even with the blight threshold. Blight: Blight has the same issue I had before with it. It doesn't do enough as the main focus of the elite spec. Adding blight thresholds is a great start, but blight itself offers little reason to stack it up. ~12.5% damage is a terrible trade off for 37% hp, a trait and losing shroud shield. Compare it to Soul Eater trait from Reaper. That gives 10% damage and 5% life steal without sacrificing health or needing to maintain a resource. Blight also feels scared to commit to stacking up to 25 and sitting there. Shroud 3 and 4 will drop it and elixers used at range will drop blight for little benefit. It's like having 10 blight is the ideal number for the thresholds, but not loosing too much hp. Harbinger is a glass cannon trade off, not a balancing act. You should want to go all in on blight. Blight needs to be stronger. The damage bonus needs to be built in, not based on traits. Blight needs interaction with traits that aren't Septic Corruption. I'll list some trait ideas below. Unless I misunderstand damage calcs, condi damage from blight is half as strong as it should be. I did a test with poison from elixir of promise. 468 damage ticks at 0 blight, 501 damage ticks with 25 blight. That's about 7% not 12.5%. It should be ticking for 526.5 damage at 25 blight. Probably a bug. Traits: Wicked Corruption: Why does this trait exist? Power harbinger is not at all viable. It's clear that harbinger is intended to be a condition spec. Combine this with Septic Corruption and free a slot. Vile Vials: This one is fine, but merge it with Twisted Medicine Septic Corruption: 1/2% damage per blight should be built in to the blight mechanic. Combine this with Wicked Corruption and make it part of blight, free another trait slot. Implacable Foe: Gaining stability on entering shroud is fine, it should probably stunbreak too. Ferocity from Vitality is bad. Harbinger does not support power builds. Twisted Medicine: This one is also fine. But could probably merge with Vile Vials Dark Gunslinger: This should be an adept trait for it's power, It's about as powerful as Spiteful Talisman and that's an adept trait. Cascading Corruption: Once again, power build harbinger is bad. Pulsing low damage and cripple in shroud is boring, and useless in PvE. Replace this with something that interacts with blight. Ideas below. Deathly Haste: Powerful, but boring. I'm willing to say this is fine as is, if the other grand master traits change. Approaching Doom: Boring. Just another flavor of the same trait but with torment. No build diversity offered here. Ideas for different traits: My goal here is just to provide some more diverse trait ideas I feel would work better with harbinger design. Not saying these need to replace every existing trait or that they would Adept 1: Applying 5 torment stacks will also apply poison. (3 sec cooldown) Adept 2: Increase Life Force gain based on blight and rate of blight gain in shroud or loss out of shroud. Adept 3: Reaching blight threshold for skills heals you on use (including the ones in shroud). Master 1: Minimum blight is 10 (so always qualify for thresholds) and gain Expertise based on blight (about 10 per stack) Master 2: -0.5% damage taken per blight. Elixir cooldowns -20% Master 3: Torment does 1% more damage for each stack of torment (max 20%). Grand Master 1: Gain blight outside of shroud, Lose blight while in shroud. Losing blight heals you. Grand Master 2: Damage increase from blight is twice as strong, max health loss back to 2% per stack Grand Master 3: Above 20 blight your attacks are unblockable (perhaps a time limit or cooldown) and you pulse alacrity (maybe different boon or two could work also). Grand Master 4: You can't take more than ~10% of your max HP in damage from a single hit (Would make it a little safer when low max hp from blight. I miss you, protect spirit) Shroud: You lose protection from shroud that other necro specs get and you build blight in exchange for damage and mobility. Harbinger shroud wants you to be in melee with no defensive options and less health while doing about the same damage. Half of harbinger is about support and the shroud does not offer any support. There are few ways to fix this, other than better traits. (Good traits make everything better) 1. Make harbinger shroud better at range options and damage avoidance. Remove the spread from dark barrage, make devouring cut a retreat/evade skill that give aegis or something at threashold. Why are shroud 1 and 2 not projectile finishers and why is Voracious Arc not a blast finisher? 2. Double down on the glass cannon melee aspect. Make dark barrage a short range skill, buff its damage. It needs to melt enemies before they melt you. Give Vital draw condition damage or make floated enemies take more damage. 3. Give shroud skills support functions. Something like Voracious arc or Vital Draw creating combo fields, destroying projectiles or increasing boon durations by a second or so. 4. Change how Devouring Cut works. Maybe I just don't know how to use it but I have not found a moment when it is worth using. When engaging a fight I just Voracious Arc in with the stun, follow up with Vital Draw and spam 12111211112. Gun: I don't like it. I'm not entirely sure why. It's not fun. I think it's because all the skills are just strait damage, with Vile Blast also having a stun. Compared to scepter it has less condition damage but more power damage. But as we know, power builds are bad on harbinger. So it ends up just being less damage. Scepter 1 has a more satisfying combo, and poisons. Scepter 2 is ground targeted AoE and cripples, Scepter 3 interacts with boons and conditions on the target. The lingering curse trait also makes it hard to compete with scepter damage. Vitality: Vitality doesn't feel very important to build on harbinger. Previously, when life force would heal out of shroud, more vitality = more healing. Now that it is gone, vitality only offers meh bonuses from the master traits. If life force healing does not come back, I'm not sure where to make vitality worth investing in. I really want to see heavy vitality investment worth it on harbinger. Enough so to make it a legitimate consideration over Viper's gear sets. Other thoughts: Power spec is still bad. Either buff it significantly or replace it. I like blight thresholds conceptually Execution needs some work Please change all the torment stuff to poison. Torment is the scourges territory They even have 15% torment damage. Poison would synergies with Death Magic traits and be more thematic. Bring back life force healing Elixirs feel too team support focused for a glass cannon spec Is harbinger intended to be a ranged dps or melee dps? Elixirs feel required on harbinger. Perhaps if there were more ways to build blight (like better traits) they would not. Elixir art please Harbinger is in a better place than in Beta 1. But still not a good spot yet. It NEEDS to have more dps potential than the other necro specs. If it does not then what purpose does it have if Reaper/Scourge can do comparable damage while keeping survivability? I think a way to do this would be have the harbinger keep below average damage with 0 blight, but great surivability. At 25 blight stacks, ~25% above average damage while sacrificing that survivability. Yes, benchmark 48kdps on kitty may be madness, but it's also just kitty and you won't see play like that outside of a few raids. The entire spec should not be restricted because of that. That's the point of being a glass cannon. The damage needs to be worth it. I don't like Devouring Cut And remember: The best “cost” is opportunity cost. Interesting trait choices are made when all your options are good and picking one means you miss out on the benefits of another. If 2/3 options are bad for your your build, there is no choice here and no interesting build diversity.

Enjoying Vindi over all so far. Been focused on support type setups in open world. The main thing I feel off about is the energy drain of the Urn. I actually like the urn. You can get 93% damage reduction on some setups while team healing and providing some boons. But that energy drain is so high. If you use the urn and no other energy skills at 50e, you get about 10 seconds. That's fine, but if you want to actually use any skills you have far less urn time. I would expect the self damage of the urn to be the tradeoff for more energy efficiency. And you cant be healed during it

Dodging with Imperial Impact or Saint's Shield does not reliably allow movement through enemy space. You just end up body blocked. So far Death Drop has allowed movement through enemies.

I spent some time today going through all the feedback replies here and tried to tally up the main points people had. Do note that this just represents over all feelings and doesn't address the nuance for some of the points. Feedback point Number of times suggested Shroud 5 needs a little improvement 5 Shroud 3 and 4 need more damage/movement impairment cleanse 3 Shroud overshadows non shroud skills 1 Shroud is fun 21 Shroud skills lack focus 4 Shroud needs utility skill access or built in support skills 3 Elixirs are boring/bad 84 Elixirs are mostly good 4 Pistol range needs 1200 4 Pistol is fun 18 Pistol is weak/boring 28 Concentration feels required 3 Power setup is too weak 33 Boon support is good 2 Boon support setup is too easy/op 2 Boon support setup is lacking 6 Condition damage setup is good 2 Condition damage is redundant 1 Harbinger needs fear 10 Change torment to poison 15 Keep torment 2 Blight needs to do more 28 Blight needs better management tools 16 Blight risk/reward isn't significant enough 18 Blight benefits need to be built in, not dependent on a trait 8 Blight needs to benefit support 7 Life force generation is too low 13 Life force generation is too high 1 DPS (condi) too high 5 DPS at a good spot 5 DPS too low 3 Survivability is too high 6 Survivability is at a good spot 10 Survivability is too low 12 Twisted Medicine needs more AOE 1 Dhuumfire too weak 2 Dhuumfire is too strong 1 Top trait line (power) is bad 8 Middle trait line (support) is bad 3 Grand master traits are boring/bad 20 Grand master traits are fine 1 Trait lines should not be so focused for condi/power/support 13 Adept traits need changes 3 Animations are good 1 Animations are bad/boring 7 Better visuals to show blight stacks 15 Harbinger is over all fun 28 Harbinger is over all boring 17

I'm not 100% sure this is a bug, but it is a problem. Vile Vials: I mentioned this in feedback thread also, but the condition application from this trait will not work if you do anything after using an elixir. The first 1/2 sec of the skill is the activation and drinking it. About a second after this the vial is thrown on the ground. It's only at this point that the conditions will apply. But if you do any animation other than move, it will cancel this part and you get no benefit from the traits condition application. So you need to just stand there for a moment between each elixir doing nothing for it to work. Quickness does shorten the time it takes but it's still easy to animation cancel the vial throw.

From a PvE perspective, using the beta gear. Would have jumped in T4 Fractals to compare with my scourge, but you know, Agony. I will be trying out PvP with it later. Good things: 1. Dark Disciple. Using life force to heal out of shroud, and managing life force as more than a panic button is fun. Survivability with trailblazers felt great with low blight. With Vital Persistence, Just running around out of shroud and no concern for chip damage while still having decent condi damage output. Over all it felt very comfortable to play casually. 2. I like the concept of blight. Risking max Hp for some reward, in this case mostly condi damage. 3. I like the attempt for another Necro support option now with the middle line and elixirs, spreading boons around. But I feel it could be done better. 4. Shroud skills 1,2 and 4 feel fun and simple to use. I think it's ok to have a little bit of braindead spam 2 off cooldown type builds. It shouldn't be common, but a few are fine. Something feels off about shroud 5 to me. I cant explain it. It just feels "wrong" Bad things: Top line: Power line just feels bad. Even going full glass cannon zerker, you get less damage than a condi setup with some vitality in it. I feel no real reason to use pistol over axe here. I tried going hybrid with celestials, and that worked somewhat, but still felt like just a worse version of pure condition setup with a bit more survivability and up front damage. Vile Vials: Conceptually it is a good idea. Adding some slow and vulnerability to a support setup. There are several problems though. 1. Range. You need to stand on top of the thing you are trying to apply the conditions to, on an elite specialization with a 900 range gun. Why? 2. It takes 2 seconds to work from pressing the button. You can't attack or dodge roll after using the skill before the animation of throwing the potion on the ground or nothing will happen. This INCLUDES using another elixir. It is very easy to spam all 5 elixirs in a row into 1 auto attack and get literally zero benefit from the trait. The trait effect needs to happen at the end of the skill progress bar, not a full second after that, or at the least not be animation canceled. 3. No benefit from blight. A trait that requires to you use elixirs, that give blight, on a specialization around blight, gets no benefit from it. Where is the risk/reward here? Something like boon duration/concentration from blight, aoe heals, life steal buff, temporary vitality for the party, reduced condition duration on the party. Something to make blight worth it on this trait. Cascading Corruption/ Approaching Doom: The 3 second pulse effects on these feel useless. You probably wont get more than one pulse out on a target and that is negligibly useful. Otherwise these are just boring +Power or +Condition damage. They need to be more impactful and there needs to be an opportunity cost here. If I'm playing a condition build there is no reason for me to take Cascading Corruption at all. I lose nothing by not taking it. The same the other way around. If you want traits to meaningful they must all be good choices for most builds and require to you choose one at the expense of the others. Fear: Fear is important to the necromancer. Not having it Feels like missing something important. In understand that it would not work well with shroud 3 and 4 that are gap closers, but even reaper has a fear. Necromancer not having fear built in to shroud makes Terror and Fear of Death hard to take. Pistol: The pistol on necro feels ok to use, but just doesn't have the oomph to make it stand out from scepter. It's auto gets 3 targets, while scepter gets 1, but scepter also gets 50% condition duration from lingering curse. Pistol has lower cooldowns and better lifeforce generation + a stun though. Not the most important in PvE. The strike damage on pistol is terrible. No where near enough to justify using it on a power build like the top line suggests. I think pistol has potential. It just needs a slight boost to power coefficient and some more condition duration on its 1. Although an attack chain would be a lot more fun/interesting. Torment: As said by many others here. Please replace torment with poison. We have scourge for torment/burning. Swapping torment for poison would keep damage more consistent on moving targets and give Death Magic a bit of love. Elixirs: They feel much like "Push button, receive boon". They are not that interesting. Outside of some organized groups where you can all stack and have a harbinger sharing some quickness I don't see them getting any use. Any condition setup is going to want Blood is Power, Signet of Undeath for lifeforce and possibly Shadow fiend or Epidemic. Take some inspiration from the GW1 sacrifice skills. Make Elixir of Promise act similar to Blood Renewal. Make it give you a good chunk of blight in exchange for a reasonable heal over time. At the end, it would remove all blight with another heal. Allowing players to control the blight level more. Have another flask act like Contagion. While the effect is up, any time you get a condition, you get some blight and copy the condition to enemies near you. once again, allowing carful players to stack blight with corruption skills, or punish close range aggressive condition pressure, but with extra risk. There is so much potential here not taken. Blight management: Blight feels too hard to build when you want it. To get 25 you need to spend 90% of your time in shroud, thus losing life force and limiting skills, or be using the elixirs non stop as they are off cooldown. There is no tactic to this and it limits build diversity. Over all I think (PvE) harbinger has a lot of potential. It's fun, has better mobility and a cool idea with blight risk/reward. But it doesn't take it far enough to provide a compelling alternative to scourge/reaper/core necro. Using half your skills and elite specialization to get -50% hp and (potentially) +25% damage just isn't worth it to me.