Potentially Crazy Harbinger Design Idea

[Dr Meta.3158]

I had a random thought and decided to bring write it down before I leave out to eat and forget.

So the Harbinger is an interesting concept in that you essentially turned shroud into a thief (along with giving thief a shroud that turned it into a necromancer). Now the blight mechanic that has been added to "balance" the spec out has been clunky and while I think its going in the right direction with having a dualistic balance between gaining and removing blight between shroud and elixirs. I had a thought that could make it even more interesting and engaging.

So what if blight were like initiative but even more extreme. In this system we have it so that Blight stacks up to 100 instead of 25 and each stack of blight reduces your maximum HP by 1%. In this manner, blight can indeed kill you. This makes is newbie unfriendly, but the spec in itself is already newbie unfriendly, the direction its going in now is even more newbie unfriendly. So since we're already in that territory, lets go all the way. Now imagine if the shroud skills had 0 cooldown, but the shroud skills 2 through 5 gave you an increasing amount of blight from using them while shroud itself gave you 1 blight per second. The skills would need some shifting or complete changing themselves, but it fits in nicely with gaining a lot of power at great risk and you are in control of how risky you want to be.

The elixirs would work well with the concept of drinking the elixirs to drop some blight off of you faster beyond losing 1 blight per second outside of shroud although the cooldown on the elixirs would warrant still some care in how much blight you stack on yourself in general.

On top of that, I think all of the traits in the harbinger specialization line should be interacting with blight instead of just the first adept traits. You can fine tune exactly what you're getting out of applying blight to yourself and customize your risk-reward system. Examples could include damage/durability increases from more blight stacks, healing from removing blight stacks, applying conditions around you from hitting blight thresholds, increasing boon duration/condition duration from hitting blight thresholds, and so on.

Could be completely crazy and not work, or it could work out great. I'm not sure, but that's the pitch. Do what you will with it.