Estimates for Power Reaper with May 2 Changes

[Griifen.2473]

9 hours ago, mandala.8507 said:

Life siphon damage can't crit. It's not a bug.

But there are two parts to the attack: the physical damage from the projectile colliding with the enemy, and the life siphon that takes place in addition to the physical damage.
I'm not talking about the life siphon doing critical damage - it's only a 1k damage anyways. I want the physical projectile, the slow moving hand, to be able to critically hit.

[KrHome.1920]

1 hour ago, Griifen.2473 said:

But there are two parts to the attack: the physical damage from the projectile colliding with the enemy, and the life siphon that takes place in addition to the physical damage.
I'm not talking about the life siphon doing critical damage - it's only a 1k damage anyways. I want the physical projectile, the slow moving hand, to be able to critically hit.

There is no addition.

Life siphon as a mechanic has two components:

1. a non crit damage value

2. a healing value

But since every skill in the game is coded in its own way, because ANet doesn't know what consistency and efficientcy is, there are a few exceptions like dagger2 that siphons and crits at the same time and various skills on other professions.

Focus4 has a 2.0 multiplier now, so these 5k+ non crit hits when running power main attribute gear are expected.

[Asum.4960]

21 minutes ago, KrHome.1920 said:

There is no addition.

Life siphon as a mechanic has two components:

1. a non crit damage value

2. a healing value

But since every skill in the game is coded in its own way, because ANet doesn't know what consistency and efficientcy is, there are a few exceptions like dagger2 that siphons and crits at the same time and various skills on other professions.

Focus4 has a 2.0 multiplier now, so these 5k+ non crit hits when running power main attribute gear are expected.

Yea, Dagger 2, Life Siphon, ironically isn't a Life Siphon/Steal. 

It's how the "Life Siphon" theme should be done mechanically - just skills that do damage and also have a healing component. 

 

The original idea with Life Siphon (the mechanic) I believe was to have the same value as Damage and Healing so it feels like the damage is gained as health - this was done by basically giving both the damage and healing non-existent power and healing power coefficients, so the numbers would pretty much line up, regardless of stats (which was already a dumb, crippling mechanic). 

 

But now that something like Soul Grasp has a 2.0 Power coefficient and a 0.2 Healing Power coefficient, these values are drastically different anyway, while the skill is still terrible due to it's inability to crit as Life Siphon damage.. so why not just make non-Life Siphon. 

 

Even if it could crit, it would still not be great, but at least not this awful.

[Dr Meta.3158]

17 minutes ago, Asum.4960 said:

Yea, Dagger 2, Life Siphon, ironically isn't a Life Siphon/Steal. 

It's how the "Life Siphon" theme should be done mechanically - just skills that do damage and also have a healing component. 

 

The original idea with Life Siphon (the mechanic) I believe was to have the same value as Damage and Healing so it feels like the damage is gained as health - this was done by basically giving both the damage and healing non-existent power and healing power coefficients, so the numbers would pretty much line up, regardless of stats (which was already a dumb, crippling mechanic). 

 

But now that something like Soul Grasp has a 2.0 Power coefficient and a 0.2 Healing Power coefficient, these values are drastically different anyway, while the skill is still terrible due to it's inability to crit as Life Siphon damage.. so why not just make non-Life Siphon. 

 

Even if it could crit, it would still not be great, but at least not this awful.

There is an easier way of doing that that already exists in this game

Deal damage, you heal by X% of the damage dealt.

 

The thing I would do to life siphon abilities to make them more interesting is to allow them to crit but make their crit modifier based on healing power.

Edited May 3, 2023 by Dr Meta.3158

[Asum.4960]

33 minutes ago, Dr Meta.3158 said:

There is an easier way of doing that that already exists in this game

Deal damage, you heal by X% of the damage dealt.

 

The thing I would do to life siphon abilities to make them more interesting is to allow them to crit but make their crit modifier based on healing power.

Sure, but the problem with that would be out of control sustain. Tying sustain directly to DPS is an incredibly risky thing to do - and generally you want those things to be a trade-off for balance - aka higher damage at the cost of sustain, and vice versa - not to scale off of each other. 

That's why these options already existing in the game are very rare, usually GM Traits, which compete directly with DPS traits. It's probably not a good idea to bake that into skills directly, as suddenly every DPS powercreep is also a sustain powercreep and things get out of hand really quick. 

Even with Life Siphon, pre-nerf Battle Scars was a good example of this, when it was both the best DPS as well as sustain option, rather than a choice to make between the two.

The Life Siphon mechanic just isn't good - either it's undertuned and not worth the opportunity cost (something like taking Blood for Vampiric Aura or spending cast time on Soul Grasp or Locust Swarm= or it's overtuned and supplants all other options, such as pre-nerf Battelscars.

Something like Life Siphon, the skill, works though - just give skills you want to have the "Life Siphon feel" both a damage (with power coefficient) and a healing (scaling with healing power) component, which can be tuned separately. 

That way a skill or trait can be both viable for damage and sustain, but to pay off on that must be invested into with separate options - rather than scaling off of each other, or being inherently crippled by it's design.

 

Making Life Siphons scale in damage with Healing Power would imo just be more wonkyness and too obtuse as a mechanic, and while less egregious, still run into the issue of building sustain = more damage, when they need to be tradeoffs instead.

[The Boz.2038]

2 hours ago, Asum.4960 said:

Sure, but the problem with that would be out of control sustain. Tying sustain directly to DPS is an incredibly risky thing to do - and generally you want those things to be a trade-off for balance - aka higher damage at the cost of sustain, and vice versa - not to scale off of each other. 

That's why these options already existing in the game are very rare, usually GM Traits, which compete directly with DPS traits. It's probably not a good idea to bake that into skills directly, as suddenly every DPS powercreep is also a sustain powercreep and things get out of hand really quick. 

Even with Life Siphon, pre-nerf Battle Scars was a good example of this, when it was both the best DPS as well as sustain option, rather than a choice to make between the two.

The Life Siphon mechanic just isn't good - either it's undertuned and not worth the opportunity cost (something like taking Blood for Vampiric Aura or spending cast time on Soul Grasp or Locust Swarm= or it's overtuned and supplants all other options, such as pre-nerf Battelscars.

Something like Life Siphon, the skill, works though - just give skills you want to have the "Life Siphon feel" both a damage (with power coefficient) and a healing (scaling with healing power) component, which can be tuned separately. 

That way a skill or trait can be both viable for damage and sustain, but to pay off on that must be invested into with separate options - rather than scaling off of each other, or being inherently crippled by it's design.

 

Making Life Siphons scale in damage with Healing Power would imo just be more wonkyness and too obtuse as a mechanic, and while less egregious, still run into the issue of building sustain = more damage, when they need to be tradeoffs instead.

There is an easy way to make it sane and not just a dps > sustain option; It was never supposed to be a DPS option, and designing it that way always confused me.

1. Rework *all* life steal to be 0 additional damage (this was always daft design), but a self-heal based on damage dealt. If you wanna be extra about it, you might want to split them into Life Steal (power) and Life Siphon (Condi).

2. The percentage is influenced by Healing Power. That gives you two levers of control for the effect, and not just "more damage more sustain always". The values on the different skills and traits should be set at around a three- to five-fold increase between 0 and 1400 Healing Power.

There. The base design is done. Now apply it to skills and traits.
For example: 

Parasitic Contagion - Grandmaster Curses, Major trait - Gain 3 (+0.005)% Life Siphon while not in Shroud.
- this gives you between 3% (0 HP) and 10% (1400 Healing Power) life siphon (so, from condi damage only), constantly, while not in shroud. Weaker on a full DPS than now by about 40%, but twice as strong (in raw percentage, not full effect) on, say, a healscourge.

Signet of Vampirism - Necromancer Healing skill, Signet - Passive: Gain 2 (+0.003)% Life Steal and Life Siphon. Active: Heal yourself for 4950 (+0.5), and mark a foe; allied players gain 5 (+0.01)% Life Steal and Life Siphon when attacking that foe for 4 seconds.
Lost value as a DPS option, but 19% vampiric to allies for 4 seconds is very valuable as a heal skill that actually heals the party. 

Battle Scarred - Adept Devastation, Major trait - Gain 4 (+0.008)% Life Steal for 3 seconds after using a healing skill.
Thrill of Combat - Master Devastation, Major trait - Gain 1 (+0.002)% Life Steal.
Dance of Death - Grandmaster Devastation, Major trait - Gain 2 (+0.003)% Life Steal for 3 seconds after inflicting Vulnerability.  When under 50% Health, all Life Steal effects are doubled. Stacks duration up to 4 times.
Loses out on the build-stacks-and-burst effect, which I think is a good thing. Remains a potent self-sustain option, especially if built with self-sustain stats in mind.

[Venres.1603]

On 4/29/2023 at 6:42 PM, Dadnir.5038 said:

You think that forcefully bringing reaper's strike dps potential to 40k is something good? I do not.

When the top dps builds could only barely reach 33k dps potential, you could already bypass mechanics through dps. Do you need to have 40+k dps potential to do the same nowadays? Not at all.

The end game content don't need such high dps potential. Giving reaper that is merely making him chase the tails of the other top scorer who have more dps potential than needed and will still be ahead of reaper after the update.

In other words, 40k dps is merely flatting reaper's players vanity. Will it create more build diversity for reaper? Of course not. Will it make reaper a meaningful option against the handful of builds that can potentially dish out more damage than it does? Nope.

And if, despite that hard reality check, reaper still rise to be the favored pick in PvE, truly getting it's 30% playrate, the only possible outcome would be a forum burning with "rightful indignation" which would ultimately lead to nerfs.

 

I'll be happy for reaper the day the devs will stop doing the same thing again and again with reaper and finally start to work on the build diversity of this spec.

 

I always liked the idea of high risk high reward along side of high action high reward.

 

A necromancer pressing 3 buttons shouldn't do the same DPS as a Weaver pressing 20 while the Weaver is far more squishy than a Necromancer.

 

That's something fundamentally wrong with the game and has been shown with speccs like Mech as well where braindead people did insane amounts of DPS through speccs that were brute forced to work.

[Nimon.7840]

21 hours ago, Asum.4960 said:

Yea, Dagger 2, Life Siphon, ironically isn't a Life Siphon/Steal. 

It's how the "Life Siphon" theme should be done mechanically - just skills that do damage and also have a healing component. 

 

The original idea with Life Siphon (the mechanic) I believe was to have the same value as Damage and Healing so it feels like the damage is gained as health - this was done by basically giving both the damage and healing non-existent power and healing power coefficients, so the numbers would pretty much line up, regardless of stats (which was already a dumb, crippling mechanic). 

 

But now that something like Soul Grasp has a 2.0 Power coefficient and a 0.2 Healing Power coefficient, these values are drastically different anyway, while the skill is still terrible due to it's inability to crit as Life Siphon damage.. so why not just make non-Life Siphon. 

 

Even if it could crit, it would still not be great, but at least not this awful.

It's not completely useless.

Since life siphon dmg doesn't get reduced by armor.

I didn't try it yet. But the world boss Taida Covington has this door that needs to be destroyed. While normal attacks couldn't damage it, you could deal dmg to it with vampiric presence, which is a life siphon.

On fully buffed power reaper, focus 4 does around 8k dmg. Which is pretty insane.

I wonder if this works on that door and if it's faster to just stack reapers, give them might and let them use focus4, instead of actually doing the bomb mechanic xD

[Nephalem.8921]

11 hours ago, Nimon.7840 said:

It's not completely useless.

Since life siphon dmg doesn't get reduced by armor.

I didn't try it yet. But the world boss Taida Covington has this door that needs to be destroyed. While normal attacks couldn't damage it, you could deal dmg to it with vampiric presence, which is a life siphon.

On fully buffed power reaper, focus 4 does around 8k dmg. Which is pretty insane.

I wonder if this works on that door and if it's faster to just stack reapers, give them might and let them use focus4, instead of actually doing the bomb mechanic xD

Oh great its not useless because it works on that 10year old world boss 90% afk leech anyways.

[Zex Anthon.8673]

Focus 4 is probably the worst skill in the game. They could easily make it useable by copying and pasting shroud 2. But they aren't going to do that because necro is supposed to be bad.

[Misterbrady.2167]

I would like reaper to have a good condition spec.  I know I can build something to 'work', but it seems like it isn't even close to power reaper imo.

[Dr Meta.3158]

2 minutes ago, Misterbrady.2167 said:

I would like reaper to have a good condition spec.  I know I can build something to 'work', but it seems like it isn't even close to power reaper imo.

I'd honestly prefer the condition damage niche stays with core necromancer; scourge support - Harbinger hybrid

[Misterbrady.2167]

1 hour ago, Dr Meta.3158 said:

I'd honestly prefer the condition damage niche stays with core necromancer; scourge support - Harbinger hybrid

I get you, but to each their own.  Having better traits in core would help every spec, so I'm down with that. 

[Cyninja.2954]

Just an FYI:

 

and Snowcrows have had a 40k+ benchmark since day 1 but are still grinding out the maximum they can get to.

[Methuselah.4376]

13 hours ago, Misterbrady.2167 said:

I would like reaper to have a good condition spec.  I know I can build something to 'work', but it seems like it isn't even close to power reaper imo.

Condi Reaper is benching higher than Power Reaper.

[Misterbrady.2167]

9 hours ago, Methuselah.4376 said:

Condi Reaper is benching higher than Power Reaper.

Thanks for the info.  The folks in my circles have told me reaper is power only.  I've been experimenting with it, and it is quite a breath of fresh air.

[draxynnic.3719]

Reaper was always designed to have condi and power options, but the condi version was detuned prior to PoF released (and is now apparently back up again).

[Nimon.7840]

15 minutes ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Reaper was always designed to have condi and power options, but the condi version was detuned prior to PoF released (and is now apparently back up again).

It always benched higher than power reaper. The big problem of condi reaper was 

A) relying on combo field finishers (which got "buffed")

B) by the time your dmg ramped up on condi reaper, most bosses either phased or were dead xD but the last patch halfed the ramp up time. Imo it's not the best build out there, even if it benches very high and there's even food that makes it beyond broken (dmg wise) in certain fights (chill on crit at night).