PVE Raid Support/Healer Scourge Damage Discussion. How much Healing vs Damage to be Viable?

[Meetshield.1756]

I think I have posted several times that Scourge makes a good healer. I have several Guilds contacting me for Builds and suggestions on how to implement this. I believe that the community will take time to accept this, and I am going to try to be patient with everyone. <3

 

Now, I would like to look at the Problems with Scourge DPS in the context of it being a Healer / Support.

 

The ground rules. In order to be a healer, Scourge is forced to take Soul Reaping for lower cooldown on F-Abilities, and Blood Magic for the actual healing to trigger on the F4 and F5.

 

Blood Magic has passives : Mark of Evasion, Vampiric, and Last Rights

Soul reaping has passives : Gluttony, Last Gasp, Strength of Undeath.

 

You have to take Vital Persistence, and Transfusion. So the optional / Major selections are :

Blood Magic Major 1:

1. Ritual of Life (Great if your having to Res People)

2. Quickening Thirst (Lower cool-down on two Dagger Skills that are not great DPS, and Movement speed)

3. Blood Bond (Such a small DPS / Healing increase its ignore level)

Blood Magic Major 2 :

1. Life from Death (Another 3k heal, and 10% revive, every 16 Seconds...)

2. Banshee's Wail (More Life Force Generation from low DPS Warhorn)

3. Vampiric Presence (Dps and Sustain, relatively low on both)

 

Soul Reaping Major 1 :

1. Unyielding Blast (Great Debuff if you are the only source of Vulnerability, Group DPS boost, but usually someone else is providing Vulnerability also)

2. Soul Marks (Life Force Generation, kinda important if your healing is tied to Life Force, is it needed?)

3. Speed of Shadows (LOL, what can I say)

 

Soul Reaping Major 3 :

1. Foot in the Grave (Could be useful for a Scourge Tank Maybe...)

2. Death Perception (Power/Healer Build, Viable 50% increase for 5 Seconds, but no power burst skill to take advantage of it)

3. Dhumfire (3 Second Burn, Our only real damage trait on a healer condi build)

 

If Anet intended scourge to be a Power Support class, they are really throwing me off with Runes of the Scourge, and althought we have seen viable power / healing builds on the editor, condi damage is very easy to create.

 

So where exactly IS the damage from Scourge Support? 2 Seconds of torment on Shade Strike, Even if you take the Small Shades, and increase Torment damage by 33% and gain a burn every 3 seconds.

For a Condi Necro Scepter is your big gun, and you want to pair it with Curses.

 

So maybe the DPS/Healer Hybrid drops the Cooldown reduction on F abilities for Curses to get 50% scepter condi duration, barbed precision, Master of corruption, Fury on Shroud, and Terrifying Descent?

A build something like this :

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNAW7fnE9Cl9iV3Ae3A83gFhBLKAkAeATPtcwNQvuuXDsA-j1x1ABAs/gf6GQU9HUeCASq87gLCwlKBDAcA8+75e3De/93f/93r7v/+7v/+7v/+7lCwvZWA-w

 

Now on this build we will get a lot of added damage from Scepter and Torch, and Burns from Shade, and On torment. We can convert condi from Corruptions using F2.

Our healing cooldown goes from 12 to 15 seconds, which would be offset by the Alacrity that we would get from the Raid.

 

If we aren't really getting enough Torment damage, we could switch to Burn runes, or if we find power damage is strong we could go with Berserker or Flame Legion Runes to increase power and Burn durration.

How much Healing is needed dictates a lot about how much damage we can put out. Because Transferance / Rice Balls / Monk Runes / Bountiful, all of these things can increase Healing.

If 750 a pulse is enough then we can add 20-30% more condition damage, if 1k per pulse is needed, we give up 20-30% damage.

 

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNAW7fnE9Cl9iV3Ae3A83gFhBb6plDuB6119agNKAkAeAA-j1x0ABMq+zmKBB4iAAz+DCqbglnAglK/CAcA8+75e3De/93f/93r7v/+7v/+7v/+7lCYRlVA-w

 

 

But with all of that in consideration, Blood Magic is our Healing line, and It tends to lend itself more to a power build.

Without Dhumfire, Scourge is a 50/50 power condi on the F1. So maybe you go towards power and use Dagger?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBmQD7koXoxGs0GwlGgDHssMYTfgAQJQPseWbrUDhjQqC-j1RBQBA4iAcl9Hgquh0qEUfPBAtq+DZV+FA4A493z9Ae/93f/93r7v/+7v/+7v/+7lCIipWA-w

 

Until these builds are Tested by Qtfy I can't really say which direction to go with the Class.

 

What I know is that 2 seconds of torment base is a joke for condi damage, and Torch / Punishments are the larger contributors to our condi damage now.

The Bug we had caused us to miss that Scourge was a Support class, and we wont' see damage like that again, but what Damage can we get while still providing enough healing for a Raid?

 

And how much should That be buffed to make us competitive?

 

If they wanted Scourge to be a Condi / Support Class, then they really need to buff the Torment on Shade Strike, or change it to Bleeding, which is our main theme already.

 

 

[Dadnir.5038]

Let's wrap this up pretty quickly, in order to be a healer/support the scourge need neither dps nor heal, the scourge need an unique buff that substancially help it's team to do more damage. To be more accurate, the scourge need to give everyone a buff that increase damage and condition damage by 10% in order to be able to take the spot of a druid. That's taking into account that you'll have a ranger or a soulbeast alongside providing spirits and _spotter_.

 

If you want damage number, count roughly 3k damage for each dps (assuming 30k dps for a dps spot) and the PS warriors (assuming 4 dps and 2 PS warrior, it's already 18k damage) and 1.5k for the chronomancers which mean that your scourge will have to outdps a druid by roughly 20k dps to be competitive against a druid.

 

Edit: note that the dps needed to outdo a druid shot up as your dps have more potential damage. With 4 weavers at 45k potential dps you are already looking at 27k more dps than a druid.

[Anchoku.8142]

I do not think more healing is the best solution. Rather, other group buffs or an effective boss debuff is necessary. Raids do not ask for more healing and Arenanet clearly has an issue with giving Necromancer more dps.

[Meetshield.1756]

> @Dadnir.5038 said:

> Let's wrap this up pretty quickly, in order to be a healer/support the scourge need neither dps nor heal, the scourge need an unique buff that substancially help it's team to do more damage. To be more accurate, the scourge need to give everyone a buff that increase damage and condition damage by 10% in order to be able to take the spot of a druid. That's taking into account that you'll have a ranger or a soulbeast alongside providing spirits and _spotter_.

>

> If you want damage number, count roughly 3k damage for each dps (assuming 30k dps for a dps spot) and the PS warriors (assuming 4 dps and 2 PS warrior, it's already 18k damage) and 1.5k for the chronomancers which mean that your scourge will have to outdps a druid by roughly 20k dps to be competitive against a druid.

>

> Edit: note that the dps needed to outdo a druid shot up as your dps have more potential damage. With 4 weavers at 45k potential dps you are already looking at 27k more dps than a druid.

 

So how much damage would Vampiric Aura? Maybe we simply need a decently large buff to Vampiric Aura. I realize that 44 additional damage per attack is not a large number in comparison to a 10k meteor strike, but are all attacks from all the classes such large numbers? Someone simple needs to run a DPS rotation against the golem and replace the Druid buff with the vampiric buff to see the difference. We then need to request from Anet a buff to Vampiric to equal the DPS loss from Druid.

 

How much DPS are we getting from a Healer Druid? I believe a Scepter Scourge would easily hit mid 20's in Condi damage, i'm not sure what a power scourge would do no one has likely tested it.

 

Another good place to find damage from Scourge would be to either increase Scourge damage and build options by giving them built in condition duration. A stronger condition duration from Sand Sage (Scourge Minor) would allow for build diversity to include healing power without condi dps sacrifice.

 

And an even better idea. Change Sand Sage to be a broadcasted buff instead of a selfish one. If the Necro places his shade down his party gets the 225 Expertise and 225 Concentration buff. This would help the other support buffs as well as provide a boost to overall condition damage from other classes. Securing the Scourge as ideal support for condition classes, to make up for his loss of dps.

 

Also is the Druid Buff Raid wide, or just party buff? If its only Party, then Necro only needs to replace the DPS loss from the other 4 members in that party, and Vampiric Aura is already some of that DPS loss made up.

[Dadnir.5038]

vampiric aura damages in PvE raids are negligible at best. Please don't overestimate it. It's at it's level of power just because it's designed for PvP where anet fear that siphon would create unkillable "vampire" and destroy PvP. If you really want numbers, count 2x44, which is 88 dps added per player where the druid add 3k+ dps. Which is lees than 3% of the dps gained from a druid.

 

A druid will do at least 3-4 k dps thanks to it's pet and somehow 3-4 k as well by himself if we count the time he spend in avatar. which mean that it would be doable to use a scourge dps as "support" if all your dps are doing 30k dps at best otherwise it's not competitive. To be competitive, you would have to have a little bit less than the dps that the scourge had pre shade fix but as a full fledged support.

 

 

[Meetshield.1756]

Okay so Scourge needs to replace the 8k from Druid + the additional 10% dmg lost due to Grace of the Land...

 

So assuming the Tank is doing 14k, and the 6 DPS are 30k each, its 194k. 10% of 194k is 19.4k , adding the 8k from Druid is 27.4k

 

So to be competitive Healer scourge needs to achieve 27.4k DPS on the Healer build.

 

So without a major dps buff that Necro Adds, which would also buff Necro DPS, it is highly unlikely a Marshall's build would be able to reach 27.4k dps.

 

Even a 300 Expertise raid buff / party buff as a replacement for Sand Sage wouldn't likely reach competitive levels due to a large portion of the party having Power damage instead of Condi. So I guess we can wait to see what buffs Anet wants to give Scourge, A raid buff would be good even for DPS scourge.

[Dadnir.5038]

Ideally, anet listen to the community, change _rending shroud_ so that it reduce toughness by 150-180, make it so a dps scourge have way less "support" than a support scourge but a competitive (33-35k) dps and suddenly everything is fine. The aim being a dps with a unique offensive support that give a significant increase in dps for the group without being a mandatory addition. As it stand nothing could replace the druid's _grace of the land_.

[Meetshield.1756]

Grace of Land should be removed from game. How can they have such a powerful group buff tied to an Elite spec that is nothing but a Healer!!

[Jethro.9376]

> @Meetshield.1756 said:

> Grace of Land should be removed from game. How can they have such a powerful group buff tied to an Elite spec that is nothing but a Healer!!

 

They needed to powercreep Ranger into Druid in some way

[Renita.7824]

I am surprised that it has not been mentioned here that having a scourge healer should allow one ps warrior to swap to dps as they should be able to provide plenty of might. This makes more sense to me than trying to increase the personal dps of the scourge while also trying to heal.

 

I would also like to very honestly ask... how often on an actual raid fight do you see people hitting 30k? You assumed it multiple times in the thread and in my raid experience that does not happen. People get close on mursaat overseer and elementalists can do crazy burst on kc, but on the majority of raid fights my guilds dps barely hits 20k and specifically on a fight like Matthias mirages top the charts with a whopping 12 to 13k dps.

 

I realize that a small fraction of an already relatively small community can pull some high numbers while being able to perfectly execute every mechanic, but assuming that 30k dps is the actual dps in most raid groups feels inaccurate.

 

I also really don't understand why you seem to think that qtfy has to test it to know what to do. Does your group not allow you to test things? Maybe you don't have the money to get a set of Seraphs and a set of harriers? I just don't understand the implication that only qtfy can test new raid strategies.

 

 

[Dadnir.5038]

The potential dps is what you do in between the moment you have to pull back because of mechanism and/or other priority. It's logical that the dps done in the end is inferior. In short the more your potential dps, the more you "exploit" your windows of opportunity to deal with your foe and thus help your team skipping bothersome mechanisms, extending the window of opportunity for a faster kill.

 

Anyway, trying to convince a community that is used to be discriminated on in raid by saying them: "Come on it's okay don't look at those chart, they are lying to you, You've always got more than enough to be accepted anywhere", is just making a fool of oneself.

 

If you want to convince players that the necromancers have more than enough to stand on their own in raids, start by convincing other professions to stop their profession discrimination in raids. It all come to this, it's not the necromancers that don't want to enter in raids, it's the other professions that block them. Soothing words on the necromancer's subforum mean nothing in front of what happen in game.

[Renita.7824]

I guess I am just lucky that I have never been kicked for being a necro, and neither of my raid groups kick our pugs without a good reason.

[Zenith.7301]

> @Meetshield.1756 said:

> Grace of Land should be removed from game. How can they have such a powerful group buff tied to an Elite spec that is nothing but a Healer!!

 

If you remove grace of the land, druids are deleted in favor of elementalist healers since elementalist is a far better healing class with little to no range restrictions, no cooldowns on high heals (druid's healing is entirely CA and staff 3, staff is a garbage healing weapon compared to ele water staff).

 

Druid is a terrible healer.

 

In fact, fractal 100 challenge motes already replace druids with auramancers.

[Meetshield.1756]

Necro needs raid DPS buffs to be a Viable Healer or Tank, and Anet has boxed themselves in with Druid. Druid will simply become more and more powerful as the power creep continues throughout the game, because 10% of 40k is more than 10% of 30k etc. And the thing that is unique to Scourge is the Barrier mechanic which doesn't make you invulnerable to damage like Chrono, and doesn't increase DPS like Druid. Barrier itself needs a rework, it needs to increase DPS, by a significant amount and be maintainable by the Scourge with close to 100% uptime.

 

So I always say its best to offer a solution.

 

Here is my solution:

*Change shade strike so that it pulses Barrier on Every strike, not just on placing of the shade

*Make Sand Savant the default

*Replace Sand Savant grand master trait with this : Your shade strike now applies a stacking debuff called Sand Blasted, which increases dmg by 2% and condi dmg by 2% per stack, stacks up to 5 times, 6 second duration.

 

This would cement the Scourge in PVE raids as a 10% dmg increase same as the Druid, they could play Healer / DPS / Tank, and even if their dmg was lower than other classes, they provide a lot of utility, and flexibility to the comp, with might stacking / off healing / off tanking etc.

 

This would have limited effect on PVP / WvW, but allow proper balancing of Scourge Damage, across game modes. Provide consistent 10 person Barrier as a mechanic to assist in damage mitigation, without replacing the existing better damage mitigation provided by Chrono. It would actually Stack with Grace of the Land instead of replacing it, and allow more flexibility for everyone involved. The Barrier mechanic in WvW would still be useful, but require scourges in each party to maintain consistent barrier, and Allow for Debuffing enemy groups to increase overall DPS from other classes. It not being a condition means it isn't clear-able like vulnerability.

 

There may need to be some consideration given to WvW so that infinite barrier refreshing doesn't create large zergs of players with 15k extra health, but the barrier maintenance / sustain is likely already limited by Life force pool, and this would increase the overall sustain of groups within WvW so that more strategy and tactics can be used rather than whoever drops the biggest bomb first wins. The barrier applied by the shade in various game modes could have a different healing coefficient, for example in WvW the healing coefficient of the Shade barrier could be lowered to the point of being somewhat meaningless other than a barrier refresh that they likely wouldn't use since they want to put the shade on the bad guys. In PVE it could scale much higher with Healing power allowing 1 scourge to cover 10 players in a raid without just some basic positioning. Like Hey party 2 stand in this shade.

[Dadnir.5038]

I must disagree with you here meetshield, it's a terrible idea to put everything onto the scourge. As it is, the scourge have more than enough support piled up on him (it's not a support that work on PvE but it's still tons of support). What anet need to do is open up the core necromancer design so that it become himself competitive in PvE.

 

- The very first step needed is to bring up the core necromancer which have always been weak (be it the death shroud or the core traits there is a lot of work needed)

- The second step would then be to balance the 2 elite specs so that they don't overperform or become useless due to the changes to the core.

 

Now, we know that anet's priority is to balance the scourge since it's their newest addition. The issue is that they will most likely put band aid upon band aid onto the scourge until it perform satisfyingly in PvP/WvW and only then will they look at PvE. I'm pretty sure that if they were to set their priority onto the core necromancer, a lot of the issue we got with the reaper would be solved at the same time or wouldn't have happened when they designed the scourge.

 

I'm still convinced that their worst mistake is their insane focus on boon corruption, as long as they push forward in this direction, the necromancer and it's e-spec are doomed to be hated by other professions and seen as useless in PvE group content. Boon corruption need to be a strategical ressource and as such it need to be scarce, if it's overflowing like now, it's doomed to be imbalanced. We've got utilities that corrupt boon, scepter corupt boon, dagger corrupt boon, axe corrupt boon, traits corrupt boon... It's harder to make a build with no boon corruption than a build that have boon corruption and that's an issue both in PvP where it's strong and in PvE where it's unneeded.

 

Scourge being a master of boon corruption? Ok, but it need to be controled. There is a need to stop this gamebreaking overflow of boon corruption that plague PvP/WvW and leave PvE unphased. There is a need for anet to expand the support of the necromancer throught a few different paths.

 

And I'm not saying that anet should push the necromancer support more toward vampiric effects. No! That would be another big mistake that would lead to as much issue than the boon corruption overflow. To be honest, the vampirics effects also need to be worked on, they need to be fondamentally different. What anet need is to work around the debilitating abilities of the necromancer. To add unique debilitating effect(s) that are not bound by the caps on the effects that are open to all professions. They also need to work on how the necromancer interact with their allies, to work on their fields and combo finishers.

[Meetshield.1756]

> @Dadnir.5038 said:

 

Boon Corruption, really has no significant impact in PVP. And ZERO Impact in PVE.

 

Boon Corruption has a BIG impact in WvW. And that is Why Necro has been a Staple of WvW for so long. However to Play a Support Role Scourge is taking so much boon corruption off, that My current Scourge can't even corrupt a Boon if he Wants too.

 

I suppose we deserve the Nerfs we are about to Receive if they come. We make it very hard for other classes to enjoy their Elite Spec's in PvP and in WvW. I never wanted to play Condi Spammer.

 

Please don't tell me you are asking for buff's to crappy Axe? Axe is a PvP Weapon let it die... Just because it is in Spite and has a 10% buff to dmg? It will NEVER compare to Weaver's 47% dmg buff that is not tied to any weapon at all!!

[Dadnir.5038]

I'm not asking for specific buff such as axe buff ;) and axe is not that bad atm in PvE, it doesn't do huge damage but as a power weapon you can already use it pretty succefully at range.

 

What I ask for is, and have always been, a different focus on necromancer abilities. If it's not ok for the necromancer to give boon to it's allies, let him have unique soft condition to reduce it's foes defense/attaque... etc. ATM, there is no need for a necro to debuff a foe because everybody have the same debuff as the necromancer and already easily cap those debuffs.

 

Honestly, If I had a chance at reworking the necromancer I'd change so many things on the core necromancer without even starting to touch the weapon that it would already look like a total rework. Simply put, to many things feel off on this profession. Even lore wise I can't help but feel that the necromancer of GW2 f*cked up in it's evolution from GW1.