Contradictory design philosophy Shroud & Life force

[Dadnir.5038]

@"ZDragon.3046"

About replacing the 2nd health bar by barrier, I'm just stating that it is indeed simple and change very few things in the game. I know that it's scarry and all because the damage reduction is lost but in reality, spectral skills are already our "defensive skills", you just use them in combination with shroud to outsustain a spike of damage.

 

Also, I am aware that such a change leave the necromancer vulnerable to burst damage, however, by design the necromancer is supposed to be a condition manager and thus, someone that deal better with sustain damage both incoming and outgoing and for that, temporary health point in form of barrier are "Ok". Afterward, the number balance will have to be done by anet's dev, I won't claim that I know each number that need to be given on each effect. However, if we got the equivalent of 16% (1600hp barrier) of the necromancer's base life force given per hit (ICD 1s) when under the effect of spectral armor, I can already say that the necromancer lose nothing in the trade. The other traits that give barrier on top of that are there to deal with burst.

 

About the death magic ideas, I'm glad that it please at least one person. (Let's be honest, the idea that I wrote is rough and I said this on the spurt of the moment because I felt that the "shroud" duration needed to be kept in check in WvW but then idea kept to appear about how to use this to strengthen death magic and so on...)

 

And this:

> Although if you did do it this way the best way would be to think of a reverse holosmith. Keep the 2nd bar just as a reference to how much LF you have stocked. your F1 becomes a weapon swap that actually gives you very potent and deadly skills. While in shroud the bar drains ideally about the same rate as holo builds heat. Using shroud skills consumes a % of LF from the bar. Incoming damage no longer is taken from that bar but your hp instead. This makes barrier play work even better.

 

I'm sorry but I just can't imagine what you're trying to explain here. Most likely because english is not my native langage I think. I just feel that I'm lacking something to understand.

[DeceiverX.8361]

> @"Carighan.6758" said:

> > @"DeceiverX.8361" said:

> > Anyone worth their salt in the PvP community will state that duality and versatility in skills is what defines a successful kit.

>

> While I readily agree, I also want to add that this is a 3-game-mode MMORPG, not a multiplayer brawler. As such, a versatile kit with loads of options and duality of skills is usually a **detriment** because it breaks class-design. Which it actively does, GW2 is a very good example of that. Game-wide. The game's insistence on overloading everyone with 30+ skills, loads of weapon options, gear-stat choices, runes, sigils, traitlines and traits makes it so that any **possible** power-combination can usually be achievement.

> Which in turn means that any however-small imbalance will immediately be augmented significantly by focusing on it (and the game allows you to focus on it!). Which in turn forces it to be brought back in line.

>

> "But wait!", you say. "Isn't that perfect? Devs are forced to balance classes!"

>

> Yes it is - for smallest-scale PvP modes, where you want the characters to be as carbon-copy of each other as possible, bringing distinct styles to gameplay and character design instead of distinct mechanics or weaknesses. So it's more about individual player skill, not about picks or team-composition.

>

> But for everything else, specifically where you want a **larger** group of players to work together (say open world mass-combat or WvW!), a confined class-design where someone is funneled into a specific role they take in the larger group is far preferrable. It allows the game design to overcome a few issues which otherwise crop up - comparing GW2 with DAoC here is interesting, the latter having extremely shallow classes but far richer mass-PvP as a result. Among the issues which can be fixed is that enemies an friends are easier to judge ("X is a Y" as a universal truth in regards to class role is helpful in quickly assessing large groups!), balance of large armies becomes easier (everyone only brings 1 or maybe 2 things to the table after all), inter-reliance is far enhanced, promoting cooperative play and this is a MMORPG after all, PvE becomes trivial to balance, and weaknesses in each classes' design can be actively exploited to create dependency on other classes.

>

> As a Necro-example, "Shroud is always a defensive option" is **perfectly** fine, so long as this extends into the classes' overall role and design. If a Necromancer is someone who is not as strong as others but also nigh-unkillable, then this gives them a purpose! They can be balanced as outrunners, unlike others not able to easily picked off when separating from their group, they can be tanks in PvE, they can even be given options to center their defensive aspects more around debuffing enemies or healing allies, ultimately always being super-durable and low on offense, "tanks", but with options on **how** to be tanks.

 

The thing is, forced-role identity does nothing to solve underlying balance issues in PvP games and really doesn't help diversity in any way, either.

You can go play the most hardcore of PvP games and only a few options will ever be at the top-tier because of micro-optimizations. And then people just copy it across the game. It's the same principle which defines the PvE meta here. Forced-role identity becomes no easier to balance for optimization. High-end WoW raiding is even more exclusive than GW2's. Wildstar promised this kind of gameplay and the game immediately failed because simply put, the overwhelming majority of people don't like to play that way, and all of the exclusivity stays. The only way to force diversity is to in fact just force it, which would require something like no duplication of classes. And even then, it just confines classes to one specific build for optimal play. Don't like that build? Too bad. Reroll. And that's not fun.

 

The forced-role identity problem is way more complex for action-oriented games on the PvP side given things like the dodge roll putting a monkey wrench into a lot of calculations and making the design space a lot more high-level. This is actually an objectively good thing in the case of a metagame because it allows things to be a bit more grey which should enable faster adaptations without the need to implement changes to the professions themselves. People are going to always look to optimize and something is always going to dominate some scene somewhere. Maybe by a hair, but it still will. Lack of forced role identity makes for a way better game state as far as principles of game theory go. If you're not familiar with multiplayer and competitive game theory and what metagames are (it's often used as a misnomer), I'd suggest doing some reading up and you'll understand better where I'm coming from.

 

It doesn't help that the game isn't actually balanced in sPvP, either. There's a reason the competitive scene abandoned GW2 a few years ago and the game lost sponsorship by the ESL. Why most top-ranked players and skillgroups quit the game. Professions are also already soft-forced into roles in the PvP formats (ANet has said in the past outright they design professions to perform certain role in sPvP); it's just horrendously imbalanced and to be honest, it isn't fun for most people. Necro has been deliberately designed to be a high-priority, snowbally, focused target in sPvP all these years. It's killed easily because teams put in conscious efforts to kill it ASAP and it's snowbally because you're either getting kills and having tons of LF or dying and have none based on how the respawning of LF works with a lack of things to charge it easily. It feels imbalanced because it's super inconsistent. It's just ANet's vision of the professions differs from what the community wants most of the time, and the variance between formats is a problem for concern which makes the low-level decisions like numbers harder to make. By letting the necro deal high PvE damage, either skill splits need to be very profound and probably functionally different (which creates a lot of confusion and makes PvE players annoyed when they switch to sPvP/WvW where their build that they enjoy playing doesn't even exist or sucks) because of how the rest of the game plays. The same is said for shroud and healing: It's whatever in PvE, but being healed in both small-scale and large-scale PvP would be crazy overpowered by the nature of how the game plays and how good necro is if it's not focused very early in an engagement.

 

The beauty of shroud's duality is that it can serve a ton of purposes but when a purpose is being served, it's obvious what the steps are to counterplay it by adjusting one's play style, which I think is one of the oft-forgotten pillars of what GW2 is supposed to be about - real time adaptation. It being accessible gives the necro plenty of options to counter their opponent, but it also gives the opponent plenty of opportunity to out-play the necro by targeting its gaps or forcing the same gaps. The decision tree on death shroud is nuanced with all sorts of subtleties that make it rewarding to play as and against when played well. This distinctly isn't the case for scourge or classes which have clear cut-and-dry answers to problems in its profession mechanic or ones which just effectively get spammed off cooldown or act as part of a rotation, because there's simply less decision-making and general thought happening.

 

 

[Dadnir.5038]

> @"DeceiverX.8361" said:

> The beauty of shroud's duality is that it can serve a ton of purposes but when a purpose is being served, it's obvious what the steps are to counterplay it by adjusting one's play style, which I think is one of the oft-forgotten pillars of what GW2 is supposed to be about - real time adaptation. It being accessible gives the necro plenty of options to counter their opponent, but it also gives the opponent plenty of opportunity to out-play the necro by targeting its gaps or forcing the same gaps. The decision tree on death shroud is nuanced with all sorts of subtleties that make it rewarding to play as and against when played well. This distinctly isn't the case for scourge or classes which have clear cut-and-dry answers to problems in its profession mechanic or ones which just effectively get spammed off cooldown or act as part of a rotation, because there's simply less decision-making and general thought happening.

 

Are you saying that the shroud is a complex mechanism that force players to think carefully about what they do and/or will do? If so, I'm moved, this is a first that someone say that the necromancer require some skill to be played and other professions with mechanisms that are more "specific" for each task are much simpler to play (at least when it come to the thought process)...

 

 

[Sublimatio.6981]

if second hp bar is removed and spectral armor is made invulnerability skill + we get blocks/evades on weapon skills and more dps then by all means i want all of these changes. do a chrono rework on necro plz arenanet.

[DeceiverX.8361]

> @"Dadnir.5038" said:

> > @"DeceiverX.8361" said:

> > The beauty of shroud's duality is that it can serve a ton of purposes but when a purpose is being served, it's obvious what the steps are to counterplay it by adjusting one's play style, which I think is one of the oft-forgotten pillars of what GW2 is supposed to be about - real time adaptation. It being accessible gives the necro plenty of options to counter their opponent, but it also gives the opponent plenty of opportunity to out-play the necro by targeting its gaps or forcing the same gaps. The decision tree on death shroud is nuanced with all sorts of subtleties that make it rewarding to play as and against when played well. This distinctly isn't the case for scourge or classes which have clear cut-and-dry answers to problems in its profession mechanic or ones which just effectively get spammed off cooldown or act as part of a rotation, because there's simply less decision-making and general thought happening.

>

> Are you saying that the shroud is a complex mechanism that force players to think carefully about what they do and/or will do? If so, I'm moved, this is a first that someone say that the necromancer require some skill to be played and other professions with mechanisms that are more "specific" for each task are much simpler to play (at least when it come to the thought process)...

>

>

 

It depends largely on the build, but yes, the mechanic is a healthy one and does require some understanding of your opponent (and vice versa) to properly utilize or punish. It may be simpler mechanically because there's only one extra button, but the nuances are much different and require a different skillset to utilize well. When I was consistently smashing daredevils on my power reaper prior to the nerfs despite all the complaints about the matchup, it was strictly game knowledge into thief that let me win those fights, and the lack of knowledge many daredevils had really built up into reapers that let me dominate a lot of them without ever even getting hit for damage.

 

I think in most cases it's people who fight necros and complain without playing one that just do not learn to recognize that they're the ones responsible for punishing the necro when those gaps open. This is also why the SoS changes were so devastating to the reaper; the gaps are now just too big.

 

OTOH, there's a big problem with how necro in terms of life force scales with gear as well in some formats; Dire/TB make an already-highest-HP-tier class have even more durability, big damage and disablement sourcing from its corruption, and then further also massively increase its defenses in shroud since life force HP scales on the necro's HP, it's already on 3k armor from gear, it almost always runs Prot from SA, and then also has another 50% baseline damage resistance on top of that while in shroud, so those gaps are very difficult to punish when they do open. It's a little bit excessive and makes it really hard to justify giving the class more damage in this context. But like I mentioned, this is more of a gear-related problem and discrepancy between formats than an issue with the necro. Remove these kits (which are a problem on a number of professions) and everything ends up being way easier to change.

 

Which is also the innate problem with scourge in the PvP formats: It doesn't really have big windows of vulnerability to punish if played halfway intelligently because that aspect of the decision tree is completely removed, and barrier spam offsets the lack of shroud while making it a potent source of damage with no good way to engage it.

 

Which goes full-circle to why I disagree with the OP: It doesn't actually solve any real problems and changes fundamentally how the necro needs to be played and approached from a balance and design perspective. I think it'd end up either making the profession too strong or too weak and it'd remove a lot of the nuances of what makes the class fun and fair on the design-level.

[ZDragon.3046]

> @"Lily.1935" said:

 

> if you read it as several separate suggestions rather than a single complete idea I could see the confusion. But that in lies the problem with the way you view it. And not not cost "HALF THE USERS LIFE" that would be ridiculous. Half the cost would be put to health. Its an interesting push pull mechanic. And that was just one example. As I give few details on how that could work it isn't designed to be taking as an absolute suggestion either. Just an idea.

>

> Lets clarify were I stand. I stand on making the necromancer have better active defensive abilities in sacrificing the strength of shroud, Greater access to offensive abilities and greater access to supportive abilities. Shroud can't exist in its current form to get any of these things as the devs have mentioned previously. And My method is designed to streamline its design so we don't have the current mess we are in now with two polar opposite designs in Scourge and Core/reaper.

>

> And as always. Greatness at any cost.

 

To be fair the polar opposite came with scourge not the other way around but im sure know that better than anyone. Im not sure if it would be fair to say that streamlining the design would have been to simply make scourge like core/reaper.

 

In any case you have made it a bit clearer to me that you wrote this with the idea of moving away from the current shroud now (that was hard to see reading it out right the first few times). With that said, this would be alot of work for them to perform. Thats not to say they couldnt do it. Even if they chose to keep some fractions but not the complete current shroud mechanic it would still be alot of work possibly as much if not more than the mesmer update. Personally I think the current shroud could be given greater offensive abilities as most of them work now but just dont deal the right numbers or simply do not perform enough mechanic wise from lack of QoL updates.

Core shroud skills, 1 or 2 reaper shroud skills, Minions, Wells, and the majority of the signets are good examples i suppose.

 

As for the other two, supportive and defensive, yes I can see how the current forms of shroud completely fail at and why they cant do that.

The amount of resources and heavy digging work into traits, and many weapon skills this would take would be intensive. Then there is the issue of how the new detached F1-F4 or F5 skills would work. It would likely require that support and defense is improved via traits within blood and or death magic and utility and not through new detached skills themselves.

 

The only reason i say the above is because even scourge still suffers the "I kind of do a bit of both when using my F skills" situation. You have desert shroud which gives barrier while pumping out dps. Sand Cascade and Nefarious Favor which proc summon sand shade. Defensive skills activating offensive ones which is kind of what core and reaper shroud are. While they have offensive abilities they also act as this soft defense at the same time. Im rather curious if the devs pursued this idea how much it would also change scourge for support or dps if the majority of support was boosted across all the specs using traits and utility with the removal of shroud.

 

Its a very tough pickle to fix

 

In terms of flavor i do like visually core and reaper shroud they feel fun to use as an alternative weapon swap. No other profession has this along with the general 2 set weapon swap. If at the very least I would personally hope for something closer to how holosmith performs, Keep shroud visually, stronger skills in general, life force is no longer a damage soaking tool instead its replace with barrier or something dont know. At this point its just throwing darts in the dark.

[ZDragon.3046]

> @"Dadnir.5038" said:

> I'm sorry but I just can't imagine what you're trying to explain here. Most likely because english is not my native langage I think. I just feel that I'm lacking something to understand.

 

It may be a bit hard to visualize if you never played holosmith before. Im not sure how else it cant really be explained though.

 

A simpler written version would be like this

Its more like losing life force per skill use. Life force wouldn't be a damage soaking tool anymore which means damage could be ranked higher on shroud skills.

You could be healed in shroud.

Utility would be open while in shroud.

Utility skills could be much more potent as defensive or supportive tools as wells as some traits.