A Disturbance in the (Life) Force.

[Rym.1469]

Hey there,

 

Seeing as the developers have been more keen on making some fundamental changes how classes and specializations work in the recent months, I've decided to tackle the subject which has been kept under the rug pretty much ever since launch - **Life Force generation from deaths.**

 

Now relevant more than ever, with Scourge using life force as fuel for it's AoE skills and presumably more life force usage coming in the future, I think it's worth a discussion.

 

As we all know, Necromancer soaks Life Force from all nearby deaths at 10% LF per "honorable kill" (player, most pve mobs, minions). Staying in Shroud prevents the soaking.

So what's the problem? It causes Necromancer's life force intake to be incredibly shaky. While thematic, 10% Life Force (or more with minors) is a significant amount, that only the strongest Life Force generating skills can keep up with, especially in mass-death scenario. In WvW or open world the passive LF generation from deaths outclasses using and landing skills that provide it.

As a result, Necromancer has always had this problem of running into "rich man, poor man" scenario. Every necro player knows how significant winning your first fight in sPvP is - it feeds you a ton of Life Force just by you standing nearby. From there, you can easily snowball. If you don't win, too bad, because you're LF starved easy target.

 

With Necromancer's specializations using Life Force for more than a glorified mana shield like in the past it's becoming a problem in design. Reaper chews through large amounts of Life Force in seconds to be relevant, Scourge is mostly limited by the amount of Life Force it has to play with.

Both run into the snowball issue I described above harder than ever before. They're one-dimensional - they either slaughter, spamming like crazy or have to scrape through with little bits of resource coming from just weapon skills (and often their LF generation being carried by Spectral Armor alone, making it so necessary).

In Open World or WvW this issue is of an incredible magnitude with the amount of constant deaths. **With enough deaths, landing your Life Force generating skills doesn't matter anymore**. On top of that, Scourge has no Shroud to stop the soaking, so it always benefits.

 

If we use Life Force as a resource, I'm a huge advocate for it, but part of it is **having resource management**. When landing skills matters less than standing near stuff dying, we have a problem.

 

What should we do? The most logical way to adress it, in my opinion, is moving power of Life Force from deaths to weapon skills themselves. This not only potentially adresses our "snowball or nothing" issue we've had since launch, but also adds some skill and counterplay back to Necromancer, as landing your LF generators/evading gets increased priority.

 

I'm unsure about the exact values, but I think lowering Life Force gain from deaths down to 2-3% still keeps the theme, while being far less impactful (LF from minion deaths could be kept at 10% like on live). How high would be bump weapon Life Force generators? That would differ from skill to skill I feel and is hard to evaluate without testing.

And finally, for those who enjoy getting stronger from deaths, Death Magic's infamous trait - *Soul Comprehension* - could be changed to provide additional 1-2% Life Force per death, making it relevant.

 

Feel free to discuss it.

 

EDIT: Mea culpa for the "early-access release", but making threads on this forum on mobile is some devil's creation.

[Zero.3871]

i agree, while in zergfights necros dont Need to take any LF regenerating skill because LF is full all the time, necros have a hard life in small scale situations when fights last 5+ min with just a few deaths. making LF reg-mechanic more active would allow necromancers to get better LF reg. controle in relation to its skill lvl

[Bhawb.7408]

Agreed. We've been asking for this since forever, and now is as good as time as any. Life Force from Deaths should just be a nice way to help scale Necromancer sustain for large situations since we don't have damage avoidance, but that's it. Currently it is far too much weighted to on-death and not enough for skill usage.

[Rym.1469]

Yes, it's a scalling defense of sorts, but as we established, it gets too out of hand. Back in the pre-HoT days it was mostly noticeable in sPvP with the whole snowballing thing, but now it's visible everywhere (but raids I guess).

 

To put it simply, Life Force now is not only your "mana shield", but actually your "mana".

 

PS. Wb Bhawb.

[DeceiverX.8361]

I've also advocated for similar before. The class is binary more or less based on environment.

 

@"Rym.1469" One note: You say that necro is "two dimensional;" I think you mean one-dimensional as that's how the phrase goes, as 1D is a line, which can only go one way or another, which is the problem you're describing.

[Rym.1469]

That's what I get from writing threads on the bus. Thanks for the obvious correction @"DeceiverX.8361" .

[Nerah.8235]

I am definitely in the minority, but I run a Reaper with Spectral Mastery, and then slot at least 2 Spectral skills, usually Spectral Armor and Spectral Walk. I can passively generate LF by using these skills repeatedly from the moment I enter an area, and usually generate enough to fill the bar by the time I encounter anything that needs fighting. Also, if you slot Spectral Grasp and use it while at essentially "zero" range--i.e. standing directly on your opponent--you can almost fill your LF bar, and apply an enormously long chill (~20 seconds), as well as possibly interrupt. I almost never worry too much about LF management: as Reaper, you either stomp stuff (PvE) or get wiped (WvW) in the blink of an eye from my experience. I play mostly WvW and PvE, so your mileage may vary.

[Anchoku.8142]

I would not mind changing the proportion of LF generated between deaths and skill use. The "on death" LF generation is really only there for PvE defense scaling but PvE has changed since 2012 with more challenging content.

 

One thought might be to give bonus LF to critical hits or certain conditions inflicted.