Guild Wars: Fear the Reaper

Soul Reaping. It's the hotbutton issue of the day, apparently. The touchstone is the skill Jagged Bones (Which, I just have to say to whoever put that abomination in the game, thank you very much. I'd like you home address so I could send you a package to express just how I feel because, sadly, words fail me. Inside will be a...clock. Yes, a clock. It'll be ticking and when it arrives you should be careful not to get it wet. Or jiggle it much. Oh, and you should make sure you open it yourself in a small space well away from any loved ones.) and certain builds which feature it.

The skill's mechanically sound (Although, again, I'm not sure this is really a mechanic the game should have) in that it allows a player to keep a minion army going without healing them – just enchant them up with Jagged Bones and when they die a new one will pop up. Priced to move, it doesn't take much energy and recharges quickly while lasting a long time allowing a character to have it up on several minions at once. The Jagged Horrors it spawns aren't too bad, either, doing decent equivalent to other minions while adding Bleeding degen (which is good for another 8DPS) to whatever they hit.

The problem, though, is that with a bit of Soul Reaping you get that minion for free. With a lot of points sunk into Soul Reaping (And why would anyone do that? I mean, the attributes a joke, right? Why, hello what's this... Signet of Lost Souls?) you actually start to earn energy back on those minions. A lot of energy, actually. Consider a Necromancer who has Animate Bone Minions and Jagged Bones – that gives them two minions they can convert into Jagged Horrors indefinitely, being paid their full Soul Reaping bonus every time they die. For a cost of 25 en for the initial summoning and 10 energy for each turn transformation of the pair into a fresh set of Jagged Horrors that's a lot of souls being reaped. Say you have Soul Reaping of 10. You just spent 35 energy and got back 40. Next time around you spend another 10 and get back 20. Up by 15 for the cycle – next time you'll be up 25, then 35, then 45, and so on. The longer it keeps going the better your returns are. And, of course, the more minions you have going on at the same time.

Now, that would be bad enough by itself – and as for just why, well, hold on, we're getting to that – but not only does the player summoning the minions and converting them into horrors all day long get to do so for free and fuel anything else they're casting at the same time every other Necromancer on that team gets their Soul Reaping bonuses triggered, too. All you need is one death and and – continuing with Necs at SR 10 – every other Necro on the team gets 40 or more energy. For free.

Now, the math is too complicated for me to care about doing but I hear, theoretically, we're talking about energy regeneration of around 15 pips on top of the natural 4 (A pip, for those who don't know, is the arrow on the bar that points left or right – like pips on the collar of a soldier or police officer or something. In terms of energy each one will return 1 point of energy every 3 seconds. 15 pips would, then, be the equivalent of gaining 5 energy every second. Except you don't gain it over time as you do with regeneration, you gain it all at once so you can spend it right away.). Or, to put it another way, more energy than anyone could realistically spend in a given time frame.

It's about the same as never running out of energy (As long as your minions are dying but they're fragile enough that this isn't exactly a problem) or what people call an infinite energy engine. Getting your energy to go infinite, by the way, is an incredibly awesome thing as far as the player is concerned but it's what keeps the people in charge of the game's balance laying awake at night looking to their ceiling for answers. If anything in the game gets the quick working over with the nerfstick, it's anything that gives out way more energy than people should normally have. Things like 3/-1 Zealous mods (And if your eyes just popped out of your skull because you realized what kind of returns you'd get on that per swing – yes, you should be playing a Warrior.), Ether Renewal (This skill got bombed out so hard that it's still the standard by which all other meganerfs are measured.) , Essence Bond chains (Complicated but by creating webs of Life Bonds, Balthazar's Spirit, and Essence Bonds you used to be able to direct any damage done to your party – from any source – to characters who'd have it drastically reduced and, as a side benefit, have tons of energy and/or adrenaline to do other stuff with. I tried for ages to explain this back in the day when it was iQ's big money maker and I'm convinced that not being able to is what drove me sane enough to bounce out of the game. Ah, good times.), and Energizing Finale (Missed that one. But looked like it would have been fun.) have all been the subjects of drastic and rapid changes designed to take them out of the game – leaving them in a playable state afterward hasn't always been a consideration although they do sometimes become useful again after a while like Ether Prodigy (It was fantastic. Basically made the E/Mo the best healer in the game – this was before Divine Favor, though. Then it was awful because the devs, apparently, didn't like the idea of secondaries being better than primaries – something I disagree with, by the way. But it's trended back up to where it's very decent these days. Although I'd argue that's more a function of the Elementalist, as a class, needing something to give them energy management since most of their skills were horribly overpriced to start with - 40 en skills people! - than pure, unadulterated izzy love.).

So, you might be thinking that I'd be complaining about Jagged Bones and calling for that monstrosity (Why don't I like it? Well, it boils down to corpses – where minions come from – are supposed to be a limited resource. Something you can fight for control of or race to claim. So you have things like Consume Corpse and Bloodstained Boots and the like that become important as counters when minion based builds are around. Jagged Bones lets you step around that and create an unlimited supply of minions from that finite source of bodies. That's the whole point of the skill, as far as I can tell, but I don't think that should be allowed. So I hate the skill and am using it as much as I can at the moment.) to be rebalanced right out of the door. But as someone very wise said, Jagged Bones is just the symptom.

The real disease here is Soul Reaping. This isn't the first time it's led to such an abuse. It took the Ritualist's ability to kick out spirits rapidly to really bring it to light but it's always been a problem – there was bloodspike even before Factions came out, after all (And that it's still around is depressing. There've been others, too, like spirit shitting and others I'm probably not aware of. But at the heart of all of them has been an attempt to make Soul Reaping explode.). But any way you can guarantee a lot of things dying quickly you've effectively broken the game's energy constraints. And any Necromancers on your team can make use of that free flowing energy to do pretty much whatever they want including supercharging the casting of expensive skills from other professions. Put a band-aid on Jagged Bones and the problem's just going to crop up again with some other skill or build down the road. A change has to be made to Soul Reaping.

Which means, of course, altering a central feature to one of the basic professions – touching Soul Reaping will involve changing the Necromancer. Personally, I don't have much of a problem with this although I suppose this far along on the game's lightcone it's a real test of just how far the developers are willing to go to address problems with its design – this goes way beyond tweaking a few numbers and into fundamental game mechanics that have been built on for years now – and whether they have any sacred cows or not. But, really, the Necromancer's been broken for a long time now and in need of some serious fixing.

I'll settle for a change to Soul Reaping but, really, the profession as a whole needs an overhaul. It was a lack of good things to do with a ll that good energy that's really held Necromancers back (And forced them to rely on secondaries whenever they broke through the energy barrier) but with Nightfall, that's begun to change. There are a few things beyond the utility skills that a Necromancer does – deal damage through life stealing, throw around hexes, throw around conditions, transfer energy, and raise minions. When dealing damage they're weak and underpowered Elementalists. Their ability to transfer energy is kept in check by the fact they have to sacrifice life to give it to someone else (Meaning they'll need to be healed up which costs time and/or energy) and outside of elite skills they don't do more than transfer their own energy to someone else – likewise, not really sexy. Conditions don't do too well in today's game especially the Necro's preferred conditions like Disease which really need time to work and other professions have better, shorter living, higher impact conditions to throw around cheaply – like an Elementalist with Blind. Running a build around minions requires a lot but it also doesn't do anything to actually help you get those first few minions you need before things go insane. Their hexes are starting to get nasty but they're in a weird place where, on their own, they're trash but when used with others in a dedicated hex build where they don't have to worry about being removed they're lethal. In other words, there's a lot of potential there for a unique profession but it's not being lived up to.

Necromancers only get used when they're broken. Or somehow abusing the game's rules. And not just in PvP. I'm sure people won't like to hear it but everything I've seen Necromancer's used for (And used them myself. I've never really developed a Necromancer character in PvE since the game's release – although I've kicked myself that I didn't make a N/R way back when instead of going with the reverse. But I did have one during the test and all. Mostly I worked on making it into an Orders bitch or something like a touch Ranger but I did mess around with minions and all. Beyond the new professions introduced in my absence – if only I had the slots and the time, it would be different - I've messed around with pretty much everything. Might not have mastered these things but the concepts aren't unfamiliar.) involves things that aren't exactly healthy to the game. Spiteful Spirit Necros, for example, were abusing the game's monster AI to get quick and easy kills. Along with the design philosophy that favors groups of similar creatures in clusters rather than treating mobs like actual teams – which might, for example, include effective hex removal to deal with things like SS or at least require such characters to learn how to cover their hexes and such.

I've hopefully illustrated why PvP minion masters are a bad idea but, you know, I happen to think they're pretty awful as far as PvE is concerned, too. I remember running through the missions in Factions and how easy things were when there was an MM around and how difficult it was when there wasn't – Monks were a dime a dozen but the Necs were kings of the lobbies in those days (Of course, now with Heroes, I don't even have to bother with that anymore. Yay, progress?). And while you could say that's all well and good, personally, I took this to be a sign that something was wrong. It's just, you know, by the time I realized it and how to say something about it, I couldn't really bring myself to care. But they do for PvE what a minion engine does in PvP. It's just PvE so people tend to be happy when they find something to abuse rather than run screaming for nerfs.

Now, changing Soul Reaping is going to be a nightmare. I've mentioned my idea for a solution in the past: Basically, turn Soul Reaping from a flat energy gain into energy regeneration. You want to dicker with the numbers, fine (I like just +3 regen for a number of seconds equal to the Soul Reaping rank. Doesn't stack but will reapply when something new dies.), but a slow, steady influx of energy that's capped by that regen max helps to blunt the insanity when things are dying quickly while at the same time strengthening the attribute where it's poor – when not many things are dying. That trickle of energy into your bar is a lot easier to spend well than a sudden lump of energy. And potentially a lot more useful in a tense fight. And even when things are dying a lot you're not going to miss out on any of that energy bonus the way you do at the moment. It's the kind of change that hits the issue where it's problematic and improves it where it's not performing well. In other words, a good one. The specifics I'll leave to a future after rigorous testing or to people who like to fiddle around with the numbers on such things.

But whatever's done it's going to upset people because it's going to be far reaching. There aren't two separate rulesets in this game for PvP and PvE or for RA and GvG so the kind of fundamental tweaking I'm advocating here is going to be far reaching. It's going to hit the PvE MMs just as much as it's going to hit things like bloodspike in the Halls (Which is part abusing Soul Reaping and part abusing the design of the Hall.) and there's going to be no end of wailing. Simply put, I don't care. This kind of change needs to be made and it's long over due. The fact that it hasn't been made yet and all the inertia that entails shouldn't deter us (And, you know, I say us like I can actually make these kind of changes. It's that sense of entitlement if not connection that I feel towards something I've cared about for so long rearing its head, in part. But, really, I'm talking about the community that embraces the game – which I'd like to think I'm a part of, after all - as well as those who work on the game and everyone else.) from making the change. If a limb's rotting, you anesthetize it, and you cut it off – you don't leave it there to fester and infect everything else.

Yeah, we'll have to do something about the built-in Soul reaping costs that are tacked onto lots of Necromancer skills. And maybe we're talking about the death of minions as a viable tactic (Having played one before a lot of the things that make them pop went into the game I'm kinda doubting that. We're talking about pulling down the power level and making PvE less brainless which is a good thing. To me, anyway.). I don't care. It's time to rip the band-aid off and reap what's been sown.

And while we're at it some other things that bother me about the Necromancer:

• Sacrificing yourself to death. Shouldn't be able to do it. When I'm holding the wrong weapon the game won't let me use a skill – why can't it just give me an error message when my health is to low instead of letting me kill myself? Being able to produce a body on demand just leads to stupid stuff – whether it's edge bombs or building up a minion army before the game starts or whatever.
• Reaper's Mark. I'm sorry, I get to do how much damage for how much energy? This is absolutely brutal when the opponent doesn't have proper hex removal (read: playing in the RAs with my hex-weak Monk build. Yes, I do have a dog in this fight. But, then, since I'll play just about anything given the opportunity, I usually do. It's either be weak against hexes or be weak something else – I've only got so many slots and skills to work with and I've picked my poison. I'll live with it but that doesn't mean some things aren't grossly overpowered.). At the Soul Reaping 14 breakpoint – which, if you're using the skill I don't see why you'd be any lower – that's 6 pips of degen for 30 seconds or 360 damage total. For 5 energy and I can cast it every 10 seconds? Sold.
• Hexes. The problem here is what I mentioned earlier – outside of builds dedicated to creating a lot of hex pressure, hexes are useless. Unlike conditions which float around and are central to how the game's played you can live without them. And since you can live without them you can skimp on defending against them. Only to be crushed by a team running a hex heavy build. Hex removal works great in that situation but it's dead weight in other situations. This is a problem more widespread than just the Necromancer but since they're heavily invested in hexes it's something they have to deal with. What the game needs is more dual purposed skills that remove hexes and do something else besides- like Dismiss Condition which, under the right circumstances is a powerful heal and effective condition removal. You can use it in either case so it fits easily into your bar. That's removal, though, at the same time the game needs more hexes that act quickly and you won't mind when they're gone – I want more skills like Phantom Pain, in so many words, and less like Conjure Phantasm – so the whole thing gets faster and individual hexes are more annoying. Yet, at the same time they can't be too grossly damaging and need to have subtle effects you can capitalize on – not a bunch of Ice Spikes, in other words or the slow acting degen skills the Necromancer seems to specialize in (Those have their place, sure, especially as covers but I want a whole new breed of hexes that you don't need to cover for them t hurt, basically.). Things that hang around a while should be removed quickly so you want skills that either work fast or kick you in the teeth on the way out, I'd think.
• Battery. I know I shouldn't when I just got done making the point that allowing free energy is a bad thing but, really, I'd like to see things like Blood Ritual and Blood is Power really shine. If only during a test weekend to see what having a character devoted to funneling energy into others effectively could really do – and just what people would do to stop it. Of course, I wouldn't mind if energy denial was a lot nastier, too, so maybe it's related to the counter.