Patch Notes - Necro 9-3-13

#29 - Sept. 3, 2013, 5:35 p.m.

teonimesic.1403:

Mammoth.1975:

I just realised I can probably explain it a bit clearer another way.

Dhuumfire with ICD and crit requirement procs around every 12 seconds.
It applies a 3 second burn (with +50% duration).
That’s 25% uptime.
Burning is around equivalent to 6 bleeds.
6 bleeds by 25% means dhuumfire is around equivalent to 1.5 bleeds if those bleeds have 100% uptime.
Grasping dead bleeds have 100% uptime.

Hopefully that gives a clearer idea of how much dps loss this means. Around two thirds of dhuumfire, the must-have grandmaster trait for condi necros.

I know I’m harping on about it a bit and I don’t intend to. Once again, I do think this was needed. I’m just saying it to try to help people understand where they get their damage from as necros.

At what crit % did you test that? With a 54% crit chance (rabid), i feel its a little closer to 11 seconds, so its 27% uptime. Also, its more like 6,6 bleeds, so i would say its closer to a 1,8 bleed stack at a 100% duration.

But the problem with dhuumfire isnt that it does an amazing amount of damage. The problem is that it does burst condition damage ( a lot of damage in a short time ), and it is another condition inflicted on the target.

If you inflict 15 bleed stacks or only 14 and your enemy uses a condition removal it removes all of it, so it doesnt really matters. But if you have burning and 14 bleed stacks and he uses a condition removal, it may only remove your burning, leaving your bleeds alone. Also, since burn has a low duration high damage, by the time you enemy uses his cleansing it already did 33% or maybe 66% of its total damage (1 or 2 sec), while if he removed your bleeding it was probably at 20%~40% of its max damage.

So yeah, 1 stack of bleed doesnt amount to much. If they reduced dhuumfire to 1 second it would be a lot worst (specially because even if you had 50% condition duration it would only tick once, meaning you would lose 66% of its damage).

Our condition damage needed to be toned down, and i think they arent done with this patch. So i will save complaining for later. For now its fine.

Great conversation going on here guys. I wanted to drop by and back up some of the theories that are being discussed.

Dhuumfire is indeed a condition ‘burst’ application. When we lowered the PvP duration, we were doing two different things. Firstly, the duration of the burn was a bit too long for the fast-paced nature of PvP. Secondly, burning was covering up the conditions that tended to deal the more intense damage over time, bleeding. Many condition removal skills, abilities, and traits remove one to three conditions, which means that bleeding (usually being the first condition applied, meaning it will be the last one removed via skills) is quite difficult to fight against. With the duration reduction of burning, it allows players an opportunity to use their condition removal skills.

The bleed reduction on Grasping Dead serves the purpose of reducing the Scepter’s overall bleeding damage, while keeping the bleed up-time constant. In contrast, if we were to have reduced the duration of the bleeds, the immediate ‘burst’ AoE pressure would have remained nearly the same.

As for the question regarding Chill of Death, the trait triggers if you strike a target that’s at 25% or less. Meaning if you strike a target that’s at 26% health and bring it below 25%, you’ll need to attack it again in order to get the trait to trigger.

Cheers,
-Karl

#34 - Sept. 3, 2013, 8:13 p.m.

In script, the threshold is still 25% health.
In testing:
On a target that has 18140 health, any strike that occurs when it’s at or below 4535 health procs Chill of Death.