Suggestions for the skill Death's Charge

I didnt know whether to post this thread in here or in the Arcane Repository, seeing as I intend this to be a suggestions thread.

Ok, lets look at this skill:

Death's Charge



5 1/4 45

Shadow Step to target foe. If that foe has more Health than you, you are healed for 40...112.

Now, the spells recharge time is horrible(like most teleports, excluding AoD). Personally, Id like this to be synced with Returns recharge time, which is 15 seconds. The only possible "abuse" I can think of atm (No idea why people think its abuse when others use tele skills) would be it would be more useable, meaning hammer warriors are more mobile to do their spikes.

Now, AoD has the ability to teleport in and out, but it is elite. To produce a similar effect without the elite status, you need 2 skills(Not counting Shadow of Haste, due to it not shadow stepping you in and out.). Isnt the downside of needing two skills for this enough?

What do you guys think?

its an interesting concept. the other thing is tho, AoD costs 10 energy, and is a maintained enchantment. if you drop the recharge, an idea that has crossed my mind from time to time, think 25-30 seconds, not 15. return is a defencive skill, not offencive, hence the lower recharge. i think make it 25-30, keeps it balanced, makes the skill more effective for primary sins.

Well, yeah, maybe it would sync too well, but, the assassin doesnt really have that many mobile skills, and, honestly I think it would work more like the skill Heart of Shadow, exept youd actually get to choose who to teleport to, and you might get a heal out of it. I wouldnt mind death's charge being 20-25s recharge, also another reason I think the 15 seconds is reasonable.

The Death's Charge/Return combo even when modified to being 15 seconds recharge time requires allies to be around to escape, hindering the combo a bit.

If they don't change the recharge perhaps take away the stipulation of the foe needing more health than you. I know it sucks if you're waiting for them to dip below, to use the skill just to have it voided by a quick burst in healing and then have to wait another 45 seconds.

You could try Heart of Shadow. It has the same stats as Death's Charge, except with the 15 second recharge, and you get 10...94 health the next time you're hit within 60 seconds.

/signed to reduce recharge on Death's Charge. In the meantime, A/R with SQ helps keep your downtime managable.

EDIT: Heart of Shadow is random nearby location, not to target.

The health is really worthless either way, the recharge needs to be lowered.

AoD cost to much anyways, all teleports have been priced to high in either recast or energy cost, making them prohibitive.

Dark Prison is Just as bad, it should have a recast of 25 seconds at most. And Death's Charge belongs at 15 recast.

Whatever Warrior can do with it is about as relavent as what Ranger can do with Blood Magic, other classes can often use their secondary skills with more potency than the class they belong to, but those skills can't be nerfed to keep the secondary applications low, they need to be strong enough for their primary class anyways.

And Unlike Running skills which often work fine for Warriors, Teleports don't chase enemies, it may get you to their location immediately, but they can run and you still have to chase them, without running skills or Dark Prison, your still not pacing them, your only surprising them. Nor can Advance Teleports like Dark Prison and Death's Charge be used to escape, they only allow you to advance, another weakness compared to running skills.

Because of Assassins inherant lack of defense, his manuverability skills need to be effective, and frequent, if they arn't frequent than he can't use proper In and Out tactics, thus he is crippled.

AoD does cost 10 energy and Maitenance, but if you compare it as a combination of Death's Charge and Recall, it is actually in the middle in cost, and it combines the strengths of both skills into one slot, that alone makes it elite, so AoD doesn't need to be changed as well. But I think AoD and Recall should both be 5 energy cheaper, Assassin doesn't have that kind of energy to expend, exspecially proceeding an advance where he will need to execute a full combo.

And Heart of Shadow should also have it's recast cut in half, they can cut the enchantment length by 75% for all I care, it's only good as a spammable defense, not a semi available counter heal and escape with no aim. Or they can reduce the recast to 5 seconds and reduce the teleport radius to Nearby or in the Area, just enough to dodge a projectile. It isn't as effective as Vampiric Weapon or Reversal, because it doesn't block damage or steal it from the enemy, the least it can do is be reusable enough to deserve a skill slot.

It is really a matter of neccessity for Assassin, he doesn't have the defense to charge into battle like a warrior, and though it is foolish to charge in before than the Warriors, making the Assassin the solo and brief target of several enemies, he should be able to get in fast enough to put down a combo and leave before the enemy can track him, and he needs to be able to do it more than once every 45 seconds, or even 30 seconds, it needs to be 15, 25 at most.

If they have to increase the cost to 10 to make it balanced, so be it, at least we will have the neccessary function of using Death's Charge every 15 seconds, if they are going to bump up the price though, they should make the healing non-circumstancial.

I guess the 45 seconds is there for both effects of the skills.
15 seconds is far too little recharge for a none elite teleport. 15 seconds would make the warrior teleport all over the place, where one is meant to run around on his feet. I think 30 - 40 seconds would be a better ercharge, but this skill goes by its skill name, and that's to charge into the opponents death. If it was 15 seconds, warriors would be all over the place, which gives them too much strafing power.

Death's Charge is already easily good enough. Seriously, it does not need a buff at all.

Make something like:

Shadow Step

Shadow Step to target foe (50% fail chance with Shadow Arts 7 and below).

5e 1/4 sec cast 15 sec recharge.

WAY 2 overpowered....

What we could do is:

1. nerf this one to 15e 1/4 sec cast 25 sec recharge.

2. create a new skill called:

- Critical Charge (the name is not 2 good i know, need some improvement): Shadow Step to target foe and inflict 1 critical hit on arrival (50% chance of failure with Critical Strike 7 and below).

- 10e 1/4 15 sec recharge

- The critical attribute would mean NO ONE else from assassin would be able to use it, making warriors and other stuff don’t get benefit out of it. I considered also an ELITE alternative for it, so we wouldn’t have to rely on AOD for every single GvG ^^ (and for the ones that say “I don’t use AOD on all my GVG builds, ooo well, I don’t do it either, but I DEFFINETELY miss it on the middle of the battle when I don’t bring it ;D)

----------------

- Critical Charge {ELITE}: Lead Atack. Step to target foe and inflict 1 critical hit on arrival (50% chance of failure with Critical Strike 7 and below).

- 5e 1/4 15 sec recharge.

- Lead attack + teleport would make combos quicker, PLUS, it counts as a critical attack so the skill itself costs almost no energy.



I can definitely see some uses for both of the skills I suggested, also I don’t think lowering the Deaths Charge recharge is necessary since its use is NOT attack, its more like defensive / evasion thing to teleport to someone and stay alive long enough to kill him. Anyway, if it was 15 sec recharge it would be REALY unbalanced....2 much heal for 2 little time, leaving it at 45 mark and creating a new skill based on something else then Shadow Arts would be a lot better

Latter.

Doesn't matter. With a 15s recharge you could use it 3 times gaining up to 282HPs in the same time Death's Charge would get you 112HP. Plus, being teleported nearby could let you get some distance while your skills recharge; not that nearby is far away.

Anyway, I meant "same stats" as in energy cost, casting, recharge, not its effects as well.

@ Minus Sign: Okay, yeah, I never really thought of Death's Charge for anything other than healing. Glad we got this cleared up.

I will admit that I'm not a sin primarily. But one of the reasons behind that is that, when I use sins, I often find their in-bred movement ability lacking.

Perhaps its just a lingering impression from the Factions intro vid, but I had this picture in my mind of sins teleporting all over the place. You don't really get that with the skills at hand atm.

About alternate proffesion abuse: that can be solved with a simple %chance to fail if requirements are not met. Not so high that it nerfs the skill to anyone else, but high enough that you have to "want to use it" to put it on your bar.

@thedeadwalk!: my mistake. I was under the impression that you were suggesting subbing HoS for DC for combat use, not healing. As their teleport effects are not simular I hope you understand the confusion and my desire to clearify.

Good idea. Kind of like gaile failing 50% with 4 air magic or less. Of course that got nerfed with the 10e cost and now only ele's use it.

I don't really use deaths charge much myself, but I probably would if you lowered recharge on it. That would make your W/A more powered in pvp being able to suddenly be on top of your monk, but if you see a W/A you'd know what to expect and properly prepare for it.

What on earth are you smoking? So the following skill that I'm about to list below isn't MORE overpowering...?

So it's a lead attack, a shadow step AND an automatic critical?

It actually makes you wonder what it was that Anet were thinking when shadowstep came into mind. They're making it seem as though having what... 3 seconds saved instead of 'running' to your target is justification enough for 45 or 60 second recharge times, of one-way shadow stepping skills.

Death's Charge has a nasty condition that makes shadow stepping the first time quite redundant where you wont get any health. It effectively comes to about 3 health per second if you could say that this skill was spammable... you might as well just throw on mending instead.

Could you explain? Maybe some examples? Id prefer Dash, or Siphon Speed over this teleport really... I dont see a reason to put it in a build, save a last second heal. Really, Id like to see a real good use for it, Im getting bored on my sin.

No pro build uses Deaths Charge because it is useless. If your going to wait 45 seconds than you may as well wait a minute and use Dark Prison, because it has an effective Hex instead of healing that only triggers if your going in weaker than you target.

I don't give a crap what it does for warriors, As I said, the skills need to be balanced for the class that they are on, they can't be gimped because other classes are effective. Besides that, Warriors don't work the same way Assassins do, they have to build adrenaline, that means that they don't just teleport to enemies and start dealing skills, they have to either build up adrenaline on another target first, or build it up after they teleport to their target. As usual, any target weaker than a Warrior, which is everything, will run from them, and if Warrior is using his skills to teleport to the enemy, than he will not have as many skill slots available to chase them, teleports alone don't pace enemies, they only give you a surprise advance. Anet doesn't need to keep Warriors from teleporting any more than they need to gimp blood spells because Ranger can spam them, it isn't overpowered, it is just effective.

Putting a chance to fail on Death's Charge doesn't accomplish much either, Shadow Arts has good healing skills and other usefull skills available to them, they will just pump shadow arts as their thrid attirbute and use it for teleporting and healing as well, they just need to make ShadowStepping better because Assassins need it.

Reducing the recast on Death's Charge doesn't add frequent teleports to the game, AoD already does, reducing the recast on Death's Charge only gives us an non-Elite option, so all this Warriors would be broken if they had 15 second teleports crap is bogus, They arn't overpowered with 20 second teleports.

Reguardless, if Anet needs to keep ShadowSteps away from Warrior to keep some sort of imaginary balance than all they need to do is move all teleport skills to the Critical Strikes attribute and add a chance to fail if they don't have even 1 point in Critical Strikes. Because it is Assassins Primary.... I don't have to explain it.

Quite Honestly, Death's Charge would only have a miniscule advantage over Dash if it had a 15 second recharge, they can drop the healing or reduce it, Dash puts you across a location in 3 seconds, it is more than fast enough for Warrior to surprise someone. ShadowStepping has the advantage of overcoming blocks, and the disadvantage of being unidirectional, it needs to be frequent as well.

This is a neccessity for Assassin balance, it is a handicapped class, and it needs maneuverability to match the output of other classes.

Warriors have plenty of spare attribute points, 16 mastery, 9 tactics and the rest is whatever they want, so unless you're moving it to critical strikes that won't solve anything.

Wait, no strength? Why would you put zero points in strength? If they made deaths charge have the same requirement as gaile it would be 20 attribute points, enough to boost up tactics/str a notch or 2 at higher lvls.

Edit: thought u meant move attribute points to crit strikes, not move skill there

Strength is garbage, it's the attribute you chuck points into when you have nothing else you need. The longer sprint is a bit meh, bulls strike works perfectly at zero spec and the AP is pox.

Last time I checked Death's Charge was not in critical strikes and the post I was responding to did not suggest moving it to critical strikes.

A TON of Assassin skills need to be tuned on the side of improvement. There are basically 4 skills that make the Assassin playable right now:

Aura of Displacement
Falling Spider
Twisting Fangs
Horns of the Ox

I honestly believe that almost everything else the Assassin has needs a slight (or in some cases major) improvement. If you don't have at least 3 out of 4 of the skills I listed above in your build, your Assassin sucks. There needs to be more diversity.

Well I only use 2 of those. I like to use Moebius over falling spider. You dont have to rely on the knockdown to finish the combo. Or if you go all out offense you could have both

The main use of Death's Charge, as I see, is to stick it on a Warrior. :P

Post your entire build and I'll tell you why it's sub-par.

Don't forget your starburst eles. DC is one of those skills that is never--well, rarely--used by its core profession.

The problem with that is that there is really nothing other than an Elite that does what you want it to.

@dgb: as my post stated, I'm not trying to take the skill out of /sin's hands with a requirement. The gale example was perfect. Back when gale was req 5 w/ 5 energy warriors still had to drop a point somewhere to gain its effect.

I'm not talking about another Unyielding Aura where only monks can use it. Just a modiffier that makes you need attribute points in Shadow and prefer having a rune there before you start fighting.


EDIT: which we are not going to be getting any time soon, as todays update shows...wtf did they do to boon?!?!?!

Sheez, 30 seconds would be decent if they wanted to keep AoD that much more useful. 45 is just... useless.

I remember a couple times where the extra 100 health from DC has saved my life though. Namely when a friend and I were leaving the Hotsprings and decided to take out a boss. Friend died. u_u
I'd taken Palm as my Elite, and Shadow Refuge, Heart of Shadow, and Death's Charge. Using these four skills I soloed a skellie sorcerer, a skellie sorceror BOSS, and four or five Grasping Ghouls while constantly being blind. Yeah, it wasn't fun, but it felt good when I finally killed the boss.

Its an ELITE, and also its CRITICAL req. making it useless to anything else then a primary sin.

Latter.

Indeed. My warrior is W/A for just this reason. Was able to get in and take out a couple of Sparks in Hell's that might have otherwise caused serious trouble to my group.

I would love to see a shadow step/lead attack skill though.

all I will say is when I first made an assasin and saw death's charge, my first thought was.. why would it heal? 45 seconds?!! damn that sucks.

Who here wouldn't like to see a decreased recharge at the cost of a lesser heal? I think it's because it heals they had to make it with such a long recharge. I would like a 15 sec recharge with no heal, or 20-25 sec with a small heal. Would much rather have a 20sec recharge and counts as a lead attack but that's probably too buff lol.

Why must most the examples of it being bad...refer to another proffesion using the skill. Forget about warriors/eles/mesmers and what not and lets look at the assassin. Recall is just bad imo because of the energy cost and the upkeep, and u still have to run thru the aggro to get to ur target. Return is a defensive skill, AoD is ok atm but the energy cost could be reduced to 5 considering your using an elite spot for it. DC should be reduced...a sin only able to tele every 45s econds is rediculous, considering their lack of armor and lack of healing. Teleporting is really thier only way to avoid dmg(when not attacking-crit defenses way of perfection) So what if a warrior can tele more often....blind, cripple, or just run away.Lets look at the proffesion the skill is for...not how other proffesions will use it.

I am please with all the nice alterations they made today with the Assassin and Ritualist primarily...... They even reduced the recast of Dark Prison..... to 45 seconds.

Nice Anet, it's better, but not good enough, Deaths Charge needs to be reduced to at least 20 seconds, and Dark Prison needs to be 20-25 seconds. Thanks for improving the damage ratio on Assassin so he's actually doing as much damage as he is recieving on the front line...... We still need working ShadowSteps.

They are too expensive, all of them, Recasts are too long, Costs are too high, we need useable skills. This is a Melee class, Spamable mobility is a neccessity.

Hey thanks for boosting Dash too, now Death's Charge and Dark Prison are extremely outmatched, fix the skills we want to use.

TBH Im satisfied now, I, as an assassin, can now use Shadow of Haste to run around and catch kiters refresh it when I dont want to res back, and can cancel it with Dash if I get into trouble. Very nice buff imo, since assassins are now pretty agile and should be really. The other skills are nice buffs too, Im actually considering using some other offhand and lead attacks since they got a nice damage buff too.

No, it's because anything other than 45s or more would be utterly godly on a hammer warrior in PvP and as such it's not going to get changed.

If ANet made Death's Charge any less than 30s, I'd be getting Factions just for that. The thought of sticking it on ANY Warrior is making my drool, let alone a Backbreaker war...

I think Death's Charge should definitely be 20 sec recharge with no healing. It really makes no sense why that skill would heal. It should disable all non-Assassin attack skills for an amount of time dependant on your rank. If Backbreaker Warriors want to have that kind of awesome mobility they would need to pump 12 in Shadow Mastery to not suffer from a lag between the teleport and the actual attack.

Dark Prison should be 20 sec recharge as well...you are paying the extra 5 energy for the very short snare it gives.

A change like that Zuranthium would make it assassin only as it would blackout (cause loss of adrenaline) on all warrior skills.

No it wouldn't. It would simply disable the skills momentarily. There are ways to code these things; it's not hard.

ROFL.

Please... Go back to last season and watch how many Guilds used Death's Charge Warriors to adren spike.

You are a fking retard. I'd suggest constructively that you return to observer mode, which you clearly don't watch enough either. So JR is right.

WM vs iQ game 1

Why would Jang have used deaths charge 17 times in game 1 against iQ, in the World Chapmionship if no pro build would ever use that useless skill? Stop talking out of your ass.

I want a minipet BahamutKaiser. They are cute.