On the Wellomancer build, swap Bloodthirst for Mark of Evasion. Or swap Vampiric Precision for Quickening Thirst.
Mark of Evasion gives more damage and healing than all siphon traits combined in practical situations, and Bloodthirst is only worth it if you plan on making heavy use of our siphon skills (Life Siphon, Signet of Vampirism, Signet of the Locust).
So, while Bloodthirst and Vampiric Precision are intended to synergize, the most effective thing to do is never use them together.
This made me laugh a little. Anet really doesn’t want blood necros to be good with such exclusive traits. I couldn’t find a single build that even looks fun after the changes. Merging the Spectral traits into one, and then making it exclusive to vital persistance is going to kill survivability (which was already low). Overall, every viable build for necro is getting a nerf to either survivability or damage. I guess there was too much QQ about necros dominating the top of the PvP ladder /sarcasm.
I agree about this killing some of our builds, especially condi builds. Now condi builds will have to sacrifice duration to get terror, dhuumfire is getting a nerf requiring you to stack dhuumfire to reach original damage levels we have now, and staff is STILL spread out over several trait lines (what class has traits for a weapon spread out over 3 different trait lines? Who knows how they will handle duration, now that condi duration is not on the spite line and some of us went into that line to get duration. Condi builds will be in a sad state, but who cares, its only necros.
Power builds look ok, if at best – proposed changes will marginally increase some power builds. That said, power builds still have to choose between a plethora of useless GM traits outside of SR and Spite. In addition, nothing really changed for power builds, as they same traits will likely always be taken, and to some degree, some of the traits we usually took in power builds are getting a nerf.
I don’t know about minion builds as I have chosen to avoid them because of the terrible AI, and as I run wvw a lot, they die in the aoe spam. To unreliable. However there are those who stick by minion builds and produce better opinions/observations.
Blood magic is a joke, has always been a joke, and will never be used in many builds, outside of minion perhaps. The entire trait line is blocked practically by our freakin class mechanic. Go into DS, traits are useless. Never got this line, and have not, in all my hours, ever used a build outside of experimentation that used this line. It’s crud in wvw, and pve imo.
All in all, I am not happy at all about the suggested trait changes. Anet simply got ride of the skills we dont used or combined them into multiple skills, and essentially did not change anything other than the addition of a grandmaster. They did nothing to increase build variety, outside of what we have now, and The forced choices we have to make now, will disrupt several builds (Not sure where Anet in their infinite wisdom decided terrormancer was distinct from condition buids, when almost every condi build uses terror given our low condi output. Every other condi class aside from necros can stack condi’s at a much more rapid rate). Guess they wanted to nerf our amazing condi output (uh, ok). In addition, when comparring the changes to other classes, necro went nowhere, while the other classes improved signficantly (i.e. thief, engie, guardian, etc.), and we are still held under the dev’s bias that the necro has two health pools, and as such “likes to be hit” and can take a hit. Ok, perhaps in a one v one, we can take a hit. But as Nemisis so eloquently pointed out, a class with a block/invuln can block an infinite amount of damage from an infinite amount of players for the duration of the block/invul, whereas we cannot, and it just depletes our hps at a exponential rate. Moreover, our only defense (i.e. lifeforce) has access to one traited stability/stun break, that lasts 3 seconds, hence our tendancy to look like a green glowing ping pong ball when we are essentially stun locked out of utility.
Focus the necro is not due to his power output, its due to the ease at which we can be locked down, stuned, and erased in seconds once focused. Its a joke, and no other class suffers from this.
