Hello everyone,
After the patch I have been messing around with the mixture of builds and have been using these for a bit. I’d like to know what you all think and how they could be improved (or scrapped…lol). Both builds use the same set of runes (torment) although for the zerg you could probably use a better rune but I wanted this build to be flexible so you could just swap some points, weapon and utilities without having to have two sets of armor while on the move.
After I got locked down by a Mesmer after the patch I wanted to try an interrupt/lockdown condition build and see how it fared. Overall when roaming solo it has done pretty well and I have been able to hold my own against thieves and condition necros where before these two would beat me almost every time. I am not the best player by any means and still have much to learn and how to react but this build seems to have helped me out a bit. There are still some cons to it which I will list below. Much thanks goes to Wraith, Pyroatheist, Black Devil, Dragon, Ross Biddle, Vash and Osicat for their ideas as well as others who I cannot think of at the moment.
Solo and Small Group Roaming WvW Build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAW7al0npRtFpxMNcrNCuxY6JaoCU+TTlMgfB
Gear: Dire
Runes: Torment
Weapons: Scepter/Pistol + Staff
Sigils: Torment/(Your choice) + Torment/(Your Choice)
Heal: Mantra of Recovery
Utilities: Decoy, Mantra of Resolve, (Your choice)
Elite: Mass Invis
What I was going for in this build is to provide low cooldowns for my interrupt abilities with good pressure from condition damage with torment being the focus. If you can get an Illusionary Counter to run its full duration then you will probably win the fight. IC only has an 8 second cooldown so you want to try to proc this as many times as possible b/c chances are the first one will get cleared but if you can get a 2nd one then you most likely will win easily. For interrupts you have Magic Bullet, Chaos Storm, Diversion and Mantra of Distraction or Signet of Domination if you choose one of those as your 3rd utility. I’ve found that when you can immobilize someone it throws off their timing and thus helps them make mistakes. You will also be proccing a lot of confusion, bleeding and blindness from time to time. If you use the sigil for poison then throw that condition in there as well.
With the torment sigil you will proc it enough to be pain and combine it with bleeding and the other conditions you are putting on your enemy they will be using up their condition clearing pretty fast in the first part of the fight, especially if you get an Illusionary Counter block. The torment runes help to have the duration up to over 12,000 with an IC proc if your enemy remains moving the whole time. Most likely they will not but you should be able to get somewhere between 8,000 10,000 damage if it goes for the full duration depending on how much they move while affected. The mantra of recovery also procs a torment charge on your enemy if they are in your radius. Plus the radom proc from your auto-attack and you should usually have at least one stack of torment on your enemy at most times. For the 3rd utility I have been playing around with blink, arcane thievery, mantra of distraction or signet of domination. With the first two you have much better survivability but the last two provide greater lockdown. I do not shatter too often, only when I am trying to interrupt them, need evasion or their health is low.
The major weakness of this build is condition clearing and also healing. You can combat the condition clearing if you choose arcane thievery as your third utility but healing is something I have not been able to fully address.