Guild Wars 2

So, like many of you, I made my necromancer to excel at Bleeding Damage with some other conditions mixed in as a nice by-product. Everyone knows how this build functions on land, but I can’t seem to find the same (or anywhere near) level of effectiveness when fighting underwater. It’s even worse when fighting a single target.

But with a Rabid 0,30,20,20,0 build, a Trident equipped with Superior Sigil of Earth, and Master Tuning Crystals and Rare Veggie Pizza, I can only seem to get up to 7 Bleeds on a target. Maybe a bit more at times, maybe a bit less, but I’d say an average of 7.

Anybody know of anything I could do to increase that?

Sadly, there are very few traits to influence our combat underwater outside of Death Shroud, this is an unfortunate oversight, as almost every other class I’ve encountered has either cd reductions or /something/.

Trait/Utility Switches you could make which I don’t know if you are:

Hemophilia – 20% bleed duration which I assume you have
Weakening Shroud – 2 stacks of bleeding pretty much 100% uptime if you DS every 15s
Blood is Power – 2 stacks also 100% uptime even when not traited

This should put you closer to 11, but in my experience I can keep up like 11-12 without either of the above from my quick testing underwater just now. Trident has 1s attack speed so it should be applying 7ish stacks of bleed on its own, sigil should provide 3-5, and barbed precision crits should be giving another 1-2 depending on your bleed duration most of the time, so you should be seeing closer to 15-16, which is more respectable.

Don’t forget to hop into DS for fury ! I’m sure you are, though. One of the best things we can do underwater is support our allies with DS4, and pawn them away with DS1. The fear is a fairly nice duration too, and a blind/poison on a short cd is ok I guess.

Outside of increasing bleeding/condition duration there are very few other things you can do. Opening with Spear #5 for 5 stacks of bleeds is decent, but it has a 600 range. And swapping to spear in the middle of combat is otherwise very lackluster. Hope this is useful.

Let’s hope ArenaNet introduce some nice changes to underwater combat across all classes real soon ^^

Ah yes. I had it traited, but the range of the Trident was too compelling to take advantage of for me to remember that I had Weakening Shroud. I’ll try getting a little closer to my targets now, thanks!

One thing I did find out though, If you start out the fight surrounded by mobs, you can use Spear #4 to pull some enemies close to you, then switch to Trident for the #1 and fully take advantage of it’s AoE capabilities. And actually now that I think about it, Spear #4 would combo well with Weakening Shroud as well. But you’re right, It’d have to be used as a battle starter, because doing it in the middle of the fight would basically kitten you even worse till you could switch again. Thanks for the advice though, I’ll definitely use it!

Make sure your Earth Sigils are actually procing underwater. I had repeated issues with any on-proc sigils working underwater a few months back and just stopped using them.

You can test by turning your auto-attack off and just using other attacks, or simply use auto attack on spear since it doesn’t have a bleed on it like trident to confuse you.

If they are working, and my testing indicates they are now, you should easily be able to sustain over 10 bleeds just with auto-attack trident as long as you are using your duration food.